house church

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.

.
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

I took a person I greatly admire to task yesterday. Well, it seemed to me that he thought people who were not in Messianic house churches were less than they ought to be. He corrected that perception but admitted that he does much admire the Eastern Church against the Western one.

This is actually more understandable to me, given that I often feel the same — except that a few weeks ago, I received an article about the church in China that began to rearrange everything I thought I knew about the Body of Christ. It was a wonderful story about how often the Chinese fast, how long they pray, what miracles they are doing, how they are suffering. They express the opinion that American Christians are proud and don’t ‘get it’. I was prepared to agree and I wanted to rejoice, but something constrained me. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first. I began to put two and two together.

First of all, the Chinese church of the article comes across as typically “conservative and evangelical” even though they believe they are not like Americans. They remind me very much of attitudes I was raised with. “How much suffering can you take for Jesus?” They have one ministry in the Body — evangelism. They fast continually and pray for hours every day. They say this can turn situations around in about 30 days. They are always working, working, working for Jesus. I would like to say this is a good thing — maybe even necessary, given that they still need evangelism in that country and face much hostility. But when they say, “You proud Americans….” and then proceed to talk about all their works…then I have to wonder who’s running things.

I spent three years in a Chinese-dominated group. They had some wonderful things, to be sure. They were also very rigid and legalistic. They believed they understood the Cross (and they were somewhat proud of all this). They believed that part of enduring the Cross was never to complain about anything — even if it was legitimate. It meant, in this particular situation, that leaders sometimes practiced abuse. But that is not to say the people I knew were the same as the people in the article…but the conformity, the “we’ve got it figured out”, “how much can you take for Jesus?” were all embedded in there. I suspect it represents Chinese culture mixed with the excesses of American evangelism which they learned from us.

I began to reconsider the Church. What is a good church and what is a bad church? What is it with all these people pointing fingers at one another with a “you people” attitude? A friend of mine shared that he complained to the Lord once about the deplorable state of the Body. “It is weak, it is beaten up, it has festering wounds,” he said. Then, the Lord spoke and said, “Don’t you ever talk like that about my Body again. My Body is strong, it is robust, it is healthy…”

I considered that later. Now I think it’s right. I wondered how the Lord could abandon His Body for 2000 years to wolves. But He hasn’t. Are heresies, slanders, wounds, sickness, despair, pride, envy, etc. part of the Body of Messiah? Yet there they are in what we consider too casually as His “Body”. Messiah’s Body is perfect. When we eliminate sin and sickness, only that which looks like Messiah remains. That is the Body. That is what Paul meant when he said,

Gal 4:19 My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,

It is why Jesus said:

Mat 5:29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast [it] from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not [that] thy whole body should be cast into hell.

And why Paul said again:

Rom 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate [to be] conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

What I am saying is that the Body is that which is according to the image of His Son. Those things rooted in sin and sickness are not part of His Body.

When I saw that, I also saw something beyond the “Here’s how you do it right” syndrome. God has spoken to His saints in many ways under the worst years of the visible church. Anyone with an open heart, He can speak to and they have the choice to take hold of His words. No one can stop you from being holy — truly, truly HOLY unless you choose not to be. One may be in prison, isolated for some circumstances of family obligation or in a situation where there are no believers in agreement.

If you will look in the Old Testament, there is The LAW. If a person transgressed, they had to make restitution — pay a penalty of some sort and make atonement. But how is it so much went on back then with seemingly no judgment? For instance, why was David allowed to eat the shewbread reserved only for priests, yet Uzzah was struck dead for steadying the ark when the oxen shook it? Why, as a Nazirite who could not come near to any dead thing, was Samson allowed to slaughter hundreds of Philistines with his bare hands and a jawbone? We see on the one hand that the LAW was not to be trifled with and on the other hand, Jesus taught that it was really about the heart.

There are many believers outside of all organization, but are they outside the Body of Messiah?

1Cr 11:29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

If we think the Lord’s Body is weak and ragged and wretched, can we say we discern His Body? If we say this one is “in” the Body because they are part of this thing and another is “out”, do we discern the Body? Perhaps the real reason the Body seems to be according to rules instead of unity is because people do NOT discern the Body. When they do, will there be unity in real time? And then will people say, “How they love one another?”

Pro 22:28 Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.

