What a great book filled with practical guidelines on how to start and sustain an Organic Church! This is in depth study of how churches were started and guided by the early apostles and why it’s necessary today to have apostles/itinerant workers laying the foundation and giving guidance for healthy church development. Below is an excerpt from the book.
Paul formed Christian communities by fathering, mothering, and nursing the Christians with whom he worked (1 Thess. 2:7-12; 1 Cor. 4:15). He showed the church how to fellowship with its Lord, how to mature in Christ, how to function in its gatherings, and how to solve specific problems endemic to community life.
Tragically, these are things that many (if not most) Christians in the institutional church know little about. To put it bluntly, being a seasoned Christian does not equip one to be a functioning member in an organic church setting. Nor does it prepare one to be a contributing member of a Christian community. In addition, finding oneself two thousand years into Christian history and five hundred years down the Reformation pike does not prepare one for such a task.
As A. W. Tozer once put it, the modern church “is an asylum for retarded spiritual children.” It’s a nursery for overgrown spiritual babes, most of whom do not have a clue about how to function spiritually with their fellow brethren in a coordinated way. And why is this? Because they have never been shown how. Instead, they have been habituated to stay silent and passive. (Except, of course, when it comes to sharing the gospel with the lost. Preachers have been pounding that into the heads of Christians since the days of D. L. Moody.) God’s people, therefore, need to be unleashed and empowered to minister in the house of God.
For this reason, the Pauline ministry of planting churches is still very much needed today. Again, far more goes into building a church than leading people to the Lord. Winning converts is merely a first step. Enriching, equipping, and empowering them to get on with God and with their fellow brethren make up the rest of the trip.
To use Peter’s language, to lead a sinner to Christ is to convert a dead stone into a living stone (1 Peter 2:5). But the accumulation of
living stones is not God’s purpose. Today, we have many living stones on the planet, but they are scattered and isolated. God’s goal is for all of those stones to be formed into a house-His very own dwelling place (Eph. 2:22). Therein lies the main calling of the Christian worker (1 Cor. 3:9-10). It’s not merely the conversion of dead stones into living stones; it’s to build the house of the living God with those stones. And that takes far more than simply preaching sermons once or twice a week. It means equipping the people of God to function in the church meetings, to take care of one another, and to witness to the glories of Christ before the world as a close-knit, Christ-centered community.Consequently, if Paul were in the Western world today, it’s extremely likely that he would seek out the lost sheep as well as the isolated sheep. To be sure, Paul would present the gospel to lost souls. But hungry Christians in the traditional church would doubtlessly attach themselves to his work as well. Would Paul refuse to minister to them simply because they were “already” converted? Not a chance.
Paul’s goal was a kingdom community. It was a shared-life assembly that lives by divine life and is held together by Jesus Christ and nothing else. So he would undoubtedly minister to all the Christians who were open to him-new converts and institutionalized believers. He would enrich them to know Christ, equip them to express Him corporately, and empower them to function in a coordinated way.
Genuine workers in our day do just that.Frank Viola, Finding Organic Church
Not to put too fine a point on it, Paul’s passion was to establish Christian communities marked by every member functioning, and that expressed the fullness of Jesus Christ. It was not to rescue individuals from eternal judgment (though that was included). We can be confident that if Paul were with us today, he would not be hindered from this all-consuming mission.