Simple Church Journal

My friend likes to say, “Too many Christians have their suitcases packed just waiting to be picked up and taken out.”

In other words, the ‘great event’ of life is a future escape from this world.

But Jesus’ message is the opposite. The ‘great event’ is already under way. His Kingdom is—right now—invading earth. He set this in motion and it is still in play today. And taking part in this heavenly invasion—His Kingdom come—is the greatest privilege and motivator life has to offer.

In chapter eight of ‘Joining Jesus On His Mission,’ Greg Finke does a masterful job describing the magnificence of what Jesus is currently up to on earth and what He is inviting us to participate in.

With the arrival of Jesus who is the king, the invisible kingdom of heaven is now coming into the created realm of earth… breaking in… taking root… taking over (Mark 3:27). The work of this kingdom is to reclaim and restore all created things (Revelation 21:5) but Jesus wants us to know that this “taking over” does not look like what the world would expect (Matthew 20:25)…

And what does he mean by it [the kingdom of God]? A working definition would be: The Kingdom of God is the redemptive presence and activity of God in human lives…

He put into play a plan to redeem and restore the created universe, and people particularly, to himself—or, as the New Testament would say it, to his kingdom. This plan of redemption and restoration is the mission of God…

From now on, heaven has come to earth. There is now overlap. Intersection. Invasion. The kingdom has arrived. The kingdom has come and is now on the loose in our very midst…

For what purpose? To begin what God had promised from the beginning: the reversal of what has become of the created world since its fall and ruin in Genesis 3.

This, then, is now what is in play. Right now! As Finke says, “Game on.”

No more promising or waiting… From now on, Jesus said, redemption is on the loose. The full restoration of all things in in motion. The Spirit of God is on the move in the created world and will not be turned back until all things are made new.

The point is that we are not sitting and waiting for God to bring about some eschatological event. We are joining Him right now in the greatest time in history as He is working powerfully, masterfully, and intentionally to bring about change on this earth that will bring about redemption and restoration in the lives of people who DESPERATELY need it. Today!

What a privilege to partner with Him in this season. What a joy. What an opportunity.

And, finally, the church is meant to be the expression of that Kingdom come. The church is not the Kingdom. It is simply our individual and collective best efforts to live it and express it. Thus we must continually reassess how we live, go, and gather to better align ourselves with who He is, with His intentions, with His kingdom mission, and with His presence. Church expressions that are simpler, more organic, more dynamic, everyone-participating, and always-going are characteristics that reflect, for me, key Kingdom earmarks.

From Simple/House Church Revolution book:

Know Whom You Are Called To

When someone enquired about visiting Mother Teresa to help with her work among the poor of India, she encouraged the person to find their own Calcutta. In other words, each of us must discover who it is that God has put on our heart to love and reach out to. This makes it personal and meaningful.

As we listen to God’s voice, we will begin to sense that we have a particular heart for a particular group, or several groups, of people. Jesus, in his human experience, was called to the people living in Israel. He knew his focus. In the same way, God has given a focus to each of us, and we will find great joy in our love-life towards others if we accept whom we are called to.

The most obvious focus for us may be those we are already living among: our family (church always begins at home), our extended family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and our friends. At the same time, we may have a particular concern for a nearby people group: homeless, youth, prisoners, children, elderly, etc. It may well be that God has put this group on our heart because we are specifically called to them. Finally, we may know the stirring for a people-group that does not live near us, i.e., the unreached of Africa or the inner city poor.

Knowing who we are called to and being willing to position our lives so that we can readily love those whom God has given us to love will allow us to begin expressing the passions and gifts that we were made for.

Perhaps the most important paradigm shift for all of us is the simple awareness that God has brought us into a fulltime, 24/7 life with Him. This is the heart and soul of being His follower and being His church in the fullest sense of the word.

This reminds me of John Michael Talbot's book on Francis of Assisi and this quote:

He Was Radical

For many people, being "Christian is roughly equivalent in time and emotional commitment to being a member of a neighborhood bridge club, having a regular seat at the local Elks lodge, or getting the family car serviced every three thousand miles.  Unfortunately, this type of Christianity is often viewed as just another civic affiliation, acquired habit, or social ritual.

Not for Francis.  In him, the spark of divine love ignited a bonfire that burned away all his indifference and sparked a radical, uncompromising faith.  His was not Christianity Lite.  He worshiped at the altar of not watered-down deity.

