"15 Theses" For A New Reformation
The House Church Network
By Wolfgang Simson
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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