[This is part 4 in a series on “The Abolition of Statism and Liberation From Political Bondage”: See part one, two, three, five, six, seven, eight, nine]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

There is a prevailing belief or sentiment in modern Christianity is that it is not the immediate responsibility of every professing believer to work to advance the Kingdom of God and begin assembling with our neighbors for the express purpose of serving and providing for each other directly and freely as a means of getting our people away from accepting the bondage-inducing benefits from the kingdoms of the world, where men involve themselves in the covetous practices of begging for and accepting the hand-outs of human rulers who dangle these tax-funded resources over people’s heads to ensnare those who accept them into the bondage of their kingdoms, an enslavement that is but a recompense for the sins of being willing to take a bite out of their neighbor’s to begin with to fund these violent systems of legal charity and socialized welfare and protection.

The Kingdom of God is often perceived as something not to be actively sought or obtained by all those who profess to be citizens of another Kingdom than those of the world. Few Christians have it in their heads at all that they are to seek a literal Kingdom where families and neighbors gather together in real congregations that exist for each other’s mutual welfare, all which are linked together in a global network of called-out ministers—the ekklesia or government of God—for the practice of pure religion through voluntary charity across a society, where people live freely under God’s rule rather than the authoritarian rule by men. The idea of “church” today—far from a body politic or non-authoritarian government of God’s Kingdom—is nothing more than the institutions seen on the corners across America that lost men gather in every Sunday morning to substitute vain rituals, sermons, singalongs, and a dead faith for the real Kingdom-work of actually serving their neighbors, setting the Lord’s table, and conducting the daily ministration of bread needed to keep our people free from the bondage of men. The idea of “the church” that prevails today is something wholly separate from any idea of a body politic that carries out all the needs of welfare, assistance, retirement, protection, and other such social needs for their people, which these men have passed off to human civil government in their slothfulness and failure to serve their people on their own and operate like a Kingdom-people who are physically in the world (ie., within the borders of a statist territory) but not of it (ie., actually citizens of another political jurisdiction). “Church” is just a “religious” term to them, not a political one — just as “the gospel” is nothing more to them than a recitation of the biographical facts of Jesus’s life that get one into heaven when they die, rather than the Gospel of another Kingdom that is antagonistic and at enmity with the kingdoms of the world.

It has been this very failure to administer God’s Kingdom and to do anything more to love God and their neighbors than “go to church” that has largely allowed the majority of professing Christians to remain in their old, slothful ways that have led us into the bondage of Egypt to begin with, where human government has been able to make tax slaves out of people who turned to human rulers for their welfare, protection, and law and justice out of the failure of Christians to administer these things on their own. Since church to them was nothing more than Sunday rituals, they saw no problem with feeding people on sermons and spitting them back out into the world to eat bread from the hand of Caesars when they were in need and to turn to Centurions when they needed protection. They leave the people who they claim to be their Christian brothers to pray to the civil fathers of the world for welfare and protection, which is to say they they don’t care one bit about seeing their people go into bondage to the kingdoms of the world and their authoritarian rulers. They don’t care one bit to be a people set apart, a people who are citizens of another Kingdom whose religion entails actually serving each other rather than merely “going to church” on Sunday under the common idea of fellowshipping.

Even worse, though consistent with their own actions, the majority of modern Christians positively praise the presidents, soldiers, police officers, and socialist bureaucracies of the world, all which would be obsolete if they actually repented of taking the Lord’s name in vain and began to form themselves into a new Kingdom that was unspotted from the world. As much as professing followers of the Lord would like to blame socialists for usurping worldly institutions or subjugating the masses who are seen to be unwitting victims of statist tyrannies, the alleged “need” for, and the existence of, human rulers has for the most part arisen out of the failure of professing Christians to seek God’s Kingdom and keep His commandments, which if kept would abolish human government. As my Christian Abolitionist anarchist brother, Michael Plaisted, writes,

“It is not the politicians or the statists that have kept men in bondage since the very first city-state, but rather it is the apathy, sloth, and covetousness of the unrepentant masses, especially those who falsely claim to be Christians, that have perpetuated the most common form of slavery for generations in their passive assent.”

