The Organic Church
"Let not him who worships under a steeple condemn him who worships under a chimney." John Newton
Church History- Buildings and Leadership
Most of what we do in the Christian Church today has no precedent in Scripture, in fact its roots are in paganism. Many of our practices originated from the Romans which were borrowed heavily from the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Persians. So, just after the death of the Apostles we began to adopt customs from surrounding cultures, yet we have Christianized them and concluded that they have been blessed by God. This is the institutionalized Church today. Because we operate according to these man-made formulas we have little or no power. The Church today is more a social fraternity, a club consisting of activities that keeps its members busy, rather than a real live organism in which the Spirit of God can flow through. This is not at all what Christ had in mind.
Constantine was known as the great liberator because he pulled Christianity out of obscurity and made it into a bona fide religious state. He institutionalized Christianity and put it on the map and everyone was apparently relieved. What he really did was position Christianity away from its original intention and the very practices by which it was meant to function according to the blueprint found in the Holy Scriptures. Every person since Constantine who sought to bring Christianity back to its simple and humble origins has been known by a certain name- martyr.
In the time of Constantine, the Fourth Century, he saw fit to provide Christianity with several so-called advancements which changed the face of the church forever. One was the church building. He gave the church at that time buildings which were fashioned after the temples of the Greeks and Romans and were called basillicas. Constantine engaged in a building program and erected edifices patterned after the pagan temples of pagan Gods, concluding that there is a special place where God dwells in a special way. The church emerged as a public institution which absorbed Christian and pagan religious ideas and practices. The church building, instituted initially by Constantine with multiple revisions and developments over the centuries, is a sad saga of Christianity borrowing from heathen culture and secularism, radically transformed how we view and practice church today.
Buildings cost and contemporary Christians are spending an astronomical amount of money on these places of worship. Currently in the United States real estate owned by the institutionalized church is worth over $230 billion and church building debt, service, and maintenance consumes about 18 percent of the $50 to $60 billion tithed annually. Overhead in the Christian church in America, which includes buildings and salaries, siphons off 50 to 85 percent of the monetary giving. If we didn't have these expenditures and were more like the early church (i.e. debt free) just imagine what we could do with that money.
So Constantine made specially constructed buildings and in AD 321 he decreed that Sunday would be a day of rest- a legal holiday. From all accounts it appears he made Sunday a special day because he wanted to honor the pagan god Mithras, the Unconquered Sun, because the Emporer was a sun worshiper. He reportedly thought that this god and Christ were compatible.
Constantine also borrowed from the pagans the notion of the sacredness of objects and places. He brought to the Christian faith the idea of the holy site which was modeled after the pagan shrine. Constantine even decorated the new church buildings with pagan art and introduced candles and the burning of incense as a part of the ceremony. And because the church buildings were regarded as sacred, congregants had to undergo a purification ritual before entering, so, in the fourth century fountains were built so the Christians could wash before entering the building.
Christians met predominantly in homes for over 300 years and did not erect special buildings for gathering until the Constantinian era. The word for church in the original language of the New Testament is ekklesia, and this term is never used to refer to a building. Ekklesia is offered 114 times in the New Testament and every time it refers to a gathering of people. The church is not a time or a place in a building. It is a body, an organism, a people representing the Lord Jesus Christ. The church is a family of brothers and sisters who meet in homes. You don't go to church, you are the church. Nowhere in Scripture do we find the term church service, it is not a service or performance offered by professionals. The church is people assembled anywhere and everywhere and everyone participates.
And then there is the leadership hierarchy. In the second century Ignatius of Antioch elevated one lone elder in each church above all the others and called this man a bishop. According to Ignatius the bishop had ultimate power and should be obeyed absolutely. Clement of Rome was the first to use the term laity to distinguish this caste from the ruling class. Tertullian used clergy to refer to a separate class of Christians. By the end of the third century this leadership structure prevailed and every church had its own bishop. The congregation, once active, was now rendered passive as God's people watched the bishop perform. Pulpits, where bishops could offer their craft, and pews, where the lower class became passive spectators, emerged as key to the organized structure of the church and its building. Not long after this bishops began to be called priests. The clergy, those who do ministry, and the laity, those to whom ministry is done, became widespread designations although these terms do not appear anywhere in Scripture. By the fourth century a graded hierarchy dominated Christian faith and one bishop rule became the accepted form of church government throughout the Roman Empire. By the time Constantine came upon the scene he simply legitimized the position of bishop, providing it with further power within the church as well as political power throughout every province of Roman government.
The early church did not view leadership in this way. They knew mostly about shared power through humble service. The terms shepherd, overseer, bishop, and elder are always used interchangeably in Scripture, so there are no distinctively separate classes representing hierarchical power. Even more, only once is the word "pastors" used in the Bible, in Ephesians 4:11, and it is offered along with four other designations, so to elevate one position above all the rest is puzzling. Not only that, "pastors" is offered in the plural, which means that they exist in a plurality and not a singular. The word "priest" is used in the New Testament three times and each time it refers to all Christians. Yet we use these terms to justify a leadership office that is not found in Scripture.
