15
Theses For A Modern Reformation
by Wolfgang Simson (continued
from previous
page)
5. The church has to become small in order to grow big.
Most churches of today are simply too big to provide real
fellowship. They have too often become "fellowships without
fellowship." The New Testament Church was a mass of small
groups, typically between 10 and 15 people. It grew not upward
into big congregations between 20 and 300 people filling a
cathedral and making real, mutual communication improbable.
Instead, it multiplied "side wards", like organic cells,
once these groups reached around 15-20 people. Then, if possible,
it drew all the Christians together into citywide celebrations, as
with Solomon's Temple court in Jerusalem. The traditional
congregational church as we know it is, statistically speaking,
neither big nor beautiful, but rather a sad compromise, an
overgrown house-church and an under-grown celebration, often
missing the dynamics of both.
6. No church is led by a Pastor alone.
The local church is not led by a Pastor, but fathered by an
Elder, a local person of wisdom and reality. The local
house-churches are then networked into a movement by the
combination of elders and members of the so-called five-fold
ministries (Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Evangelists and Teachers)
circulating "from house to house," whereby there is a
special foundational role to play for the apostolic and prophetic
ministries (Eph. 2:20, and 4:11.12). A Pastor (shepherd) is a very
necessary part of the whole team, but he cannot fulfill more than
a part of the whole task of "equipping the saints for the
ministry," and has to be complemented synergistically by the
other four ministries in order to function properly.
7. The right pieces-fitted together in the wrong way.
In doing a puzzle, we need to have the right original for the
pieces, otherwise the final product, the whole picture, turns out
wrong, and the individual pieces do not make much sense. This has
happened to large parts of the Christian world: we have all the
right pieces, but have fitted them together wrong, because of
fear, tradition, religious jealousy and a power-and-control
mentality. As water is found in three forms, ice, water and steam,
the five ministries mentioned in Eph. 4:11-12, the Apostles,
Prophets, Pastors, Teachers and Evangelists are also found today,
but not always in the right forms and in the right places: they
are often frozen to ice in the rigid system of institutionalized
Christianity; they sometimes exist as clear water; or they have
vanished like steam into the thin air of free-flying ministries
and "independent" churches, accountable to no-one. As it
is best to water flowers with the fluid version of water, these
five equipping ministries will have to be transformed back into
new, and at the same time age-old, forms, so that the whole
spiritual organism can flourish and the individual
"ministers" can find their proper role and place in the
whole. That is one more reason why we need to return back to the
Maker's original and blueprint for the Church.
8. God does not leave the Church in the hands of
bureaucratic clergy.
No expression of a New Testament church is ever led by just one
professional "holy man" doing the business of
communicating with God and then feeding some relatively passive
religious consumers Moses-style. Christianity has adopted this
method from pagan religions, or at best from the Old Testament.
The heavy professionalisation of the church since Constantine has
now been a pervasive influence long enough, dividing the people of
God artificially into laity and clergy. According to the New
Testament (1 Tim. 2:5), "there is one God, and one mediator
also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." God simply
does not bless religious professionals to force themselves
in-between people and God forever. The veil is torn, and God is
allowing people to access Himself directly through Jesus Christ,
the only Way. To enable the priesthood of all believers, the
present system will have to change completely. Bureaucracy is the
most dubious of all administrative systems, because it basically
asks only two questions: yes or no. There is no room for
spontaneity and humanity, no room for real life. This may be OK
for politics and companies, but not the Church. God seems to be in
the business of delivering His Church from a Babylonian captivity
of religious bureaucrats and controlling spirits into the public
domain, the hands of ordinary people made extraordinary by God,
who, like in the old days, may still smell of fish, perfume and
revolution.
9. Return from organized to organic forms of Christianity.
The "Body of Christ" is a vivid description of an
organic, not an organized, being. Church consists on its local
level of a multitude of spiritual families, which are organically
related to each other as a network, where the way the pieces are
functioning together is an integral part of the message of the
whole. What has become a maximum of organization with a minimum of
organism, has to be changed into a minimum of organization to
allow a maximum of organism. Too much organization has, like a
straightjacket, often choked the organism for fear that something
might go wrong. Fear is the opposite of faith, and not exactly a
Christian virtue. Fear wants to control, faith can trust. Control,
therefore, may be good, but trust is better. The Body of Christ is
entrusted by God into the hands of steward-minded people with a
supernatural charismatic gift to believe God that He is still in
control, even if they are not. A development of trust-related
regional and national networks, not a new arrangement of political
ecumenism is necessary for organic forms of Christianity to
reemerge.
