Tag: Frank Viola

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Insurgence

I took this book, by Frank Viola, with me on my trip to Tanzania, Africa. It’s about 440 pages and pretty hefty but it’s broken up into small segments which makes it easier to read. On my first leg, from Phoenix to D.C., I had to put the book down. I found myself getting teary eyed around page 60.

Rather than describing this book, I’ll just quote from the back cover.

Have we lost the explosive, earthshaking gospel of the kingdom that Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles preached? Have we exchanged this dynamic, titanic, living gospel for a gospel of religious duty or permissiveness and “easy believism”?

Highly recommended if you believe the answer to the above is “yes”. Let’s stop arguing theology with one another on social media and start building His kingdom here. Below is an excerpt.

For far too long, the kingdom of God has been shrunken and reduced to mean either individual salvation or social transformation. But to define the kingdom this way is to distort what it means.

When Jesus said, “The kingdom is at hand,” He meant that the world was about to have a new king. It was also about to see a new reign on the earth in and through a new people.

There is no kingdom outside of Jesus, the King. And there is no kingdom outside the ekklesia, the people who are governed by the King.

For this reason, there is a close connection between the kingdom and the ekklesia. In both places in the Gospels where Jesus refers to the ekklesia, He ties it into the kingdom (see Matthew 16:16-19 and 18:15-18). Binding and loosing is kingdom language.

No kingdom exists without a king. The same is true for the kingdom of God. Caesar was called “the son of God.” When people called Jesus the Son of God, they were claiming that He was a king. In the Old Testament, both the terms “Messiah” and “Son of God” carry the meaning of “king.”

When Peter preached the gospel of the kingdom on the day of Pentecost, he ended his message with these sober words:

Save yourselves from this corrupt generation. (Acts 2:40 NIV)

My word to you is to save yourself from this corrupt generation. How? By coming under the rule of the realm of the kingdom of God.

As Tozer once put it,

We need men and women who have fought their way to endure scorn and may even have been called fanatics-scoffed at and called everything but a Christian. We need men and women today who are willing to push in and bear their way past the flesh, the world, and the devil, and cold Christians and deacons and elders. They will have to push themselves until they are fascinated by what they see in Christ. Those who have truly seen Christ in His glory have eyes for nothing else.

When the Lord’s first disciples heard Jesus say, “Come, follow me,” they left everything and followed Him.

To follow Jesus today means to leave everything and follow Him wherever He leads. It means and requires cross-bearing. It means and requires self-denial. It means and requires self-sacrifice. It means climbing on the altar as a living sacrifice to God and leaving the world behind.

Sin, with its selfishness, idolatry, pride, and independence, can be juiced down to our desire to be king, to be in control, usurping the place of Jesus as King. Entering and enjoying the kingdom, then, means surrender.

As Jesus-followers, our calling is to live in the world without being captured by its spirit. We are the people who live in the divine parenthesis, living between the end of one age and before the age to come. We are those “on whom the culmination of the ages has come” (1 Corinthians 10:11 NIV).

The insurgence doesn’t square with the idea that Christians should retreat from the culture and throw rocks at it from afar. Neither does it square with the idea that Christians should try to fix the problems of the world through political power and activism.

Instead, the insurgence is about living in a different kingdom and putting that kingdom life on display before principalities and powers as well as before fallen women and men.

The insurgence is marked by radical generosity. That is, using our material goods for the good of others, not just for ourselves.

The insurgence looks toward God’s final judgment, which is about adjusting what’s wrong in the world and making everything right.

When Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” He was referring to a new way to live (John 18:36 NIV). The way that Jesus orders our social life is radically different from the top-down pecking order that’s found everywhere in human civilization. The way of Jesus is a completely different way to live, be human. and interact socially (Matthew 20:25-28; Luke 22:25-26).  

The kingdom of God is a social order in this world that’s a stark alternative to the kingdom of Ceasar (the empires of the world).

The insurgence calls us to model the true “radicalization,” one that’s in and for God’s already-but-not-yet kingdom.  A kingdom of which we are called to be faithful witnesses.

The call of the insurgence is to forsake all and follow the new King and His peaceable kingdom, which is here now but will come in full someday.

Frank Viola, Insurgence

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Finding Organic Church

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.


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.

Frank Viola, Finding Organic Church
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Reimagining Church

This is the second excerpt about counting the cost. Thank you Frank for being honest and encouraging.

Let me be clear. There’s a price to pay in responding to the Lord’s will for His church. You’ll have to reckon with being misunderstood by those who have embraced spectator Christianity. You’ll bear the marks of the cross and die a thousand deaths in the process of being built together with other believers in a close-knit community.

You’ll have to endure the messiness that’s part and parcel of relational Christianity – forever abandoning the artificial neatness afforded by the organized church. You’ll no longer share the comforts of being a passive spectator. Instead, you’ll learn the self-emptying lessons of becoming a responsible, serving member of a functioning body.

In addition, you’ll have to go against the harsh grain of what one writer calls “the seven last words of the church” (we never did it that way before). You’ll incur the disfavor of the religious majority for refusing to be influenced by the tyranny of the status quo. And you’ll incite the severest assaults of the Adversary in his attempt to snuff out that which represents a living testimony of Jesus.

Add to that, living in organic church life is incredible difficult. The experience is fraught with problems. Read the New Testament letters again with an eye to discovering the many hazards the early Christians encountered when living in a close-knit community. When we live in the same kind of community life today, the same problems emerge. Our flesh gets exposed. Our spirituality gets tested. And we quickly find out just how deep the fall goes.

