Simplicity

Commune-ity Values (or Redefining “Church” Yet Again….)

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Oy vey!

That’s all I can say after reading The House Church Blog’s post on what the Bible really says about house churches.

As someone who has even considered whether a house church was the “church of last resort” for a couple of square pegs like my wife and I, this semi-new definition of what constitutes a house church should have even Robert Fitts throwing a few of his namesake (minus a “t”—of course.)

A distressing—for all those house church proponents, at least—excerpt:

The implications of Gehring’s insights about the importance of oikos [Greek for “household”—Ed.] are huge! For one thing, it means that moving church from a special church building into a home does not go nearly far enough. The churches established by Jesus and his disciples were not mere weekly meetings. They were literally households—ongoing, 24/7, family-like communities.

Consider 1Cor. 16:19 – “Aquila and Prisca greet you heartily in the Lord, with the church that is in their house (oikos)”. If we read this from our 21st Century Western context, we would (unconsciously?) conclude that once a week a group of Christians met in this couple’s home for church. However, if we read this verse from the 1st Century context, we would conclude something quite different.

To say that we have a “house church” because we meet in someone’s home at 7 pm on Tuesday nights, falls significantly short of the New Testament concept of “house church”.

Yikes! Are we back to the redeemed hippie communes of the 1970’s Jesus People era? Well, from this assessment, it seems we are.

St. Chapelle Stained Glass by Dan EdelenThe perpetually moving target that is the method of some to capture the exact mode of meeting of the first century Church is bothersome. Methodology is great and I applaud those who are going for as pure a methodology as can be understood, but at some point we just need to get on with doing what the Lord commanded: making disciples. If every couple years we rip down the idea of what constitutes a “true” church meeting, then we are only forcing our churches through ever-finer strainers. Who or what comes out of that in one piece is debatable.

Perhaps we are asking too much of people. In the midst of a resurgence in house churches, this is an acid test that few can withstand, I suspect. “Now we have to live in the same house with these people!” is asking too much too early on in this nascent movement.

My wife and I have wondered if the best model is to get a group of six or seven committed Christian families to purchase about fifty acres of land near a smaller town and build a home for each family on that land, along with a larger building that can provide a centralized meeting place. One or two of the families can work the remaining land as a source of food and revenue for the community, not to mention a source for feeding the poor. A portion of the income of each family would be pooled and used to support the community, especially during times of duress (such as medical expenses or job losses), and for basic outreach benevolences. Childcare and homeschooling would also be provided in this model, with every family chipping in. Group meals could also be planned, as well as allowances made for private dinners devoted to the needs of each individual family. The items that many families duplicate (yard care, basic tools, even vehicles) could be pooled in order to save money, while time can be saved not having to work and shop for duplicated items, freeing folks up to spend more time in devotion to the Lord.

Despite this idea of ours, I’m not completely ready to give up on the current model we have used for so long. It may not be perfect, but that imperfection may lie more in our inability to stay true to the Gospel message than in our lack of replicating the Book of Acts’ style of church meeting to a “T.” There is much to be said for the synergy a church of two hundred or more can bring to a locality when all two hundred souls are on the same page spiritually, right with God and with each other. You just can’t get that with any other style of church meeting.

That’s what I am hoping for now in the church we just joined, at least. Should we grow that into something more “organic,” then great. But for now, I’m not going to get flustered by yet another (somewhat) new direction in ecclesiology. You shouldn’t, either.

Occam’s Bible Razor

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This weekend I promised some folks on another site that I would take a look at the idea of the Priesthood in the same manner that I looked at Apostleship. I was tackling my idea that the formal office of priest has passed away and is now only owned by one person, Christ. No mortal human “priest” exists to carry on the role Christ now does for all of us. (Backstory: this is mostly my attempt to counter the growing trend in evangelical circles to make the father in a family some new form of “family priest,” an idea that has no history that I can find in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library or any of the writings of Jonathan Edwards.)

Well, in the course of getting ready for an apologetic examination nonpareil, I ran into a huge problem with the Greek word “presbuteros” (from which we get the word “Presbyterian”, the key meaning being “elder”) which some who support a distinct role of “priest” want to use in the same way that we use “hiereus” (high priest). The “presbuteros equates to a modern NT priestly role” seems so tortured to me that trying to disqualify presbuteros in order to make my point is maddening. Frankly, I’m not prepared to write a dissertation on this, what I saw as a simple subject before it got obfuscated.

Cross on BibleAnd that brings me to my whole point.

Jack Deere once wrote that if you take someone who has no experience with the Bible or Christian doctrine at all and you sit that person down to read the Bible through for the first time, that person is not going to come away from the Bible a cessationist. Now I realize that’s a whole ‘nother topical hornet’s nest, but the idea is what I want to hold onto here. Likewise, Leonard Ravenhill, one of my favorite authors and preachers, once said that one day someone is going to sit down with the Bible and truly believe it and then we’re all going to be ashamed.

Does Occam’s Razor apply to the Bible?

William of Occam stated quite simply:

Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.

Or in 21st century English:

The simplest answer for explaining something is most likely to be true and is to be preferred.

Perhaps we need to recover this same perspective when it comes to reading the Bible.