Francis's minute-by-minute desire was to follow God ever closer…

Organic, as in ‘organic church’ means that there is something inherently alive about God’s church. And the genesis of that life is in the seed itself, the word of God.

When we lose sight of the organic, living nature of the church we can also lose sight of the power of the seed. In our institutional frameworks, we have spent so much time developing the professionalism of the farmer that we fail to realize that the DNA and power is still the seed itself and that the seed, the word, is incredibly dynamic.

Here are three simple examples of this.

A friend of mine, recently hanging out with a family member, said “Can I tell you a story?” “Sure,” came the reply. My friend then recounted a simple story from the Bible and asked a couple of questions. A conversation ensued which ended in the family member saying, “This is really interesting. I would like to discuss this more.” Previously this person had insisted that he was not interested in spiritual things, but the power of the Word was prompting something in him.

In another instance, a friend of mine had several opportunities to discuss with a co-worker his enthusiasm for God’s word and how it had changed his life. Without saying much about it, this person went home and spent the next year reading through the Bible with his wife. He was not going to a church and he was not listening to TV teaching. But, sometime later he caught up with my friend and told him how his life had been changed! So much so, that he recently invited an acquaintance of his to begin doing the same thing. Two generations of spiritual transformation based solely on the power of the seed—the word of God.

Finally, we see movements throughout Africa, in our own work there, based primarily on the Discovery method of Bible Study. This means that even non-believers are given the opportunity to discover who God is simply by reading, or hearing Bible stories, that present the major truths of Scripture without commentary or external teaching. They discover together who God is by reading, listening, and asking one another questions about what they are gleaning about God, about humankind, and what it means to follow and obey the Word they read.

It is the seed that fell upon the good soil that brought forth thirty, sixty, and one hundred fold. If we do not have confidence in that seed, then we may invent all kinds of ways to try to bring forth fruit or manufacture life that is unnecessary at best and perhaps harmful at worst. Furthermore, there is something incredibly freeing and easy about trusting in the power of God’s seed.

He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. Mark 4:26-28

At the very core of being the organic/living church that we really are is the trust that the seed itself does bring forth spiritual life dynamically and beautifully.

It is relatively easy to deconstruct from institutional church-going and thinking. Many of us would echo the sentiments expressed by some of the people quoted in this article:

“I didn’t want to invite the people that I was first exploring a conversation of spirituality with to church anymore. I didn’t want them to see walking with God as a relationship of jumping through hoops – that it was about behavioral management or sin management.”

“It’s hard to demonstrate love from the institution now…”

“[My] training to become a pastor mostly reminded me of the corporate techniques I followed at [General Electric].”

However, beyond deconstruction, the more difficult challenge is to reconstruct a lifestyle with God that is intentional, authentic, meaningful, and impactful. Many people fall through the cracks, today, who have deconstructed and left institutional church life, yet never intentionally develop an organic, significant life with God.

Kyle Rice (same article) describes where his own reconstruction has led him:

“I would say that I am very intentionally engaged with a group of believers who are committed to one another and committed to seeing God’s word make an impact around the world.”

I would suggest that there are three essential rhythms that make up the adventure of intentionally reconstructing an organic lifestyle:

1. The God-ward rhythm. Everyone knows that institutional church life does not create inner spiritual life. But we still face the challenge, outside the institution, to find the personal rhythms that move us ever deeper into the heart, purposes, and leading of Jesus Christ.
2. The community rhythm. This is a challenging rhythm, but we need the Body of Christ and some shape of authentic community life for healthy growth and alignment with God’s purposes. This is often messy, uncomfortable, and difficult to define. But we need others, we need mentors, we need to be mentoring, we need spiritual family, and we need to be sharpened by difficult people.
3. The missional rhythm. Church is always God’s people reaching out with the love of God to people who desperately need to know the love, power, freedom, healing, hope, renewal, and eternal life that only the cross brings. How this rhythm is walked out may be as varied as sands on the sea. But it is an essential dynamic for our organic adventure with God.

I am not trying to dictate forms out of any of these rhythms. In an earlier post I remarked that “if we begin with forms and structures we continue to miss the core reality of relational connection that underlies true church.”

However, I am suggesting that, as God leads us out of institutional forms of spiritual life and into organic ones, we can expect that He will draw us into new ways of living out all three of these essential dynamics. We leave the institutions (or not) with intentionality to join our life more intimately, organically, and purposefully with the Person.