Christians today may say their “love their neighbors” because they know they are Biblically obligated to profess this, but at best, this only means some sort of negative, libertarian principle that they plan to do no harm against them; they do not believe that they have a positive obligation to actually serve their neighbors and keep them from going into bondage to human rulers by providing for their social needs of welfare and care directly and freely out of personal responsibility.

In every way, Christians today have sought to escape their responsibility to actually love and serve their neighbors, whether by sitting around waiting on heaven, going to church, or casting ballots and asking worldly governors to do their work for them. Most Christian outlook toward social order and political theory involves passively waiting around, hunkering down in hopes that things might get better in their inaction, and doing anything but becoming a doer of the word who obeys Christ’s commands to serve one another and seek to have a godly society. Their defeatist eschatological views often help to justify the sloth, abdication of responsibility, and laziness, that was already present in them before they decided that the Dominion Mandate isn’t applicable to us today, further convincing them there is nothing they can or even should do to transform their ungodly, statist societies into a voluntary, just, and free social order that aligns with God’s commands and will.

To the same effect, often when professing Christians do have any sort of concept of seeking God’s Kingdom and being active for the Lord, they mistake this activism with reforming the kingdoms of the world through the voting booth, running candidates for satan’s political offices, or appealing to the worldly governments to pass legislation on their behalf, as opposed to seeking another Kingdom that is entirely separate and apart from the man-made governments of the world. They are just statists interested in polishing up Babylon and rebranding it as a “Christian” government, rather than repenting from their belief in human civil government altogether, which is always ungodly and antithetical to God’s Kingdom order, where authoritarian rulers do not exist.

Since both of these views—the heavenly-minded people who sit on their hands as much as those who throw themselves into worldly politics thinking this is activism—are apathetic approaches to earthly life, we can conclude that the vast majority of Christians want nothing to do with actually loving and serving their neighbors and brothers and fellow Christian families in a network of congregations that are formed and gathered for this purpose. As brother Plaisted writes,

The vast majority of professing christians claim to love God and love their neighbor as themselves, but they do not keep God’s commands and follow Christ’s instructions, nor do they build their neighbor up to love and good works, strengthen the hand of the poor and needy, bring justice to the fatherless, or plead the widow’s cause. They are more content to fatten their hearts in the day of slaughter under false gods, while outsourcing these responsibilities to their socialist bureaucracies that offer social programs and authoritarian administrations which pervert these weightier matters.”

Despite the inactivity and apathy of many who claim to follow the Lord who says “if you love Me you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15), we are called to preach the Gospel of God’s Kingdom, evangelize the people who are willing to hear this word and join us, gather this faithful remnant into Kingdom congregations that begin serving one another, and live according to God’s instructions. We must point people back to The Way again.

The apathy of escapists and statists

Too many people today have abandoned hope and surrendered to their status as captives to man-made political systems, losing faith in the possibility that communities and societies may be transformed with this Gospel of the Kingdom. They believe that nothing can be done about our (political) social order the way it stands, even refusing to repent from the ideology that supports it, which can be done today without waiting. They do not believe that Jesus came as King, definitively treaded on the powers (Col 2:15), and paved the way for a progressively advancing Kingdom society that is our commission to carry out. They have mostly given up all hope for anything earthly to improve. “It’s all just going to hell down here, but thank God I’ll be going to heaven soon.” Their sights are set on the afterlife, as opposed to carrying out the work of the Lord on earth and serving each other as we were called to do. “Come and get us soon, Jesus, everything is failing down here.” The thought doesn’t even cross their mind that perhaps things are the way they are today—a people occupied by human rulers—because of this very slothful thinking that refuses to seek another way than the man-made kingdoms of the world, a circumstance that, in the books of the prophets, was always a judgment against sin rather than some natural, unavoidable, or God-approved state of affairs.

