Author Description

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