15 Theses For A New Reformation
The House Church Network
By Wolfgang Simson
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Houses That Change The World
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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