Those who have felt the need to become active often only at best become people who mistake motion for real Christian agitation for another Kingdom, partaking instead in the politics of kingdoms of the world and criticizing anyone who calls for Christians to be a separate people as being the ones who are actually slothful, even though their own actions like “going to church” or “get out and vote” represent the very apathy and sin that has led to our current situation. Since they subconsciously recognize themselves to be slothful, they turn their claims around on those who seek another Kingdom. Though they won’t admit it, they realize their actions like “going to church” and playing the politics of the kingdoms we are to be repenting from serving and furthering are the safe road that stirs up no trouble in their backward societies, which makes it easy for them to pretend that turning out to a building every other Sunday or casting a ballot once every four years is a radical move on their part for God’s Kingdom that actually helps their neighbors. False converts know that the true Christian mission of agitating the masses to repent of statism and join them in a network of people seeking God’s Kingdom invites persecution by the rulers who they still trust in for their salvation, and so they take the safe route of “going to church” and “voting for lesser evils” while telling themselves that these apathetic motions are somehow being “salt and light” in the world, while turning around and criticizing those who repent from worldly politics and take the route of gospel evangelism as being the ones who supposedly forsake this duty. Fake Christians who praise human rulers and further their kingdoms through sloth and idolatry know they’re guilty of forsaking their duties to love God and their neighbors, so they have to kid themselves that they are doing it when they sinfully enter the voting booths of other kingdoms, while denying that those who call for direct action are the ones who are flaking out and disengaging from responsibility.

Despair

For those who don’t have the false and misguided ambition of dominionists who erroneously pursue God’s ways through the politics of the world, it is easy to see how men have become discouraged given that the satanic political systems of man have successfully encroached upon us. Yet it has been this very lack of belief that anything can be done about it—that we have been given power to tread on serpents—that further perpetuates this circumstance, leading people ever further into a state of despair and hopelessness. Just as forsaking God’s Kingdom is what has originally allowed our people to become occupied slaves of a gang of plunderers who call themselves the “government,” so does this occupation and the temporary comforts that might be found under it (the lack of need to serve your neighbor when Caesar does it for you) lead men to further forsake the Lord and their neighbors. “There’s nothing we can do about it” is a typical defeatist response among people who find themselves living in an Egyptian slave society, which is the same attitude that led them there to begin with. “This is just the way things are” rings throughout history. Living as tax slaves is thought to be as inevitable as death, rather than a punishment for the sin of trusting in human rulers to serve you. Most of the evils that lead men to think it would be futile to fight against them are but judgments upon their own sins that, if repented from, would reverse the curse that they believe to be impossible to undo.

We must break out of these lazy and slavish ways of thinking that have ruled men for so long. Now is the time to repent of this sloth that tells us we have no earthly duties down here below just because we are conquered by the false kingdoms of men, which again have overcome us for this very way of apathetic and nihilistic thinking. Now is the time to get active and start finding God’s people, to start seeking out those non-slothful men who hear the words of the Lord and are ready to do them, to find the sheep who hear His voice and leave those who don’t want to change their ways behind in Egypt, while we seek to liberate the captives who know the way these kingdoms are headed.

The need for neighbors 

If we’re ever going to find people in order to congregate with for the purpose of truly supporting and serving one another with the hope of being divinely liberated from the bondage of Egypt where we have eaten from the hands of Pharaohs rather than provided for our own people because we love one another, we will have to actively rally God’s children toward this great cause of mankind. We find ourselves living as captives today precisely because we have neglected our responsibilities and duties toward God and our neighbors, allowing the kingdoms of this world to provide for our people at the cost of tax slavery. This has been the effect of the false, so-called “churches” too: to feed people on nothing more than emotional and manipulative sermons without caring that any of their “members” are living in bondage, effectively shutting the Kingdom of God up in their faces by making them believe that God has called us to nothing more than sitting in pews for an hour a week, listening to one man deliver a monologue, and then disbanding without a care in the world about the political captivity we are all in.

If we ever hope to reverse the bondage caused by our own disobedience and start doing right by the Lord again, which is accomplished by caring for our people and pursuing the justice and liberty He desires, then we must seek out and find those men who recognize the need to separate from the world and seek this Kingdom, the furthering of which works to make worldly governments obsolete by taking personal responsibility back into our own hands again.

There is no way around this need to organize with others. The godly mission is not to hide out in a hole or resign into a monastery in the belief that we serve God by meditating all day or lighting candles and performing some rituals and conducting other so-called liturgies that God expressly says forsake Him and His ideas of religion and justice. We serve God by loving our neighbors, which means to literally feed, shelter, house, and provide for them, knowing that if we don’t do it ourselves, then other people—the Caesars and Pharaohs of the world—will do it for us, only to fail miserably and tax the people for their own miserable lives as subject citizens to the kingdoms of this world. Seeking the Kingdom of God cannot be separated from seeking neighbors to love and serve.

