Tag: Reimagingin 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