Now this is not to say that we can strip the depth of meaning out of the Scriptures. No one man can take in all the breadth of knowledge and beauty the Bible contains. But what if the simple, first-through reading of a passage of Scripture is closest to its true meaning? Some of our most debated doctrines today seem quite tortured when theologians start beefing about Greek verb declensions. Why not just read a passage and let the very first thoughts you get about it serve as the basis for belief? Does the Holy Spirit demand that we parse verb forms in order to get to “the real meaning” of the Bible?

The older I get the more this bothers me. I think Deere may be right. It’s only after most new Christians are exposed to us “mature” believers that they start to temper their initial excitement at reading the word of God. “Oh, so it doesn’t really mean that?” is not the kind of attitude we should be encouraging in spiritual beginners. I know I get tired of hearing some people try to dissect John 14:6 by using tortured logic to say that Jesus isn’t really saying He’s the only way to be saved. I’m sorry to say this to the text-floggers out there, but I think that is exactly what He is saying. Doesn’t a first reading of that passage say that? Don’t you have to contruct an elaborate deconstruction of that passage in order to get it to say something entirely different from what it seems to say on a first reading?

I’ve noticed that several apologetics blogs are starting to emerge. That’s great. We need good apologists. But I also think that perhaps we are losing the basic truth of “the first read.” I know that I wish I could strip away twenty-eight years of “Bible learnin'” to be able to read a text with a first-timer’s eyes. Maybe then I could be the man of Ravenhill’s aphorism and go on to be far more than the critics would contend I could be.

So all I ask is, why are we making it all so difficult? Anyone else here desiring an Occam’s Bible Razor? (I hear Family Christian Bookstores is looking to sell a titanium one for $14.98, but don’t quote me on that!)

The Curse of Monasticism Reborn

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No sooner do I get done writing a far-between post noting how my posts have been far-between while I work on finishing up my novel, and offering up a link elsewhere to ponder just to prove the point, God grabs ahold of me and makes me write this.

I wonder if we are creating a new monasticism.

The Reformation drove a stake into the separatist mentality that is the core of monasticism, proving that the Gospel belongs out among the people, out in our communities, villages, towns, and cities. It was a call to leave the ivory towers and get one's hand dirty out in the "real" world. And not only that, it called Christians to be pillars in their communities, villages, towns, and cities, to have a real presence that brought Christ into the marketplace of ideas.

The True Light cannot be hid in us who cherish Him, so the Reformers told us to get out from under our bushels and shine. They taught that Christianity was not to be a religion of disconnection, but a relationship with Christ who gathers us in a Body and dwells amid that Body—a Body centered in our local communities.

This is why I wonder about the current moves going on in the American Church. There is a gung-ho attitude toward small groups, house churches, and select meetings of a few outside the large church assemblies. It is good that we think about those types of groups and consider their impact.

However, in a day and age when fractionalization and withdrawing from community are the norm are we Christians missing the bigger picture by de-emphasizing large assemblies while heaping praise on smaller groups?

My wife and I spent much of this year searching for a new church. More than three years ago, we moved an hour's drive away from our old church while continuing to go there. The outcome of this was that we did not plug into the village we lived in because our church was fifty miles away. Having one foot in the community we lived in and one in our community of faith many miles away meant that neither found a connection to the other. In the end, both were diminished.

Yet it is more than just a distance issue. It may also be a numbers issue. The church that we have landed in near our home has about four hundred people in it. That winds up being four hundred connections into our local village. That's four hundred reinforcements to a presence in town AND four hundred reinforcements to our community of faith.

A small group cannot do that. A house church cannot do that, either. When we wonder why we feel disconnected in our own communities, perhaps this is why. Neglecting our presence in our towns and villages in numbers that reinforce rather than divide is ushering in a new monasticism. We find ourselves cut off from the world at large and also cut off from the Church at large. Dwelling in this limbo, we gut our effectiveness not only to reach new people with the Gospel, but to enjoy relationships with a wide variety of people, relationships that have Kingdom potential ranging from a simple "God bless you!" to the clerk at the local grocery store to a deep discipleship relationship with a new believer at our church.

Synergy is also lost. It is one thing to cast the seed everywhere we go, but how much more effective can we be when we repeatedly cast it right where we live? The compounding of this synergy repeated four hundred times every day by the folks in our new church can also not be overlooked. A new monasticism cripples this kind of synergy, diluting its effectiveness.

One of the first verses I ever felt God illumined in me is this one:

As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
—Isaiah 55:10

God's word does not return void. In some people it is like rain, soaking into the soil of a barren heart, that rain finally giving nourishment to the seed there. In others, it is like snow, piling up and up until something warms it, causing it to melt and seep into the soil.

When we Christians spread ourselves thin or withdraw into little groups, the storm is lost, and the blizzard is reduced to a mere frost.

There is something to be said for churches between two hundred and a thousand people. A church that size allows us to know the ones with whom we fellowship. It also can take a people of one mind and cause a storm in the towns and villages in which we live. And lastly, it affords us connections into those same towns and villages that allow us to be a vital part of their livelihood rather than just listing them as a place where we get our mail.

People wonder why we feel disconnected from the people who live right next door to us. They ask why our churches seem to be so ineffective, too. Perhaps our monastic mentality is the cause.

God helps us break out of our ivory towers and get out among the people, both those who know the Lord and those who hope one day to know. Let us be a vital presence in our local communities, bringing the Gospel Light into all we do. And let us also be the beneficiaries of the connections we forge immediately around us, to our neighbors, and to the community at large. Always for Your glory and Your Kingdom. Amen.