15 Theses Towards a Reformation of Church
God is changing the Church, and that, in turn, will change the world. Millions of Christians around the world are aware of an imminent reformation of global proportions. They say, in effect: "Church as we know it is preventing Church as God wants it." A growing number of them are surprisingly hearing God say the very same things. There is a collective new awareness of age-old revelations, a corporate spiritual echo. In the following "15 Theses" I will summarize a part of this, and I am convinced that it reflects a part of what the Spirit of God is saying to the Church today. For some, it might be the proverbial fist-sized cloud on Elijah's sky. Others already feel the pouring rain.
Fifteen Theses towards a Re-Incarnation of Church
1. Church is a Way of Life, not a
series of religious meetings.
Before they where called Christians, followers of Christ have
been called "The Way". One of the reasons was, that
they have literally found "the way to live." The nature
of Church is not reflected in a constant series of religious
meetings lead by professional clergy in holy rooms specially
reserved to experience Jesus, but in the prophetic way followers
of Christ live their everyday life in spiritual extended families
as a vivid answer to the questions society faces, at the place
where it counts most: in their homes.
2. Time to change the system
In aligning itself to the religious patterns of the day, the
historic Orthodox Church after Constantine in the 4th century AD
adopted a religious system which was in essence Old Testament,
complete with priests, altar, a Christian temple (cathedral),
frankincense and a Jewish, synagogue-style worship pattern. The
Roman Catholic Church went on to canonize the system. Luther did
reform the content of the gospel, but left the outer forms of
"church" remarkably untouched; the Free-Churches freed
the system from the State, the Baptists then baptized it, the
Quakers dry-cleaned it, the Salvation Army put it into a uniform,
the Pentecostals anointed it and the Charismatics renewed it, but
until today nobody has really changed the superstructure. It is
about time to do just that.
3. The Third Reformation.
In rediscovering the gospel of salvation by faith and grace
alone, Luther started to reform the Church through a reformation
of theology. In the 18th century through movements like the
Moravians there was a recovery of a new intimacy with God, which
led to a reformation of spirituality, the Second Reformation. Now
God is touching the wineskins themselves, initiating a Third
Reformation, a reformation of structure.
4. From Church-Houses to
house-churches
Since New Testament times, there is no such thing as "a
house of God". At the cost of his life, Stephen reminded
unequivocally: God does not live in temples made by human hands.
The Church is the people of God. The Church, therefore, was and
is at home where people are at home: in ordinary houses. There,
the people of God: share their lives in the power of the Holy
Spirit, have "meatings," that is, they eat when they
meet; they often do not even hesitate to sell private property
and share material and spiritual blessings, teach each other in
real-life situations how to obey God's worddialogue- and
not professor-style, pray and prophesy with each other, baptize,
'lose their face' and their ego by confessing their sins,
regaining a new corporate identity by experiencing love,
acceptance and forgiveness.
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 "sidewards"like organic
cellsonce 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 lead 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 formsice, water and
steamthe 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 newand at the same time
age-oldforms, 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 corporateness 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 centre 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 ideologisation, privatization and
spiritualisation of politics and economics, Christians
willsooner than most thinkhave 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
difficultand therefore most meaningfulplace 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 rootsback to where it came from. It literally
comes home, completing the circle of Church history at the end of
world history.
(From: Houses that change the world, Wolfgang Simson; Postfach
212, 8212
Neuhausen 2, Switzerland Email: 100337.2106@compuserve.com.
FAX +49-7745-
919531)
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