The following story is from Floyd McClung’s book, “Starting a House Church.”  It illustrates all of the basic principles of starting and multiplying simple churches: going, praying, reaching a person of peace, empowering that person to disciple others and to start simple/house churches…

A U.S. businessman named William was making $350,000 a year but was bored.  To alleviate his boredom, Bill decided to go and serve the poor in the Indian sub-continent.  During a time of prayer, Bill felt the Lord saying that he should invest his time in discipling a young man who was a paraplegic.  After a couple of years spend in training him, Bill encouraged this young man to start a church for his friends, many of who were also in wheelchairs.  These were people who nobody wanted—the outcasts (one of the lowest castes in Hindu society), the lepers, the homeless, and the disabled.

Bill, meanwhile, started businesses to employ the “unemployable,” giving life skills and training to people who otherwise had nothing going for them.  I (Floyd) attended their church, called Beautiful Gate, recently and witnessed 200 people crammed into a small room for a celebration involving seven of their house churches around Kathmandu.  All the elders were sitting in front, and all were wheelchair-bound.  During the worship time, I saw people with missing fingers raising their hands.  Others had missing noses and ears—all due to leprosy.  Despite their affliction, the joy of the Lord was there and the people were worshiping Him with all their hearts.  It was an absolutely moving and gorgeous scene to witness.”

Bill provides coaching and spiritual oversight from behind the scenes.  He told me, “We pray everyday, go to the poor, I disciple people and pour my life into them, we encourage them to gather in small home groups, and as soon as we can, we multiply.”

Inspiring, simple, and powerful!

The term ‘organic church’ is often misunderstood as a description of:

• A way to do church, i.e. a house church
• A non-institutional expression of church
• A church system without hierarchical leadership
• A free-flowing, Spirit-led gathering
• An expression of church that has no form or organization to it

All of this misses the point and causes us to compare ‘organic church’ to other kinds of church ‘systems.’ With this understanding of organic church we miss, completely, the true, living nature of church as the Bible reveals it. In other words, we lose sight of what the church actually IS.

Perhaps a good plumb line for grasping the term ‘organic church’ is T. Austin Sparks’ words:

God's way and law of fullness is that of organic life. In the Divine order, life produces its own organism, whether it be vegetable, animal, human, or spiritual. This means that everything comes from the inside. Function, order, and fruit issue from this law of life within. It was solely on this principle that what we have in the New Testament came into being. Organized Christianity has entirely reversed this order.

Organic church, then, refers to:

1. The nature of church which is alive. It can be cooperated with but not created. Its life can only come from the Spirit of God who is the author of all spiritual life, both individual and corporate.
2. The order in which life comes forth. Organic life starts from within, and moves from one living disciple to the next, and only appears as a corporate expression (gathering) when the natural order is followed.

The challenge to move beyond institutional church systems is not to replace one system with another one, rather it is to re-discover and cooperate with the true living nature of the church as God created it.

BUT, what does this look like? Our need to outline the blueprint for organic church is the same one that comes from our misunderstanding. Yes, their are forms and shapes that typically come out of this intimate walking with God, both individually and corporately. But if we begin with forms and structures we continue to miss the core reality of relational connection that underlies true church. We want shortcuts to the reality of life with God that do not exist.

Organic church, then, is a lifestyle that comes out of an inner life with an involved, intentional, at-work, Kingdom-bringing God. As such, organic church describes an adventure… the greatest adventure of all time.

In future posts, we will discuss the principles and forms that underlie living/organic church, but don’t expect this to be the blueprint for  ‘church planting 101.’ We have to step back from this kind of thinking, unlearn the premises of our man-made structures, and then connect and cooperate with the Spirit who fills His church with life, liberty, joy, power, and love.

In one of his last letters Dietrich Bonhoeffer described his thoughts on “religionless Christianity” and a “non religious interpretation of biblical concepts.”

Bonhoeffer was concerned that church people in Germany were content to simply wear a thin “garment” of Christianity.

One biographer wrote about Bonhoeffer’s meaning of religionless Christianity:

In this process, religion itself, considered and historically conditioned, transient, dying form of Christianity, would undergo drastic changes as faith is freed from its more Westernized, self-serving constrictions and emphasis on inward piety and empty rituals.

…Bonhoeffer had criticized religion for its having inflicted on people a psychic posture of weakness and immature dependence and for having encouraged individualistic, self-centered attitudes toward God and others. Christians living a “nonreligious” form of Christianity, on the other hand, would draw on the example of Christ, the “man for others,” and live in a paradox of being called out of the world while belonging wholly to it.

