Improper Assembly of the Body of Christ (ePub)

Improper Assembly of the Body of Christ is a book written to challenge how the church today looks at, extracts, ingests, and dissects scripture, especially with our recipe used to congregate and formulate the assembling of the true church.
This book is a strong reminder of the biblical protocol. As Jehovah stressed to Moses, "See that thou do all things according to the pattern shown thee in the Mount."
In this book, Bishop Riles seeks to reestablish biblical principles and truths. It is written to increase unity in the body of Christ and tear down and remove walls, barriers, and partisans never supposed to have been in the first place.
It is to ensure that the blood of God's truth circulates to the least extreme and remotest parts of the body of Christ.
Pauper or king, Sunday stroller or Holy Roller, we must all strive to be the church of the faith, where everybody is welcome to take a seat.
Some might be tempted to think that it is impossible to have unity-we are just too different! We come from different backgrounds and have different styles of praise and worship, we express ourselves differently, and we enjoy distinctively different things.
You may ask, "Bishop, how in the world do you propose that we can be unified?" To achieve corporate unanimity, we must come to the understanding that unity is not "sameness or uniformity."
The Christian's unity is a unity in diversity. Like Baskin-Robbins, we exhibit thirty-eight flavors and varieties. We can be different but not divided. We must learn not to compete or to compare but to celebrate our incompatibilities.
God did not create the earth in just browns and earth tones.
God views the world through a kaleidoscope. It is a beautiful bouquet. The church must be an array of multiplicity-multicolored and multicultural. The church is the "rainbow coalition."
God is calling his family in for suppertime. At suppertime, my mother's rule was that she would never call us to eat at the table separately or individually. Instead, we all had to eat together at the same table at the same time or not eat at all.
The church needs to be an accurate sample of unity and a proper example of what it truly means to unite and be a unit. If you dip a glass into the Pacific Ocean in California and you return to Texas with that glass of water, you cannot say you have the entire Pacific Ocean in a glass. But perhaps you have an accurate sample or a proper example of the Pacific Ocean in that glass.
A cake, a pie, or even cornbread has many ingredients essential to the texture and flavor of the cornbread, pie, and cake. You cannot bake a pie or a cake with a cornbread recipe or with cornbread ingredients or bake cornbread with a pie or cake recipe or ingredients.
In a cake recipe, all the ingredients are different, all the ingredients aren't sweet or agreeable, but all ingredients are necessary for the success of delicious cake. Any ingredient alone is not a cake. Sugar alone does not constitute a pie or a cake.
Flour, vanilla, eggs, or butter alone, independent of one another, does not make a pie or a cake or cornbread.
It is not until you homogenize them and blend them-mix, mingle, marry, merge, scramble, and place them together in a hot oven-that they come together to make cake, pie, or cornbread.
In this last hour, God is removing the walls, barriers, and partisans never supposed to have been there in the first place.
God is scrambling up his church. He will keep on scrambling until you cannot tell where the yoke or the yellow begins and the white ends. He is going to scramble until we do not choose ministries based solely on race, culture, or ethnicity but based upon whether there is a move in that ministry.
Like the black-and-white keys on a piano, the church belongs to all of us. It is time for us to go back to the Bible. God has given us his word to live by, and there is just no other way to please him.