My exploration into the ancient church roots was well underway when I chanced to make a new acquaintance in Israel, an American Gentile converted to Messianic Judaism. He participates in house church among Jews, Bedouins, the newly regenerated and the not-yet regenerated. I had hoped to understand the Jewish-Gentile branches of the Early Church, and I did not come away disappointed with our discussions of how the early church involved the synagogue, Jewish house churches and later Gentile house churches. House churches gave way to the domus ecclesia, later the free-standing basilica and finally the cathedrals.

My original goal was to capture the real roots and its implications for us in the 21st century. I had already come to understand that my Protestant background had taught me a warped view of church history. I spent many hours poring through books that purported to tell the “real story” of how Rome ruined the Christian faith and how the Reformation brought us closer to the roots again. I knew the Reformation had addressed many church abuses and that later waves of reform had brought forward neglected dimensions of the faith. Nevertheless we were not closer to our roots, as we supposed, but we — accusing the Roman Catholics of foul play — developed theologies around the misconstructs we had inherited.

It was, after all, a “reformation”, not a completely new thing. I did not realize for a long time that the Western Church lives in a bubble and thinks wrongly that its part of the story is the whole story of THE CHURCH. I decided to look much deeper into the Coptic, Orthodox, and other obscure branches for clues. They all have experienced similar issues: Politics, generational apostasies, insularity, enforcement of uniformity. All of these were to be expected, given the warnings of the Apostles. For all this, nothing crippled the Church universally as much as the exchange of the headship of Jesus Christ for the headship of men.

The Apostles preached the ever-present, indwelling, life-giving Spirit by which the Lord would lead His people. Later ministers fashioned themselves as caretakers of God’s people, maintaining a nursery of spiritual children who no longer grew to maturity. The Church, once taken out of the home, became identified by its building instead of its people. The Church returned to the ways of the Gentiles, hiding its light under a bushel as special ministers rose up to filter the words of their God by means of elaborate (sometimes secret) systematic theologies. God’s people no longer trained their ears to hear what the Spirit would say, and the masses of them would no longer be permitted to learn how. Spiritual fathers no longer walked alongside the children they had birthed but entrusted them to a building for spoonfeeding the rest of their lives.

When the Church still gathered round the common table, God was conspicuously immanent in His people. They relied on the Law and the Prophets for their objective grounding; they relied on the Spirit within for guidance. They did not arrogantly cast off all restraint now that they had the in-dwelling Spirit, but more mature members discipled them in the ways of the Spirit until they should come of age to reproduce spiritual children uncorrupted by natural thinking. These are the kind of ordinary people who “turned the world upside down” (Act 17:6).

I believe one clue as to when this happened may be found in the shift from the domus ecclesia to the basilica. (Please don’t neglect to click on these links as the content is extremely important here!) I do not think that the move from house to public building was the prime factor in changing the Church. More likely, it was symptomatic of a change that was already occurring — after all, God may be found anywhere (in theory). In the beginning, He was known to live in the hearts of His people but later it was supposed that if His people did not attend services in a building, their God no longer resided with them. Individuals who resisted this kind of assimilation were thought to have been “cut off” from the Body. God’s will and purpose became a matter of group-think and decisions handed down from on high instead of the collective hearing of God’s people. Within such a framework, later generations would be prevailed upon to fight for kingdoms of this world in order to preserve a kingdom not of this world (Cfr. John 18:36).

I believe that the house church represents a time when God had His natural place in the lives of His people. The domus ecclesia came about as a natural extension of practices already in the home. It began as a legitimate expression of art and architecture in a house church setting. It was the first intentional piece of architecture associated with the Church and was the natural forerunner of the magnificent, experiential designs that came later. The domus ecclesia came about before the Church was socially acceptable, unlike the public buildings that Constantine had constructed later. Whereas the original Church was a matter of the heart and home, the new-think of Constantine recreated it as a public cultural experience. The Church acquired a new identity from a parachurch building when it should have retained its identity in the life-giving Spirit.

In spite of the fact that the Church took on the role of an institution, it must be noted that the glory of the Lord had not entirely departed. Its new structure, respectability and accessibility probably increased the influence of those attempting to repackage its key doctrines to fit better into some previously held belief system. To argue against any kind of orthodoxy, as some still do today, is ridiculous given that there must come a point when one completely misses the whole point of the Messiah. In 325, the Church Fathers hammered out the bedrock of the faith at Nicea so there could be no mistake as to what the Church had always believed. The fact is that the Church did operate from some common assumptions even if it had not bothered to address every device of human concoction. We may deduce that, while a basic orthodoxy existed from the beginning, the Church must have expressed Christ in a diversity unimagined when it still met in homes.