Though this is no easy task given that most men are comfortable living in Egyptian bondage, love their chains, have begged for their masters, or see no alternative to it even if they aren’t so content with it, it’s on us to get the ball rolling in the right direction, so as to pass down a foundation for the next generations to build upon and bear fruit thereon. Though many will not hear our message and may choose to stay behind in Egypt as she fails to serve the people who expected that their benefits funded at the expense of their neighbors could last forever, we are going to have to search for those who are hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit telling them that neither the kingdoms of this world nor the false churches are the ways of God’s kingdom. We are going to have to work with our neighbors, organize with people as a genuine community that consistently looks after each other’s needs, and actually begin physically serving one another, as opposed to the present idea of “church” that acts as if its only role is spiritual edification via sermons, where it even fails in that role.

One of the reasons that ideological motivation and repentance for the worldly ideology of statism must precede the evangelist effort that takes this message to the streets and homes of families around us is that we must be sufficiently concerned for the slavish state of our people to care enough to do anything about it. Ideas necessarily precede action, and to ever care to do anything about the lamentable conditions we have found ourselves in, men must first see the problem. This is why we act. We see a problem in society—we have gone into captivity for our own iniquities—and want change it. As Plaisted writes,

“The agitator is against the world, for the world, defying every delicate sensibility to boldly proclaim justice and mercy in an unjust and merciless society. He takes it upon himself to intercept public opinion in the market places and public squares, and oppose it with the opinions and injunctions of the living God, needing no other authority but his conviction, and no other strategy but preaching the Kingdom of God in the face of the kingdoms of men. He wields reason and conversation as apologetic tools, arguing with those who profess themselves wise, but are really fools, believing in the pragmatic gospel of men in bondage.”

Preaching the Kingdom and finding the remnant

The question now becomes, where do we find these people who are serious about God, His word, and getting free from the dominion of man (ie., the state rule that most of the people of the world believe to be necessary to society and civilization)? We know right now that few men are interested in doing the hard things the Lord has called us to do. We know that very few people see this absolute necessity of an alternative kingdom—a free society of networked individuals who have formed congregations of mutual aid and service to God and neighbor—in order to free us from the bondage of men. They continue voting, waving flags, posting up lawn signs of their favorite politicians, sitting in pews, listening to boring sermons, and remain generally unrepentant to the ways of the world that have brought them into political bondage.

The preachers of the institutionalist “church” in our age have wholly failed to evangelize the true gospel of another Kingdom and agitate their people to seek it. What is needed now is for those Christian Anarchists who hear God’s word and are ready to act on it to stand up, hit the streets, and find the people who are ready to receive this message, repent with you, and build His Kingdom. The sermonizers of old have done nothing to advance this kingdom, because they were caught in all the trappings of modern churchianity that reduced the gospel message to nothing more than a heavenly and spiritual one that, at most, meant that men should gather in their buildings for Sunday ceremonies that have nothing to do with serving your neighbors. What is needed is for new men to rise up, for abolitionist anarchists to take up God’s cause on the ground outside of these institutions. As A.W. Tozer wrote,

“If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation, it must be by other means than any now being used. If the Church in the second half of this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the first half, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have been tried and found wanting. Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there will be not one but many), he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom. Such a man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little bit angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the One and the salvation of the other. But he will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.”

After having undergone our own intellectual and spiritual transformation to the cause of the Lord and His Kingdom and becoming radicalized for this cause, our next step is to take this message of repentance and regeneration into our local community and seek out those who have eyes to see and ears and to hear who will become co-laborers with us in the harvest that awaits those who become doers of the word. We must “go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). We must begin getting God’s word out there in any and every way that we can and see who bites. We must become fishers of men, who use the word of God as bait for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see and are ready to come to us when we cast our lines.

The first mode of abolitionism that helps us to begin seeking the Kingdom is thus agitation for this Kingdom upon a society of dead people whose sins have them on the path to hell and who need to be called to repent for these sins or else perish in the judgment that awaits all worldly systems of government that all have their origins in man’s sinful attempt to substitute human rulers for God’s rule and usurp the divine law. We must become evangelists for the cause of this Kingdom and share its Gospel—as opposed to the statist gospel of salvation through human government—with others and seek to find them so that they can become repentant men too who will leave behind the statist ideology and practices of the world and seek this Kingdom with us.

