ARTICLES

LANDING THE REFORMATION GOD IS RELEASING

by Jill Smith

This article is designed to sit alongside the prophetic word: God is Re-forming His Church as a Potter Re-forms his Clay. It does not add new revelation or interpret the word, but helps locate it in lived human experience – personally, relationally, and communally.

If the prophetic word names what God is doing, this explores how it is felt, embodied, and worked out in people and groups.

Reformation in the Kingdom of God is never abstract. It is always accomplished in people.

1. Authority Is Always Experienced

Authority is not theoretical. It is always experienced. Every person carries an internal map of authority formed through life:

• family systems

• education and institutions

• church culture and leadership

• trauma, loss, pressure, and survival

• success, affirmation, or failure

These experiences quietly teach us:

• how to belong

• how to stay safe

• how to avoid punishment

• how to earn approval

• how to manage uncertainty

Because of this, when God speaks about reforming authority, He is not only addressing structures and systems, but also internalised authorities that shape reflexes, expectations, and relationships.

The spirit of control rarely appears first as domination. More often, it appears as seemingly necessary adaptation – a fear managed, a vulnerability protected, a danger averted, potential rejection avoided.

2. Understanding Functional Authority: Who or What Is ‘God’ in Practice?

The central clarifying question underneath the prophetic word is simple, but challenging: Who or what is functionally God in my life? This is not about theology, but practice, our own lived experience.

Functional authority is revealed by:

• what we fear

• what we obey

• what we protect

• what we feel responsible to manage

Rather than asking one overwhelming question, the Spirit often invites us to notice smaller indicators, because what rules us often does so quietly.

3. Locating Authority in Personal Experience

Control and Technique:

• Where do I feel responsible to manage outcomes?

• What happens inside me when things feel uncertain or out of my control?

• Where do I believe that if I don’t do something ‘right’, something bad will happen?

Technique (doing the right thing, the right way, at the right time) tends to grow where trust feels unsafe.

Fear and Approval:

• Whose disappointment carries the most emotional weight for me?

• What kind of disapproval feels unbearable?

• What must go well for me to feel okay about myself?

Fear reveals allegiance and alignment.

Pace and Pressure:

• Who sets my pace?

• Can I rest without guilt?

• What voice inside me says ‘not enough’?

Relentless pace is often a sign of misaligned authority.

4. Authority in Those Who Lead

The prophetic word makes it clear that God is not removing authority from the Church, but properly locating it. This means those who walk in authority must first encounter reformation internally.

Some gentle but honest questions for leaders:

• Where do I feel anxious if I am not in control?

• What behaviour in others threatens me?

• Do I equate clarity with certainty?

• Do I feel safer with compliance than with shared discernment?

• Do I carry a weight of responsibility God has not assigned to me?

Authority that has not been healed will try to manage what it does not trust. This is why technique can become a substitute for trust, and control a substitute for presence.

5. Authority as Experienced by Others

Authority is always relational. Its health is revealed not only by the intentions of leaders, but also by the experience of those who live under it.

Communities shaped by misaligned authority often display subtle patterns:

• silence instead of freedom to speak up

• compliance instead of personal agency

• loyalty instead of truth telling

• spiritualisation of issues instead of discernment

Important questions for communities:

• Where do people feel afraid to speak honestly?

• What questions are not permitted?

• Who carries the emotional cost of keeping the peace?

• Who is protected when harm occurs?

These dynamics align closely with the prophetic concern about binding what heaven wants loosed, and loosing what heaven wants bound.

6. Binding and Loosing as Interior Reformation

Binding and loosing begin internally. This interior work often feels disorienting because it involves the surrender of false responsibility.

What God Is Binding:

• the compulsion to manage outcomes

• fear-based leadership

• spiritualised control

• urgency driven by anxiety

• techniques used to avoid trust

What God Is Loosing:

• trust in God’s prior action

• rest without guilt

• attentiveness to the Spirit

• shared discernment

• relational authority that serves

This is not loss of power. It is the restoration of authority that can be trusted.

7. Relational Authority and the Protection of the Vulnerable

The prophetic word highlights that failures of authority are often not merely moral failures, but failures of discernment, relationship, and responsibility.

Reformed authority is communal rather than isolated, relational rather than positional, protective rather than privilege-preserving, and restorative rather than punitive.

Where authority is aligned with heaven vulnerable people are prioritised, accountability is welcomed, repentance is possible without shame, and trust can be rebuilt.

8. What Reformed Authority Might Feel Like

Because many people struggle to trust authority – including trusting God – it might help to name the felt difference.

Authority aligned with Christ:

• lowers anxiety, rather than increasing it

• invites participation, rather than compliance

• slows pace, rather than demands performance

• strengthens agency, rather than diminishes it

• carries the fruit of the Spirit

These are not techniques, but signs of alignment.

9. A Final Integrating Reflection

Who, or what, we trust to keep us safe will eventually rule us.

God is lovingly reclaiming that place through proper relationship, not tyranny and control.

This reformation of authority is not judgement, but housekeeping. It is not withdrawal, but purification. It is not loss of power, but restoration. God is binding His people back to Jesus and loosing them from control, fear, pressure, and performance. In doing so, He is forming authority within, and amongst, His people that looks a lot more like Jesus.

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