Reflections to a Friend

When I speak of organic church and organic ministries, I am not speaking about house churches. Instead I speak about the organic life of God Himself flowing through His body on Earth wherever His body may be. So that can be in house churches, or it can be in the professional clergy system, or it can be on the job, in school, in the family, or anywhere. In short, everywhere. [Alexander Douglas, "Organic Church", freethechurch.org]

What a wonderful quote from the Free the Church site. Soon afterwards, I went into deep thought and ended up writing my reflections below to a mutual friend.

Dear T–

You write a lot about the Kingdom of God and others write a lot about house churches. So my friend was talking about the heavy emphasis on some sites we’ve been on that have an emphasis on the church. He brought up some valid issues, I think. One of those is that neither he nor I really know what house churches are teaching. We hear a lot about the state of the I/Cs, but then when we go to these forums, we meet these people in house churches and what comes out of their keyboards is insanity. What he said is this:

On [Forum X] we only seem to hear from people who have some form of ministry themselves and from leaders like K–. I don’t recall hearing from people on the receiving end. On [Forum Y] it was a free for all and we’d hear from people who aren’t leaders but who were very sure of themselves and very vocal, and way off track. The discussions I was in on were mainly about refuting doctrinal assertions, not about maturity and spiritual reality.

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His next remarks came from something I wrote once about how “church” didn’t happen by “getting a bunch of people together”. … That is the thinking — that we have to “get a bunch of people together” or “church” isn’t really “church” — not even in house church. And so many of these groups, we suspect are meeting just to meet.

Isn’t the spiritual quality of the group or the gathering a matter of the measure of Christ that is being expressed? Doesn’t that increase less by gifting than by the cross working in an individual whereby they are permanently transformed?

This doesn’t just come about by getting people together, whether they are “centered on Jesus” or not. I’m not really sure what they mean by being centered on Jesus or in love with Jesus anyway. Being “in love”, in our vernacular, comes from feelings of strong affection and admiration for a member of the opposite sex. It’s not an expression I recall any place in the NT, nor even a sentiment expressed in other terms. There is a cultural history to the whole idea. …

So I don’t really know what they mean by it, as applied to life in Christ. Is this a perpetual feeling people have? [Frank] Viola has spoken about “A people who are consumed with God’s eternal passion, which is to make his Son preeminent, supreme, and the head over all things visible and invisible.” Is this about getting excited over the idea of this? I’m not sure at all how they say this plays out in real life or even church life. I’m not going to buy their books to find out.

What I’m not exactly hearing from these quarters is about the fact that God’s purposes come about through resurrection. It’s the resurrection life of Christ in us, which implies there has to have been a death.

Here’s something that I’m puzzling over. I’m not hearing a clarion word about Christ and the meaning of the Cross and about growing unto full stature. We hear about church planting, house church, being focused on Jesus, . . . But does this word of Christ as our life and the role of the Cross have anything to do with talking about the church? Is this the actual foundation that is being laid by those who are church planters, out from which the church is a natural and inevitable result? Or are we facing once again a de facto clergy system, in effect, where there are leaders who remain the leaders and there are followers who remain followers of the leaders?

One thing I seem to see this morning is that one attains leader status by writing books. If you don’t write a book then, no matter what you have to say or how much light you may have, you can’t get a word in with the leaders who write books and their groups. Whether they are humble about it or otherwise, the leaders are the authorities and if you come in with a different emphasis that what they are teaching they will basically dismiss you.

This reminds me that I heard a church planter say that in America there are four or five streams of house church and he fears they are becoming house church denominations. I hear a lot of good from their vocal leaders, but then hear so much junk coming from the practitioners of this method of meeting. It’s like they have a floating foundation — just like everything else in the world these days.

Meanwhile, my friend and I have been talking just between ourselves, lifting things up to God…and lo and behold, there is no confusion, backbiting, dissension, vying for leadership… We think that two or three also constitutes a “church” of some sort since Jesus is in the midst of even two or three. Neither of us had been led into a “house church” as yet. …

Anyway, I haven’t answered my friend appropriately yet because I was so struck by what he said that I needed to mull it over more. But then shortly after this I started thinking about the questions we seem to have most difficulty getting answered and how Jesus, as a man walking this earth, didn’t seem to struggle with this stuff. He pulled up the most amazing answers to things out of the blue. It was then that I wrote a post on my blog called “The Mind of Jesus“, which cracked open an entire new realm of understanding for me.

I began to understand a little more about how Jesus could pull up the answers to difficult questions that He did. After I finished writing “The Mind of Jesus“, I was driving home musing on it all, and realized that a person could see everything in the world different if they could only apprehend how Jesus derived His thoughts. It was only a glimmer then, but after I got home I realized that something had been cracked open to me about the culture wars and our role in society out of all this. I wound up writing “Fishing for the Answer” immediately after. Suddenly, everything began to make sense. I don’t have all answers to everything yet, but I see that there is a better way to approach all questions of life than in the debates.

The result for me at the moment is that I have many questions now that I want to understand through the mind of Christ. In past, I would simply raise questions to God and wait and raise them again and again. I wonder now if part of my lack of discernment may have been that I didn’t fully understand what it meant to have the mind of Christ. Nobody teaches you what that’s like. They just assume you have it.

So far, I seem to be on the right track and I trust that God will keep me there. A lot of what I thought and believed two years ago, I’ve throw overboard. Hard to believe so much could change in a short space.

See you later,
Kathryn