The following is from the book Finding Organic Church by Frank Viola (used with permission). I have included almost the entire Chapter 14, Five Unmovable Principles. I encourage you to study these individually and with your group. If you are engaged in Organic Church or wanting to start one, this is invaluable wisdom. For more information about the book Finding Organic Church click here.
In this chapter, I would like to introduce you to five unmovable principles. If you can embrace them-and manage to remember them-it will inoculate you from a bundle of problems and disappointments that await you.
Principle 1: Become like little children.
One sure thing that will kill body life is the belief that you-an individual-are more mature, more gifted, and more spiritual than the rest of the group.
Perhaps in your last church you were regarded as a spiritual giant. Perhaps you were even a minister in some capacity. Perhaps you have been outside the institutional church for years and have experienced all kinds of supernatural activity. Perhaps you were in an organic church in the past, so you feel that you’re more experienced than the rest of the group.
If so, please keep this in mind. There is one experience you have never had. It’s an experience that is totally new to you. It is the experience of being built together with all of the brothers and sisters who are in your present group. It’s the experience of being in a face-to-face community with Jesus Christ as the group’s only Head. This changes the playing field dramatically. And it makes everyone a beginner.
If you wish to discover Jesus Christ corporately in a fresh way, then become like a little child. Drop your agendas. Drop your ambitions. Drop what you think you are in the Lord. Drop what you think your gifts are. And become a humble brother or sister in Christ.
One of the greatest-and most common-tragedies of a new organic church plant is for its members to transfer pounds of institutional baggage from their religious background straight into the new group. When this happens, the church becomes nothing more than a scaled-down, small-is-beautiful version of a particular stripe of the institutional church. Further, if you have people in the group who come from different religious backgrounds, the only chance you have for staying together is if everyone agrees to come in with a clean slate.
That being said, if the Lord will lead your group, you will be unlearning many things. You will be discarding a great deal of excess baggage that weighs you down. This baggage touches the way we pray, the way we sing, the kinds of songs we sing, the vocabulary we use, the way we see ourselves, the way we see the Lord, the way we approach the Bible, the way we share, etc. In short, it makes what should be a light burden heavy.
The most important ingredient for a new organic church is to strip down to Christ alone. Doing so will give the Lord a clear shot at revealing Himself to you in a new way. He will be free to express Himself in a way that is natural, organic, and free of traditional baggage.
So come up to ground zero. Put your gifts, your “ministry,” and your ambitions at the foot of the cross. And let God, in His time, raise up whatever He wishes to raise up.
I assure you whatever comes up out of the ground will look quite different from what it did in the past. This is the principle of resurrection: It is only by death that new life is produced. And what dies comes back in a different form.
If you are not prepared to do this, you will severely hamstring the life of the church. I implore you, therefore, to come with a heart to discover the Lord all over again with the brothers and sisters with whom you will be churching. For it is to such-those who have become like little children-that the kingdom of God is given.
You are stepping into a world where most of you have never been. You will be taking responsibility for your meetings and for the affairs of the church. Not as an individual, but as a people.
For this reason, it’s important that there is no one acting in the capacity of a clergyman in your group. Participation will come from each of you as you learn to function as members of Christ’s body. Leadership will come from the Holy Spirit through the body. Sometimes it will come from the weakest. Other times it will come from the strongest. Decisions will be hammered out by consensus. Specialized gifts and functions will emerge naturally in time.
Burn this into the circuitry of your brain: Everyone in the group should be on equal footing. There should not be a local member of the group who is designated as the leader or facilitator. Forfeit this and the book you are reading at this moment will be of little value to you.
Principle 2: Your feelings will get hurt.
Institutional religion has a way of hiding our flaws. It also has a way of safeguarding and insulating us from each other. In an organic church, we get to know one another very well. That means that what we are in the natural gets exposed. Authentic church life is a house of mirrors.