Bonhoeffer’s prophetic voice is still calling today’s western church to divest itself of the veneer of religion so that the heart and essence of faith and communion with a holy God remains the core Gospel.

From the prison letters, one can deduce that Bonhoeffer was calling for a complete restructuring of ecclesiastical offices and for a reshaping of the churches so they can become more like Christ, divested of their possessiveness and encouraged to live only to serve others.

My hope, as we seek the wineskins that best serve and reveal Christ in today’s world, that we never give up the quest for re-shaping our personal and corporate lives around His person and the deep relationship with Him that He calls us to.

(My appreciations to bonhoefferblog from whom I drew most of this post from).

From the book Simple/House Church Revolution.

Comfy Christianity

Shane Claiborne writes: “Being a Christian is about choosing Jesus and deciding to do something incredibly daring with your life.”

In my former life as a pastor, I was a dispenser of comfortable Christianity. I took on the job of creating a “conducive environment” for worship. What this really meant was making a worship event cushy enough that people would want to come and then come back: comfortable seats, coffee, pleasing worship music, and a sermon that holds attention. Unfortunately, regularly attending a comfortable worship event has become the primary marker of what it means to be a Christian today.

In fact, we often replace the miraculous adventure of following Jesus with religious activity. Did I go to church this week? Check it off the list. Did I read my Bible? Check it. Did I pray? Check it. Done! I have completed my Christian activities and am, therefore, a “good Christian.” Religion itself becomes an easy replacement for a daring life lived in partnership with Jesus.

Ironically, Jesus drew a startling line in the sand in response to someone who wanted to follow him: "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head (Matthew 18:20).” Jesus was not a dispenser of comfortable Christianity. Quite the opposite. He taught that followers would live a lifestyle of stepping outside of comfort zones in order to join him in the adventure of extending the life of the kingdom.

Reprinted from a post dated 3/9/06

Highlight: "In other words, just attempting to come out from under 'hierarchical, unbiblical church structures' does not get to the root of the issue.  It's growing out of our unhealthy dependencies so that, as whole people, we can contribute generously to our spiritual communities and world from a place of authentic fullness in Christ while developing vibrant 'one another' relationships."

We westerners tend to think of ourselves as independent people who are learning to live fully our God-given life and potential.  But Kirshenbaum (Finding The True Meaning Of The Events In Our Lives) challenges this:

I think people today have trouble being who they really are because as social creatures we live in a hierarchical world in which we're highly dependent on others.

She suggests that the reason we become dependent on the hierarchical systems we live in is because of our need for approval and our need to keep relationships intact.  She says that we tend to feel that in order to survive and "to get what we need we sometimes have to become less like the people we authentically are."

I have not read this book, I was only provided with some quotes from a friend (John Gray).

However, it is worth looking at the way that hierarchy in our culture has shaped the way we are and has caused us to become comfortable (dependent?) on similar structures within our churches.  Perhaps the problem is not just hierarchy within churches but our own inability to find our authentic identity in Christ.  The result is that out of our neediness we fall into a dependency on external authorities to tell us how to live and act in order to be "approved by" or "okay" with others.  In other words, at some level we are comfortable with hierarchical structures because they meet our need for external affirmation and approval.

As long as we need our approval and identity to be affirmed by externals, we will likely create hierarchical type systems to be part of–even in simple/house church models.  As long as we need our approval and identity to be affirmed by others, we will probably relate wrongly to spiritual authority including genuine, servant, spiritual authority.

The answer, therefore, is not simply to reject forms of church that are hierarchical.  Nor is the answer to reject community all together.

Somehow, we are going to come to the place where whole people, fully alive in God, are able to join with one another in healthy interdependence.  We know that a healthly marriage relationship comes from two healthy people who are not emotionally dependent on each but healthy enough to support, give, love, and care for the other.  Perhaps that is exactly what is necessary for healthy spiritual community: a group of people who are emotionally, authentically whole who are able to fully commit themselves to love, care for, and support others.

In other words, just attempting to come out from under "hierarchical, unbiblical church structures" does not get to the root of the issue.  It's growing out of our unhealthy dependencies so that, as whole people, we can contribute generously to our spiritual communities and world from a place of authentic fullness in Christ while developing vibrant "one another" relationships.