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.
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 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 word, dialogue - 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 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 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 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.
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this 15 Thesis