Our first line of business, before ever getting to the question of what we are to do about our bondage, is to even show people that they are living in sin and call for their repentance. We must point out that the idolatrous support for the kingdoms of the world has been the essence of man’s sin, which was always political rebellion against God and His Kingdom. Before we can even get to organizing other people and showing them how to seek God’s Kingdom together, we must first find the people willing to repent or who have already done so and are ready to build with us.

We must expect that in this evangelist mission, which is coming down after all upon a people who have long accepted the status quo of statism whether through their passivity or positive idolatry for these systems and their system-makers, that there will be great pushback among the majority of men that we encounter. We must approach the abolitionist cause knowing that “there are those who hate men who rebuke in the gate and abhor those who speak righteously” (Amos 5:10). However, the point is not to change every mind that we cross on the spot, though we must consistently preach to the lost and show them that they’re lost. Our role in this case is to plant seeds in the doubtful and let God do the rest of the work. But our more important role, the main reason we must hit the streets and cast our nets, is to find the people who are ready to hear this word, accept it, and begin building with us — to find the sheep who hear the Lord’s voice already and don’t require endless convincing. This was part of the prophet Isaiah’s commission. Though we must rebuke the sin of statism, show men that they are living in sin for supporting the kingdoms of the world, tell them they are in need of repentance and turning another way, we also do it to find those who are ready to come aboard and seek another Kingdom with us. As Albert Jay Nock summarized the divine commission of the prophet,

“The Lord commissioned [Isaiah] to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. ‘Tell them what a worthless lot they are. He said, “Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don’t mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,’ He added, ‘that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.’ Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job — in fact, he had asked for it — but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start — was there any sense in starting it? ‘Ah,’ the Lord said, ‘you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it’” (Nock, Isaiah’s Job).

Taking the Gospel to lost sheep

How do we begin to carry out the Abolitionist mission? Certainly not by sitting idly forever in passive complacency, hoping that our social order will magically change from the comforts of our homes. We must rise up and carry this liberating message of the Gospel of God’s Kingdom to the people through every means at our disposal, boldly and courageously hitting the streets and infiltrating every corner of society where there are ears that might hear and eyes that might see. This form of agitation, which seeks another literal Kingdom after all, is not for the faint of heart and not for people who aren’t ready to confront a world where the masses have gone into captivity for their own lack of knowledge and rejecting of the voice of the Lord to begin with. Yet our awareness that our people have been deceived provides both the reason for our work and a reason to consider what we are getting ourselves into. Our neighbors have been ensnared by the devilish lies of statist propaganda for centuries and even millennia before our feet had ever touched God’s green earth to call upon men to seek another way. They have been a people of many gods and idols of human government who have exalted the rule by men above the rule by God and do not want to hear prophets and evangelists come around to tell them of their follies. Yet this mission, the same one given to the prophets before us, has now fallen into our hands and passed on to us to carry this torch of light in a dark world that has been sleeping on the need to seek God’s Kingdom, even as they have been under a bondage that should have served to wake them up already. It now falls upon us, as Christ’s radical Kingdom disciples, to proclaim the unadulterated Word of God in a world that had adulterated it and destroy all the deceptions that men been tricked into embracing and all the sins that they have willfully pursued in their darkness.

Our anarchist evangelism, aimed at abolishing these coercive kingdoms of man through the transformative power of the Gospel, won’t be easy for this very reason. We will be casting our nets knowing that “justice is turned away, and righteousness stands at a distance” and that “truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter” (Isaiah 59:14). We are dealing with a statist people, both among the ruling elite and their population of supporters, “who despise justice and pervert all that is right” (Micah 3:9). We are up against a population of fools who “do not know or understand” and who “wander in the darkness” (Psalm 82:5). We are up against a place and people where “lies prevail over truth in the land,” against a people who “proceed from evil to evil,” who do not take the Lord into account, and who have “taught their tongues to lie” and who “wear themselves out committing iniquity” (Jeremiah 9:3-5). We are up against a nation of thieves, both tax and revenue agents and the people who accept their benefits, who “have practiced extortion and committed robbery” (Ezekiel 22:29).