The Gathering of Believers
Christ accomplished many things that had never been done before. His government stood in stark contrast to any administration that ever existed, including the Roman system of his day. He established himself as the Head, fulfilling the former systems of temples, priests, and sacrifices, all within himself. Not only was his ministry not housed in a building he did not even live in a building. He was a homeless itinerant preacher who sauntered through desert wastelands and had no place to lay his head each night, except for maybe a rock. Jesus got into trouble when he said he didn't need a temple because he was the temple and he could reconstruct it in three days. Even in the early church there were no buildings or offices; individuals served the collective so God would be glorified, not man. Jesus taught of his own pre-eminence and left the earth urging his followers to submit to the Teacher, the Holy Spirit. In other words, the typical human institutions of hierarchical leadership were unnecessary because we already have a Leader, the Lord. We are all equals, in mutual submission to the Godhead. The church itself is not at all what it has become today, but rather an organism, a real live body of believers, the body of Christ. George Barna and Frank Viola, in their book "Pagan Christianity," have defined this organic church as "a living, breathing, dynamic, mutually participatory, every-member-functioning, Christ-centered, communal expression of the body of Christ." Every member is to play a key role in what occurs during gatherings and no one is to remain passive.
We look at Scripture through the lens of our own culture and seem to bypass so many obvious truths, adding what we want and deleting what we feel is appropriate. There are many spiritual gifts in the Bible yet for some reason we have concluded that some are not for this age. We have an order of service in God's written record for his church, but rare is the gathering that adheres to it. The gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12 seemed to be the most neglected. They include word of wisdom, word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, miraculous powers, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits, tongues, and interpretation of tongues. The order of service for the church today in 1 Corinthians 14 is as follows: a hymn, a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. To me that seems real simple and is only complicated through overplanning. When we rely on the Spirit our gatherings are very orderly and meaningful, occurring in precisely the manner intended by the Godhead in heaven. I would say that we have too much earth-based humanity and not enough heaven powered Spirit in our churches today. It may not always be like the whirlwind at Pentecost but we do have that as an example.
Just imagine what that would be like to see those gifts and that order of service offered in God's church today, not in buildings but in homes. It makes you wonder what the early church gatherings were like. I have had experience with gatherings which have employed all of these gifts and this particular order of service. The following is a description of one of these gatherings of the body of Christ.
"Just the other day I was in small group of like-minded people of the Spirit. As is typical of this group, we had not planned anything
specific before meeting. We did not have an agenda nor any teaching prepared. We simply showed up and invited the Spirit to
arrive without our interference. An unplanned teaching then came out of me because the Spirit provided revelation that I was
compelled to share. Others shared in a similar manner along the same theme. We then sensed that a time of worship would be
essential so we played a CD of praise songs. Everyone closed their eyes and went to a place in the spirit. Immediately we sensed
God’s Spirit with us. The presence of God was as tangible as a brisk breeze. We were enlivened and energized by this presence.
We were then led, collectively, to pray in certain ways for specific people. We were all able to discern this in our individual spirits
because the Spirit had told each of us the same thing. We prayed hard for a long time with direct words from God. God provided
revelation to us that we declared to the rulers and authorities in the spiritual realm and to each other. It was as though a divine
communication was being transcribed within each of us, one that we all heard. We then wanted more of God, so we pressed in
further for even more of his presence. We played more music and worshiped and praised God from our spirits. More prayer came
at the Spirit’s direction. We spoke words to each other as God supplied utterance through the Spirit. At the end of this time we sat
in a heavenly afterglow, being warmed by the God who draws near."
This is the church of God and it would behoove us to realign ourselves to God's interests so Christ would be the true Head and the Spirit would guide us into all truth. Try this in a home group, throwing aside your own agenda and fear-based self-reliance, and you will truly be blessed. The Spirit operates in freedom and through our self-denial a certain climate invites God's kingdom to come, his will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Frank Viola, in his book "Reimagining Church- Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity," offers another example of a Christ led Spirited home gathering:
"The believers gathered together and began the meeting with singing. The singing was a capella. A Christian sister began the meeting by starting a
song. And everyone sang with her. Then prayers were offered spontaneously one by one. Then a brother in Christ started another song. By this time,
everyone was standing together. More prayers were offered. More songs werre sung. During the singing, different ones would share short exhortations
based upon the lyrics of the songs. The word moving doesn't quite say it. There was no song leader present. All were participating in offering praises
to God freely and spontaneously. After they sang for a time, everyone sat down. And immediately a sister stood up and began sharing. She spoke about
how she found Christ as her living water during the week. She read a few verses out of John 4. As she began to share from the text, two other sisters interrupted her and shared insights out of their own experience from the same passage and the same theme. Yet what they shared of Christ was different. When the first sister was finished, a brother stood up and began to speak. He also talked about the Lord as living water, but he spoke from a passage in Revelation 22. He spoke for several minutes, and then a sister stood up and began adding to what he had shared. This went on for over an hour. One
by one, without pauses, brothers and sisters in Christ stood up and shared out of their spiritual experience of the Lord Jesus Christ. They all revealed him
as living water. Some shared poems, others shared songs, others shared stories, others shared from Scriptures, others offered prayers... That meeting
was electric. It was as if a flowing river had poured into that room and it couldn't be stopped. I could sense the Lord's presence and grace. The sharing
was rich, full, living, and vibrant... The incredible thing was that no one was leading this gathering. No one was facilitating, either. (No human being,
that is.) And it was incredibly Christ-centered. The meeting finally wound down and someone stood up and began a song. The rest of the church joined
in." This meeting then ended.
This meeting happened because much prayer was offered ahead of time. Each person also sought a vibrant and intimate relationship with the Lord in their individual lives so that by the time they arrived at this meeting they were bursting with insight and revelation from their own times with God. As they arrived they engaged in mutual submission to God and each other and sensed the Spirit's leading to offer songs, words, and prayers according to the Spirit's design. Let's do this!