Houses that change the world
by Wolfgang Simson
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 spiritually 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 thesuperstructure. 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 18thcentury 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 Gods worddialogue-and
not professor-style,pray and prophesy with each other, baptize,
lose their face and theirego 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 Solomons 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 Makers 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 somethingmight go wrong. Fear is the opposite of faith, and not exactly a Christian virtue. Fear wants to control, faith can trust. Control, therefore, may begood, 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 newarrangement 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 dropsof 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 religiouscompanies 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, isit 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.
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.