A couple of months ago, I left an onlne forum that I felt could no longer be trusted as a place for seekers to get honest answers about the path to God. A friend invited me to a house church forum, which seemed less about the individual journey and more about the corporate one. I was prepared by then to go totally off-line and see what God was doing in real time; in fact, my enthusiasm for forums had waned dramatically. I was already waiting for the owner of another forum to get his off and running and planned only to visit the new house church forum for the duration of the wait. I kept telling myself that I was not joining any more forums. 

Although the forum was aimed at house church members, I was pleasantly surprised that the theoretical and abstract hadn’t disappeared entirely from the conversation. I had half-expected the topics to center around how to hold meetings and how to prepare organic food. I had not gone the house church route at all after my three-year engagement with a certain house church group ended on unhappy terms. While searching for the next step, I became aware of a contention I knew a little about before leaving the group I was with. It involved a leader of that group and a well-known leader of a popular stream of house church in America. I wasn’t terribly interested in house churches for their own sake anyway. My theology was veering more towards Eastern Orthodox by this time anyway.

What I found on the house church forum surprised me. They were not nearly as conservative as I’d previously thought. Instead, they were inclined to the same apostasy, sneakiness and lack of restraint as the free believing group I’d encountered on the other forum. Someone suggested the need for a moderator on the site and comparisons were made of the ancient Israelites saying, “Give us a King!” “We have the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth,” they countered. But what to do when the “Holy Spirit” guides into rebellion? If the loudest protestors had really read the scriptures, they would have seen that they had fallen into self-serving heresies as in the days of ancient Israel when “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” It was not a king being called for, but judges. In those days before a king, God raised up judges in Israel to keep order. So, in the insanity that ensued, I teetered on leaving online forums altogether. No big loss, as I had not expected to find myself on another one anyway. But out of the blue came a, “Psst! Go here instead. They won’t let it get this crazy.” So I did. Yep…I found myself on yet another forum and quit the house church one. (How’d that happen?)

It turned out to be what I was looking for, to my great shock and surprise. I found myself, once again, the child and not the professor. For several years I have played the role of professor, questioning things, probing, going to sources, publishing findings. But now I was a child, asking many questions about faith communities and discovering that someone had walked a path I had not walked, but which would prove meaningful and, indeed, pivotal for me.

I had long suspected that house churches in America were really streams of conformity to different ideas we’ve already seen. Mostly, I was right about that, it seems. I was not interested in the one or the other stream. I had been there and moved on and had absolutely no interest in taking the same ideas I had found to be incomplete down to a micro instead of a macro level.  I had believed that I would never fit into a house church. But as I pondered this further, I discovered that the secret really isn’t in the house at all. It’s in the spirit. The house is only a holding place where most relationships take place. One may engage in the same committed relationships in settings other than a house.

So my mind has changed about the viability and the legitimacy of the house as a meeting place once again. Some of my theology has also taken a ninety-degree turn. I left town for the holidays, asking God to answer some questions before I returned. Most of them were answered before the trip ended. I found that there are many expressions in the Body, yet we all should have the same mind and speak the same things on a few key items (1 Cor. 1:10).  How does one find a place in the Body when one’s expression may be so different from the prevailing attitudes?

The answer is to start a house church at home. Yet, no one can start a house church except the Lord. I pondered the feasibility of this. I listened to a podcast about the need for the ministry gifts in the Body, especially for that of the apostle in laying a foundation for a house church. I decided in that case, not to start a house church but to pray for a miracle that God would grow one. Instead, I shall open my house in the meantime on Friday evenings for a Shabbat meal. I find house church to be immensely practical. I function best in the evenings and this was a great time to do it. Tomorrow will be my first Shabbat and I have one guest coming.

I will write from time to time about how things are coming along. For more infomation on house churches, I highly recommend these podcasts by Keith Smith. He talks about the foundation of the house churches, the pitfalls, the benefits, and the possibility of so many expressions in the Body of Christ. I am excited about being among those who place the church back at home where it belongs.

It’s beginning to make sense. Yes it does. I’m talking about the strange behavior on a couple of on-line forums I visited recently — one was a “free believer” site and one was a “house church” site. Without getting longwinded about it, both counted persons of anti-institutional church sentiments among their members, some of who were in various stages of de-toxing from traditional church or who had made some measure of peace about their experience.

