When a congregation learns this lesson, a number of its earlier assumptions are also changed—not always for the best: viz:

a) The Vicar/minister will almost certainly be pushed off the pedestal as ‘the one in authority. the one in charge’. This is a very necessary move away from ‘childhood’ in the life of the congregation - but it usually leads to adolescent rebellion rather than mature ‘adulthood’.

As the Vicar’s authority is challenged, so it can often happen that groups within the congregation compete to be ‘the authority’ - claiming their experience of charismatic renewal or even simply that they are the ones who are really obeying what the Bible teaches.

b) A new awareness will dawn that being a church member is not quite the same as being a church goer. Again this is healthy but it has its negative aspect. Church members can become over-conscious that they are different from other people in the locality and they gradually lose touch with what their neighbours are feeling.

c) The discovery that all are involved in ministry can also have its problems. People wrongly assume, based on what they have seen previously of a clergyman’s ministry, that all ministry takes place within the fellowship of the local congregation. As a result they become so busy in and around the church building doing things with other church members that they hardly have any time left to live in what now appears to be a very secular world.

d) When people’s perspective is shifted from ‘Stage Three’ to ‘Stage Four’, it is often a very powerful and intense experience of God’s Holy Spirit at work. But here is the greatest danger of all, when church members assume that they have ‘arrived’ and that the Holy Spirit has nowhere else to lead them.

This is what leads some congregations virtually to barricade themselves and become ‘holy huddles’, trying to live out heaven on earth with as little contact as possible with the rest of humanity - except of course for ‘evangelistic campaigns’, of which more later!

Despite these and other dangers, the shift from Stage Three to Stage Four is a vital part of the process by which a congregation discovers how it is meant to be involved in what God is doing. It is a huge advance along the journey of faith, even though some of the less than ideal by-products are probably inevitable.

The essential need of a congregation which has reached Stage Four is that it should be enabled to grow on to Stage Five.