Every evangelist for the Kingdom of God who is willing to take up this mission must then recognize that he is, like a Elijah, something of a lone prophet in a land that has been overrun by Baal worshipers who outnumber him four-hundred to one, at the very least. He must realize that for every man like him who is willing to come along and denounce statism as sin, that there are thousands of other false prophets of statism, in the so-called churches, universities, government, or community, who work to defend these idolatrous systems. He must realize that the ground he is preaching on is enemy territory and that the hostile territory of taking the word into Assyrian and Babylonian capitols is naturally infertile and rocky, for if it had consisted of godly men already then it wouldn’t be a statist society.

We must then know what we are getting ourselves into—a world full of idolaters who defend their false gods and false kingdoms with everything they’ve got—as we pursue this righteousness mission to destroy all ideas that are raised up against God’s Kingdom and preach another Kingdom that is not of this world. The world stands arrayed against the agitator just as much as the agitator stands against the world. They scorn us as much as we have come to scorn them, yet for their redemption. Our neighbors have hitherto hated the truth, refused to turn back from their sinful statist ideology, and have mocked those who have tried to give it to them before. They have not wanted to hear the word of the Lord, which is why we’ve made it to this point to begin with. We must then know that we are up against a people who have lusted after violent political systems and whored themselves out to the Egyptians for their protection and bread as we take up this mission of preaching justice, mercy, and another Kingdom in a society where men have for so long been workers of iniquity whose ideas and hands have empowered the evil kingdoms of the world. We come to proclaim the Gospel of God’s Kingdom in the streets to a people who have already rejected it before, using the tactics of agitation to once again stir them up out of their stupor with the spiritual sword of God’s word as our only weapons. We come knowing that our people’s souls are in chains and that they need to be freed. We come knowing that our people’s physical bodies have been imprisoned by these demonic agents of the State who have thrown literal shackles around the ankles of those who defied the commands of men. We come knowing that our neighbor’s hosues are on fire and we must extinguish them with the word of God and call them to seek another Kingdom with us, lest they perish in the inevitable collapse of worldly kingdoms that they have mistakenly or more-than-willingly placed their faith in.

The mission of the Abolitionist, who seeks to do away with the plunderous kingdoms of man and replace them by the Kingdom of God, will then require that we engage in a serious effort to agitate the culture around us. We may need to invade small towns and speak to everyone we can, flier entire towns with cards and posters, hold signs of Bible verses or Biblical truths on street corners and downtowns, hand out kingdom-oriented tracts, flier the vehicles of church parking lots, stand outside churches and call people to repent from their slothful pew-sitting, attend Bible studies and leave material to everyone, raise up banners on the roadways, stand outside of grocery stores and talk to everyone, and engage the common people everywhere we go, before we will find a single professing Christian (or any man converted by the message) who is actually seeking to the live the way the Lord commanded us to live. But distributing the word and ways of the Lord in many different ways, both written and verbal, will be one of our main ways of reaching people and winning them over. As the Christian abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote in his 1838 Declaration of Sentiments,

“We expect to prevail through the Foolishness of Preaching. We shall endeavor to promulgate our views among all persons, to whatever nation, sect, or grade of society they may belong. Hence we shall organize public lectures, circulate tracts and publications, form societies, and petition every governing body. It will be our leading object to devise ways and means for effecting a radical change in the views, feelings, and practices of society…”

We must begin to stir up holy trouble in our communities and lead people who are complacent or caught up in the ways of the world toward the ways of the Lord that they have hitherto not known or had openly forsook. We must take after the men of the Bible, who were firebrands on a mission to spread this Gospel of the Kingdom of God, not the timid churchgoers we see today who are looking for the easy way out while patting themselves on the back that they’re “in the boat” on a ship headed for heaven. The mission field is not an easy one. If it were we would not have this job before us today. The Kingdom would have already been sought by our fathers before us and we would, at most, be seeking to expand a Kingdom that we were born into by continued evangelism. Instead, our parents have sold us into bondage to the kingdoms of the world, registering our births, applying for Social Security numbers for us, and passing off all their godly duties to feed and educate us to the socialist fathers of the world, and we have continued in these sins by applying for government benefits, using our slave numbers to obtain legal employment, and participating in the politics of the world. We now have before us the great duty of even trying to break ground on this Kingdom, to lay the first bricks and start laying a foundation for others to build on.

