The Geneva Strategy

Puritan Reformed Church Phoenix

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The Geneva Strategy is an answer to the question, how do we deal with the decline of Christian civilization in America and the increasing rise of tyranny?

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It's so difficult to get anything going, to make anything happen, to have something be transferred across generations.

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It's difficult to have a Christian culture where you can do anything. So the Geneva Strategy is a strategy where we try to combine the different elements of a culture and to pull them together into an enclave, whether it's in the middle of some secular city or whether it's in a small town.

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So our context is Phoenix, Arizona. What we're doing is we're building an enclave inside of that broader setting by trying to create sort of gravity centers that draw people in.

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Now, when we think about these centers of work, we need to realize that God established four covenant centers where work gets done.

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There's the individual, you do stuff on your own, you're stuck with you right now. But then you also have the household. And the household is the smallest unit of organization where we have responsibilities and we can't just run away when we're tired of each other.

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And we are stuck working with each other. And so the household is this place where most of the work gets done.

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It's where the division of labor occurs, it's where wealth gets built, it's where wisdom gets passed along. There's the church, which is supposed to publicly teach the truth, see the right worship of God done, and to see discipline and government of the church.

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And then we have the state, which is supposed to restrain wickedness, right? The use of the sword to stop wickedness.

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And our objective for the state is to see Christ acknowledged as King of Kings, His word established as law, to see biblical liberty defended and biblical justice administered.

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And so those objectives, how do we make all of that happen? When we get together in a single place, there's an accumulation of resources and influence.

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And so as individuals who are godly work together and they form households and there's good marriages and children, and you start to build businesses and have resources, you have this little cultural center.

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Your household is a domain that you ought to rule by the word of Christ. As for you and your house, you should serve the

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Lord. Make sure to make that a domain that you're guarding and keeping out all the vileness and wickedness of the world.

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And then as you build that, it becomes a cultural center. You have hospitality there, and there's hospitality from house to house.

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And unbelievers can come into that hospitality and be discipled, but also there's this encouragement. And so you have this enclave where you encourage that.

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So then there's a shared church where you work together and having clarity about what's being taught and the standards of discipline to be maintained and the encouragement of people to build in their homes and to build in the estate and to have

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Christian education. And so then you have in these homes, you have homeschooling occurring and some people working together with co -ops and maybe the pulling together capital to see a

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Christian school put together where we can encourage people who are around us to be able to be a part of that and to draw in a broader

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Christian engagement. And then from there, we need to use our resources and to have the well -ordered homes have their patriarchs run for civil office at the local sphere.

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And so if we can get a county, a town, a state to have Christian magistrates in the executive legislative and the judicial branches, then we can see a

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Christian order there. So these are the things to pull together. And the practical steps that need to occur in between is this gathering of people, gathering of capital, and this working to expand out who's there.

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And as that capital gets pulled together, it makes it so that we're able to make progress and to see continued improvement.

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This enclave becomes sort of the liberty that we're looking to achieve in the midst of this sea of tyranny around us.

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And so as we have that enclave, that space to work together, a Christian zone, and we commit to defend each other and train so that we will not be tyrannized and not have our liberties pulled away or see us punished for preaching the gospel, but instead this mutual defense of our

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Christian liberties that have been passed to us in the constitutional order of America. If we see that being done on a local level, what we can do is eventually we have the capital and the mutual working together with the division of labor to be able to make

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Christian culture and project it out more. People talk about Christian culture being so bad and the art that we make being so bad.

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Okay, well, come here, help us, let's work together, let's make it. And so as we make that and we project it out and we train up missionaries and we send them and we plant churches around the area so that we see a town or county filled with solid churches and then from there are able to send out more, that idea of concentrating efforts is a principle of war.

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We are so accustomed to spreading ourselves out so thin as Christians. In America, what we need to do now is to concentrate.

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We need to pull things together and to see little Geneva's built. If you're in a place where you don't have the resources or people to work with, where you can see a

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Geneva established there, you should come and check out what we have in Phoenix and investigate whether or not you think this is the place to contribute your blood, toil and tears and to see if there's something worth building here.

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We're working together in the context of covenant. It is necessary for us to build and not simply complain as we watch what prior generations built being torn down about us.

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If we want to be victorious, we must have a strategy to win. The Geneva strategy is that strategy.

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Phoenix is a place where we're applying it and we call this effort the Phoenix Project. I invite you to come check out

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Puritan Reform Church and look at the businesses we're building, the hospitality that we're extending to people and look at the culture that we're starting to build and to join us in the