One of the most profound things that you will learn in a face-to-face community is the utter depths that the fall has marked on your soul. Consequently, it’s inevitable that you will hurt one another. This is one of the cardinal laws that I have discovered in twenty-one years of living in body life. John Ortberg wrote a book titled Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them. That title sums up body life pretty well.
Add to this principle the following sentence: You will not get your own way in the church. So learn to surrender. Discover the spiritual secret of relinquishing control and forfeiting your way. There is something called a cross. And it’s found at full force in body life. The cross means death to self. It means loss. It means suffering. You will meet the cross in one another. It is inevitable.
Body life is a holy wedding of glory and gore-agony and ecstasy. This journey will be the most difficult adventure in your life. But it may very well be the most glorious.
The principle of the cross is designed to transform you. It’s designed to bring life to your brothers and sisters in Christ. If you get your own way all the time, then the Lord is not getting His way. If you are forfeiting your way, then you are allowing the Lord Jesus to build His own house-and your labor will not be in vain.
If you can accept that the cross is embedded in the DNA of church life, it will spare you from having unrealistic expectations. Keep this in mind. When someone hurts your feelings, at that moment, your spiritual mettle is being fiercely tested. Your reaction will reveal volumes about yourself. But this is God’s wonderful design of transforming you into His glorious image.
To frame it another way, you will never learn the virtues of forbearance, patience, endurance, long-suffering, extending mercy and forgiveness until you are thrown together with a group of very imperfect people who are putting absolute strains on your Christian character.
I offer you an image: The members of an organic church are living stones that are being welded together to form a dwelling place for the Lord. In order for those stones to be built together, they require a great deal of cutting, chiseling, sanding, and refining. If you can remember that these deeper virtues are being worked out when you face difficulties in the group, it will carry you a long way during the painful periods. The secret: Allow the Lord to thicken your skin, and you will survive body life.
Principle 3: Be patient with the progress of the group.
Meeting in a home doesn’t constitute the birth of church life. A church, in its purest form, takes time to be born. It took approximately nine months for you to be born. In that time, your mother experienced growth pains, sickness, uncomfortable positions, and major adjustments to her wardrobe and to her eating and sleeping patterns.
It’s similar with the birth of an ekklesia. The church is a living organism. Therefore, it takes time to be born. Starting something is human; but birth is divine. Birthing a church is territory staked out exclusively by divinity. It is not a human proposition.
I entreat you, therefore, to be patient. You will be learning to use instincts you have never before used. More important, you are beginning a journey to discover your Lord like never before. Not as an individual, but as a people.
Before the foundation of a new house can be laid, the lot must he thoroughly cleared. Trees, brush, and debris all must be removed. Your first six months (plus) are the “clearing phase” of your life as new church. The exercises in this book are designed to give your group a clean slate upon which to lay a rock-solid foundation.
During this clearing phase, a great deal of unlearning will occur. A great deal of deprogramming and detoxification. A great deal of tearing down of the old mind-sets, the old mentality, the old vocabulary, and the old practices. A discarding of the methods of operation that you picked up by being part of institutional Christianity. In place of that, there will grow up among you a new mind-set, a new mentality, a new way of operating, a new vocabulary, and a new way to know the Lord and express Him together.
This all takes time. Lots of time.
Laying hold of authentic body life is the 100-mile walk rather than the 40-yard dash.
Therefore, body life demands infinite patience. You may think at times that it can’t possibly work. That it’s hopeless. That the die has been miscast, and you were handed the wrong bundle of people to church with. You may feel at times that the group simply refuses to do what you want them to do, the church will not grow fast enough for you, etc.
Impatience with the birth of church life is a monumental hurdle that those who subscribe to a microwave-on-high-for-two-minutes philosophy will have to face squarely. Task-oriented, program-driven people will have a run-in with the slow pace of body life. But no one can hurry the birthing process. That is God’s business.
Let me remind you that you are moving away from a religious service on Sunday morning where you mostly sit and listen―toward an organic gathering of new creations, discovering afresh how to express Jesus Christ corporately. That’s no small shift. It’s as large as the universe.