We are then also dealing with the problem that so few people—evidently—have cared to do anything about their political bondage and seek the Kingdom of God as its only answer. Even professing Christians, much less the non-Christian public, are more interested in the so-called worship of singing songs on Sunday morning and having their ears tickled by sophists preaching sermons than they are in doing what it takes to agitate the culture to seeking the Kingdom of God and carrying out the genuine worship of serving their neighbors. They’re content being complacent and comfortable as the empire collapses around them, or even diving into the overt sin of seeking to save the unsalvageable kingdoms of men as they continue to fail. Most professing Christians are the main enemies of God’s anarchistic Kingdom, where the Lord is our only King. They are the main people in society who defend the worldly ideology of statism and even believe that it has been God’s ordained system of providing law and justice for a people. In addition to having no foundation yet to build but the firm foundation of the Lord, we have the problem that most people who say “Lord, Lord” hate God and don’t know Him. They are statists who raise up presidents, vote for congressmen, and seek legislation to make their societies better. They are the people who the Bible calls whores and adulterers and prostitutes who wave flags of other kingdoms, praise president, and say evil things like “support the troops” and “back the blue.” They are people who sought salvation—protection from their enemies and provision of goods—from human rulers rather than to trust in a providential provision of all their needs in an anarchist society.

Nevertheless, God has left us a remnant, and they need to be found and organized into this Kingdom network where the Lord is our only King, and we are but His servants who take care of each other without exercising authority over one another as the political systems of the world operate. It is on us to get out there in every way we can to turn the statist world upside down — or rather, right-side up from its current backwards, backslidden condition. As Michael Plaisted writes in his article on the steps of abolitionism,

“Every abolitionist should be unified in evangelizing their local communities with hard-hitting, uncompromising calls to repentance of sloth, covetousness, and idolatry which lead people to civil bondage. They should be agitating a dying culture to new life, to reflect on their culpability in their oppressive society, and be evangelizing in the highways, byways, on street corners, towards the institutions of their society, and within the marketplaces of goods, services, and ideas. The first stage in the seven stage strategy of liberty is the soapbox. It is necessary to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to every ear that will hear, to become a spectacle of reformation, disseminating the ideology, rhetoric, and symbol, in order to attract those sheep who hear God’s voice and recognize the truth when confronted by it. Go to the town square. Go to the abortion clinics. Go to the high schools. Go to the churches. Take signs, drop cards, pamphletry, and tracts. Talk to people. Make waves. Do not rely only on social media as a platform for preaching. An actual change in the culture requires a personal, intimate, and confrontational set of tactics. Your neighbor’s house is on fire. Go in there and wake him up. Every community needs a prophet because every community needs to hear the message.”

Our daily Bible reading should light a fire under us to do as the prophets and apostles were doing and taking this message of God—namely His despise for the sinful kingdoms of men and the call to repent and be baptized into a new kingdom under Christ—to our neighbors and calling them to repent and change their ways and get off the wicked path and walk the narrow one with us. We are not reading merely for our own edification, but to build up others the way that God and His word are building us up. Everything we learn about God, everything that God sees as an abomination and everything that He sees as good and just, should be taught to others in an effort to further a righteous society and lead men away from the wicked path they have hitherto walked on. 

In the beginning of our hunt for men who will be doers of God’s word with us and seek His kingdom, very few men will be found. We must do everything we can with the first of these men to sufficiently evangelize them in the abolitionist cause and lead them to repent from the statist ideology of the world and teach them the need to serve one another as the true church. In this stage, we just need one or two people who can join with us in these newly created abolitionist societies, which function as a congregation. In the early days of this Kingdom effort, we may just have one or two people with which to meet regularly to begin serving and to discuss further plans and strategies to evangelize in our communities together and expand the flock.