As one person said, “Everybody’s normal until you get to know them.” This is all too true for those who take the plunge of living in organic church life. The problems are endless. It’s much easier to become a “pew potato” two hours on Sunday morning in an instititutionaal church. Anyone can be a perfect Christian then. Organic church life, however, is a wedding of glory and gore. But this is the genius of God. It’s His prescribed way to transform us into His image. For “iron sharpens iron” (Prov. 27:17).

Yet regardless of the suffering that follows those who take the road less traveled, the glorious benefits of living in body life far outweigh the costs. The Lord builds on broken lives; His house is constituted out of conflict (1 Chron. 26:27). This being the case, “Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore” (Heb.13:13). For it is there that we may meet the Savior’s heartbeat.

Frank Viola, Reimagining Church
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Reimagining Church

Masterful work by Frank Viola, here is the first excerpt on rediscovery.

To borrow a term from scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn, we need a “paradigm shift” regarding the church before we can properly rebuild it. That is, we need a new worldview regarding the meaning of the body of Christ. A new model for understanding the ekklesia. A new framework for thinking about the church.

Of course, the “new paradigm” that I’m speaking of is not new at all. It’s the paradigm that undergirds the entire New Testament.

Our day is not much different from that of Nehemiah’s. In Nehemiah’s time, Israel had just rediscovered the Law of God after being without it for many years. But once it was discovered, it had to be reexplained and reinterpreted. Consider the words of Nehemiah:

They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that people could understand what was being read.

Nehemiah 8:8

In the same way, twenty-first-century Christians must relearn the language of Scripture with respect to the church. The original meaning of countless biblical terms like “church,” “minister,” “pastor,” “house of God,” and “fellowship” have largely been lost.

These words have been invested with institutional power. A power that was foreign to those who originally penned them. Therefore, a pressing need today is the rediscovery of biblical language and ideas. We need to rethink our entire concept of church and discover it afresh through the lens of Jesus and the apostles.

Because of common misteaching, we have many deeply buried assumptions that are in need of excavation and examination. Many of us have been mistaught that “church” means a building, a denomination, or a worship service. And that a “minister” is a special class of Christian.

Since our contemporary notion of the church has been so entrenched in human thinking, it requires a conscious effort to view it in the way that all first-century Christians did. It demands that we rigorously plow through the thick and tangled weeds of religious tradition until we unearth the virgin soil of organic Christianity.

As we rethink the church in its scriptural context, we’ll be better equipped to distinguish between the biblical notion of church and those institutions that pose as churches.

In the eyes of those who see the world through institutional glasses, unless a church meets in the “right” place (a building), has the “proper” leadership (an ordained minister), and bears the “correct” name (one that indicates a “covering”), it’s not an authentic church. Instead, it’s dubbed with innovative terms like “parachurch.”

Hence, among those who haven’t yet grown weary of running on the program-driven treadmill of institutional “churchianity,” that which is abnormal is considered normal and that which is normal is regarded as abnormal. This is the unhappy result of not basing our faith and practice upon Scripture.

In brief, nothing short of a paradigm shift regarding the church, coupled with an impartation of fresh light from the Holy Spirit, will produce enduring change. Readjustments to the old wineskin, no matter how radical, will only go so far.

Consequently, in my personal judgement, the church doesn’t need renewal. It needs a complete overhaul. That is, the only way to fully renew the institutional church to wholly disassemble it and build something far different. The brittle wineskin of church practice and the tattered garment of ecclesiastical forms need to be exchanged, not just modified. Some may disagree. But this is my conviction based on my experience, and I’m not ashamed to state it.

Frank Viola, Reimagining Church
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Pagan Christianity

Incredibly researched and written, Pagan Christianity, authored by Frank Viola and George Barna, is a must read. They explore the roots of our church practices and, unfortunately, confirm that pagan practices have had a huge influence on what we do today.

FYI. Pagan C. is not a stand alone volume. The majority of those who read it without the constructive sequels misinterpret and misapply the message. Check out the video-audio at PaganChristianity.org for an explanition. Thx!

Frank Viola, Facebook post response.

Yes, it’s true, you can use the information in the book to hammer away at people but it is not the intent of this book. If the Holy Spirit hasn’t begun the process of revealing truth to a person, no amount of head bashing will work.

Below is an excerpt about the introduction of the pew. It may seem insignificant but you can get a sense of the research that has gone into this book.

The pew is perhaps the greatest inhibitor of face-to-face fellowship. It is a symbol of lethargy and passivity in the contemporary church and has made corporate worship a spectator sport.

The word pew is derived from the Latin podium. It means a seat raised up above a floor level or a “balcony”. Pews were unknown to the church building for the first thousand years of Christian history. In the early basilicas, the congregation stood throughout the entire service. (This is still the practice among many Eastern Orthodox).

By the thirteenth century, backless benches were gradually introduced into English parish buildings. These benches were made of stone and placed against the walls. They were then moved into the body of the building (the area called the nave). At first, the benches were arranged in a semicircle around the pulpit. Later they were fixed to the floor.

The modern pew was introduced in the forteenth century, though it was not commonly found in churches until the fifteenth century. At that time, wooden benches supplanted the stone seats. By the eighteenth century box pews became popular.

Because box pews often had high sides, the pulpits had to be elevated so as to be seen by the people. Thus the “wineglass” pulpit was born during colonial times. Eighteenth-century family box pews were replaced with slip pews so that all the people faced the newly erected high platform where the pastor conducted the service.

So what is the pew? The meaning of the word tells it all. It is a lowered “balcony” – detached seating from which to watch performances on a stage (the pulpit). It immobilizes the congregation of the saints and renders them mute spectators. It hinders face-to-face fellowship and interaction.