A curious thing happens when people step out to find freedom. The first instance of refusing to go to traditional church can induce fear as well as giddiness at the prospect of defying an invisible taskmaster. Survival can be heady indeed, and with success come ever-increasing opportunities of putting the toe over the line.  Perhaps there is some kind of law to describe what comes next – I don’t know what it is — we shall call it “SaltSister’s Law” for the time being.  The law goes like this: For every ditch there is a corresponding ditch on the opposite side of an issue which one is likely to fall into while escaping the first ditch. 

The “ditch” in question may manifest in numerous ways. It is a ditch related to anger, to bitterness, to rebellion and — once in it – a person may be as easily deceived as when they indiscriminately swallowed the doctrines of Churchianity. In fact, one way to erase unwanted identification with Churchianity is to get oneself labeled as opposite as possible to what one has been.

Snarls are often heard from the direction of groups and individuals who resent what they perceive as having been duped or backstabbed by the institutional churches, but that should not surprise anyone. After all, many suffer acute distress and pain.  But the saddest part is that so many remain in the ditch of distrust, unforgiveness, frustration — and are thus ripe for further deception when a guru proposes novel ways of looking at the mess. The ditch-jumpers may start to question everything they have ever believed. It’s a complex job, this sorting out of all things. Being sure the guru is of sound mind is another hurdle. What do they have to measure the guru’s teachings and opinions against? Tricky, yes.

They read books…lots and lots of books and articles…and go to conferences. Each anti-institutional movement has its articulators — those who describe what we have each been feeling secretly and couldn’t tell anyone.  There are three main movements in the U.S. in opposition to the institutions — the emergent church movement, the house church movment and the free believers movement. Each has its leaders, each has its safe havens. But these articulators — they can describe the symptoms of the problems, but have they really got the cure? They can lead the flock out but can they lead them through the wilderness into the Promised Land?

Cutting to the chase, each of the on-line forums (free believer and house church) I tested demonstrated itself to be in confusion and without a rule of measure to know where it stood. The search for authenticity has now disintegrated into a wasteland where no one knows what truth is. Some claim that “we see through a glass darkly” and decry those who are sure of anything, though the apostle who wrote those words was very sure about some things.  When you are sure of nothing, then you will swallow anything.

Some of us tested these leaders to see what they stood for. They could not tell us. At least they hemmed and hawed about it, claiming either that they were not theologians or that they were tickled that everyone felt welcome (even at the expense of the testimony of Christ). We wondered what had got into some of these people, for we certainly never took them for universalists or ultimate reconciliationists. Rumor had it later that one of the main movers was exactly that, though if it’s true, he made a great to-do to hide it in a podcast interview. 

What some of us thought were places for church escapees to swap information on walking out this life, we found to be places of such flexibility as to have no particular view on anything. No certain sound was made. Hence, when unbelievers came aboard, they were not merely welcomed, but they converted the believers into things not believed by People of the Way in any century. I believe it was partly naivete on the part of the owners of these sites.

One of them threatened to shut down altogether if people didn’t monitor themselves. When he gave his reasons, I wanted to shout, “Grow up!” I had cut him slack, but when he finally tipped his hand, I saw several reasons he may have had for refusing to deal with major doctrinal controversy and problem behavior. But the biggest thing that stood out, which also stood out in retrospect to the owner of the other site was this scripture:

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. [John 10:11-13]

Perhaps the owners would argue that they are not shepherds, but I beg to differ with them. When they provide a haven and invite people to further their spiritual journey there, they are very much in the position of shepherds (in this case, read “monitor”). When I saw the truth of what had happened, I realized very quickly that in both cases, the sites were run by hirelings — nice, sincere men perhaps — but hirelings nevertheless who have no self-abnegating love for the sheep.

Further, I began to realize that the same aberrations afflict all major anti-institutional movements (or extra-institutional in some emergent church cases). All are rapidly abandoning the faith of Christ in favor of ideas that are flowing into universalism (even though some repudiate this idea, they have unwittingly set the stage for it). All are perfectly willing to toss most of the scriptures out on their head as unauthoritative, yet they are willing to adopt Gnostic writings based on less authority than the scriptures they want to get rid of. Many have adopted a spirit vs. word preference in a misguided effort to know the Person of Jesus Christ, and yet it is that rejected word by which they have even heard of Him! 

The leaders of all three groups are nearly one and the same, each speaking to each others’ audiences – is this a clue? There is one spirit and one apostasy running through these movements. And the people follow the writers of books, but what about the shepherds? Where are they?

[To be continued]