What you can do today then is start a local abolitionist society as a visible congregation that people near you can come to in order to inquire about this Kingdom of God, where they will either hear your message to repent and seek the Kingdom together and join up with you or spit in your face and reject it. Though not to jump the gun in this article series, the second mode of abolitionism is assistance. Agitation would mean nothing if it were merely to create people who accepted the ideology of the Christian Anarchist cause and stood around and did nothing afterward. The whole point of agitation is to bring people into the network of assistance, for them to be adopted into the Kingdom of God and repent from their service towards the kingdoms of the world and the acceptance of their benefits, which are paid for through taxes and therefore entail the covetousness of your neighbor’s property who we are called to love and serve rather than extort and neglect.

The first thing you might do in your community then is start a local Abolitionist Society of X town and raise it up as a symbol of a people who are gathering to begin serving one another, to have some actual charitable congregation getting off the ground that can stand as a testimony for those who are also ready to leave behind the world and its politics and pursue the politics of another Kingdom, where things are administered through freely elected ministers who operate on freewill offerings as opposed to “elected representatives” who distribute property funded through taxation.

Neighborhood missions

While one can and should form an Abolition Society in a town, city, or area, they can also begin to organize their neighbors who exist in direct proximity to them. Proximity is key to having a congregation of ten families that can meet regularly under an appointed minister who functions as the “church” or “government” of God who receives the charity from each family with which to distribute across a network of families who are likewise organized under servant-ministers who work to build and expand a global kingdom-network, adding more repentant families to this kingdom-network, getting them under a minister every time ten more families are found, and so forth, until there are one-hundred families who organize under a hundreds-man who ministers to one hundred families, working with the ten ministers of each of these congregations. You will want to congregate with those who are physically closer to you—your next-door neighbors—so that plans can be put in place to provide goods, services, and means of protection for one another in a future society that may not have access to power, fuel, or other resources that we currently have available. You will need to know those who live around you and work to gather everyone who is willing to repent and come into the flock. From here, you will be networked with those who are more distant from you as distant congregations are joined together by ministers whose jobs are to make sure that the many are provided for with the charity of all the congregations as a whole. But in the beginning, one who is serious about advancing the Kingdom of God might make an effort to go big on their own neighborhood or surrounding area to their home, going it alone and seeking sheep who want to avoid the slaughterhouse.

This neighborhood effort can be facilitated through a “house church” of sorts, where you invite people into your own home to discuss the need to seek this Kingdom together and for weekly meetings of the families who have joined the congregation of ten families with you. The “house church,” so to speak, should be careful not to simply adopt the practices of the institutional church and consider itself progression merely because it practices churchian rituals like singalongs and sermons in a residence rather than the building with a steeple on top. The point of such a meeting place will be to gather remnant together in an intimate setting where we can discuss the needs of the people who have heard this message and wish to stay and regularly congregate together. But it can also be used to host evangelist days where men who are not yet part of the regular congregation can meet up with new people to evangelize them into the Kingdom congregation. Those who don’t want to hear this anarchistic gospel will probably go away on their own anyway; those who accept it and seem authentic can be considered co-laborers and fit into the congregations being assembled.

For those who are itching to serve God and their neighbors, they may begin planning, alone or with their local abolitionist group, a means of making contact with their neighbors. You may want to craft a message that is relevant to you and your area and either hand deliver it by knocking on doors or mailing hundreds of cards and letters to your neighbors telling them about the Kingdom of God, your devotion to it, and offering to help them with any needs they may have without seeking money. Pray to God that two out of a hundred people will respond to your message and that at least one of them seems serious about loving their neighbor and beginning to serve one another. Begin making small efforts to serve your neighbor, so much as telling them to call you if they need anything and regularly reaching out to check on them. Remember, we have nothing now and are merely trying to smooth out the ground to pour a foundation upon. It is fine if things are only lightly discussed in the beginning. But we must meet the people around us, and might consider knocking on hundreds of doors if we’re particularly ambitious and want to break serious ground on leading the way in forming networks. Any effort at getting things off the ground in the early stages of the movement is worth it. Surely, we would not be laboring in vain, be blessed for our efforts, and may even experience miracles by getting out there and meeting our people (1 Cor 15:58; Gal 6:9; Col 2:23-24; Heb 6:10).

Are you ready to go fishing? You have to. Our neighbors can’t survive in the infested and diseased swamp they’re currently swimming in and need to be brought to some living water.