10. From worshipping our worship to worshipping God.
The image of much of contemporary Christianity can be
summarized, a bit euphemistically, as holy people coming regularly
to a holy place at a holy day at a holy hour to participate in a
holy ritual lead by a holy man dressed in holy clothes against a
holy fee. Since this regular performance-oriented enterprise
called "worship service" requires a lot of
organizational talent and administrative bureaucracy to keep
going, formalized and institutionalized patterns developed quickly
into rigid traditions. Statistically, a traditional 1-2 hour
"worship service" is very resource-hungry but actually
produces very little fruit in terms of discipling people, that is,
in changed lives. Economically speaking, it might be a "high
input and low output" structure. Traditionally, the desire to
"worship in the right way" has led to much
denominationalism, confessionalism and nominalism. This not only
ignores that Christians are called to "worship in truth and
in spirit," not in cathedrals holding songbooks, but also
ignores that most of life is informal, and so is Christianity as
"the Way of Life." Do we need to change from being
powerful actors to start "acting powerfully?"
11. Stop bringing people to church, and start bringing the
church to the people.
The church is changing back from being a Come-structure to
being again a Go-structure. As one result, the Church needs to
stop trying to bring people "into the church," and start
bringing the Church to the people. The mission of the Church will
never be accomplished just by adding to the existing structure; it
will take nothing less than a mushrooming of the church through
spontaneous multiplication of itself into areas of the population
of the world, where Christ is not yet known.
12. Rediscovering the "Lord's Supper" to be a real
supper with real food.
Church tradition has managed to "celebrate the Lord's
Supper" in a homeopathic and deeply religious form,
characteristically with a few drops of wine, a tasteless cookie
and a sad face. However, the "Lord's Supper" was
actually more a substantial supper with a symbolic meaning, than a
symbolic supper with a substantial meaning. God is restoring
eating back into our meeting.
13. From Denominations to city-wide celebrations.
Jesus called a universal movement, and what came was a series
of religious companies with global chains marketing their special
brands of Christianity and competing with each other. Through this
branding of Christianity most of Protestantism has, therefore,
become politically insignificant and often more concerned with
traditional specialties and religious infighting than with
developing a collective testimony before the world. Jesus simply
never asked people to organize themselves into denominations. In
the early days of the Church, Christians had a dual identity: they
were truly His church and vertically converted to God, and then
organized themselves according to geography, that is, converting
also horizontally to each other on earth. This means not only
Christian neighbors organizing themselves into neighborhood- or
house-churches, where they share their lives locally, but
Christians coming together as a collective identity as much as
they can for citywide or regional celebrations expressing the corporate ness
of the Church of the city or region. Authenticity in
the neighborhoods connected with a regional or citywide corporate
identity will make the Church not only politically significant and
spiritually convincing, but will allow a return to the biblical
model of the City-Church.
14. Developing a persecution-proof spirit.
They crucified Jesus, the Boss of all the Christians. Today,
his followers are often more into titles, medals and social
respectability, or, worst of all, they remain silent and are not
worth being noticed at all. "Blessed are you when you are
persecuted", says Jesus. Biblical Christianity is a healthy
threat to pagan godlessness and sinfulness, a world overcome by
greed, materialism, jealousy and any amount of demonic standards
of ethics, sex, money and power. Contemporary Christianity in many
countries is simply too harmless and polite to be worth
persecuting. But as Christians again live out New Testament
standards of life and, for example, call sin as sin, conversion or
persecution has been, is and will be the natural reaction of the
world. Instead of nesting comfortably in temporary zones of
religious liberty, Christians will have to prepare to be again
discovered as the main culprits against global humanism, the
modern slavery of having to have fun and the outright worship of
Self, the wrong center of the universe. That is why Christians
will and must feel the "repressive tolerance" of a world
which has lost any absolutes and therefore refuses to recognize
and obey its creator God with his absolute standards. Coupled with
the growing ideologization, privatization and spiritualization of
politics and economics, Christians will, sooner than most think,
have their chance to stand happily accused in the company of
Jesus. They need to prepare now for the future by developing a
persecution-proof spirit and an even more persecution-proof
structure.
15. The Church comes home.
Where is the easiest place, say, for a man to be spiritual?
Maybe again, is it hiding behind a big pulpit, dressed up in holy
robes, preaching holy words to a faceless crowd and then
disappearing into an office? And what is the most difficult, and
therefore most meaningful, place for a man to be spiritual? At
home, in the presence of his wife and children, where everything
he does and says is automatically put through a spiritual litmus
test against reality, where hypocrisy can be effectively weeded
out and authenticity can grow. Much of Christianity has fled the
family, often as a place of its own spiritual defeat, and then has
organized artificial performances in sacred buildings far from the
atmosphere of real life. As God is in the business of recapturing
the homes, the church turns back to its roots, back to where it
came from. It literally comes home, completing the circle of
Church history at the end of world history.
As Christians of all walks of life, from all denominations and
backgrounds, feel a clear echo in their spirit to what God's
Spirit is saying to the Church, and start to hear globally in
order to act locally, they begin to function again as one body.
They organize themselves into neighborhood house-churches and meet
in regional or city-celebrations. You are invited to become part
of this movement and make your own contribution. Maybe your home,
too, will become a house that changes the world.
From "Houses That Change The World, The Return Of The House
Churches, by Wolfgang Simson." Taken from www.homechurch.org,
used by permission.
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