So I exhort you to stick with it, regardless of how slow the pace. If you can manage to endure, you will discover a Lord who is all-sufficient. But remember-He moves according to His own clock. And His clock almost always ticks slower than ours.
Principle 4: People will leave your group.
This should be chiseled in marble. Let’s face it. In the minds of most Christians, it’s flat-out strange to go against the conventional current of having a paid pastor, an in-place Sunday school program, a church building, and a church service that’s centered on a worship team and a forty-five-minute sermon.
If you live in the Western world, you have options. Countless options. You are accustomed to choosing from a raft of different automobiles, ice-cream flavors, and brands of cologne. In the city where you live, there are most likely hundreds of churches, Bible studies, and parachurch organizations that you may join.
The situation was drastically different in the first century. There was only one option if you were a Christian. If you came to Christ, you became part of the one and only church in your city. And that church met in homes without a clergy. In the New Testament era, coming to Christ was the equivalent of being membered to His body.
What does this mean for you? It simply means that the only way you will manage to hang together for the long haul is if you have come to the place where you have run out of options.
Meeting in a home without a modern pastor has a pretty hefty price tag attached to it. The meetings are now in your hands. What to do with the children is now a problem that you as a group must resolve. Difficulties with the other members is a challenge that you must tackle. Add to that, authentic church life will not work if you come to the meetings only to receive and not to give. And giving requires spiritual preparation. It requires time. It requires energy.
So get clear at the outset that there’s an excellent chance that some of the people who are reading this book with you will not be around a few months from now. Let alone a few weeks. And there are endless reasons why they will leave.
But here is the most important thing I wish to say to you. When people leave, I beg you not to pressure or persuade them to stay. And more important, do not speak ill of them when they go. On top of that, it’s of utmost importance that you refrain from imputing evil motives to their hearts. I have watched the profound destruction that judging motives does to relationships. The damage is devastating, and it has a ripple effect that injures others.
The Lord Jesus condemned this practice, saying, “Judge not lest you be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard that you have judged others.” These are thundering words. The Lord gave peculiar insight into what happens when a person judges the motives of another. The one who finds fault with his brother and detects a speck of wood in his eye is exposing the fact that he is guilty of having a cedar tree in his own. The speck is actually a small chip off the cedar tree.
Consequently, when someone judges the heart motives of another, they are in effect projecting what is in their own heart onto another person. Simply put, to impute ill motives onto another human being is to expose what is in our own hearts. Only Jesus Christ has the right and the ability to see into the motives of someone’s heart. We have no such capacity.
I implore you, therefore, to take the high road when people leave your group. Accept what they say at face value instead of second-guessing their intentions. In fact, if you really wish to hit a high watermark, bless and speak well of them when they leave. Especially after they leave.
To do so incarnates a monumental breakthrough in the kingdom of God. It also speaks volumes about your group. Namely, that your church is not built on fear, elitism, sectarianism, or religious obligation-but on freedom. And an atmosphere of liberty and freedom is an evidence of the presence of God’s Spirit. Note that freedom includes the freedom to leave without negative consequences.
Principle 5: People will experience exciting spiritual growth
and healing.
Even though organic church is difficult, it provides a context in which God’s people can experience significant spiritual growth, maturity, and healing. This is because the organic expression of the church is our natural habitat. It’s the God-ordained environment that believers are called to live out their lives. It is the native nurturing ground for the Christian. The mutual participation, encouragement, and loving atmosphere that organic churches provide cause believers to make significant strides in their spiritual walk. Discipleship (as it’s often called today) was never meant to take place outside of this context.
Time and again people have testified that experiencing open-participatory meetings and authentic community has accelerated their spiritual maturity, love, devotion, following of the Lord, and the expression of their gifts. Therefore, the combination of knowing the cross of Christ in close-knit community and learning to live by God’s life rather than our own creates transformation. I’ve never seen these five principles change. If you can manage to keep them in mind, they will increase your chances for survival dramatically. Write them down. Revisit them. And remind one another of them from time to time.