Estimated reading time: 28 minute(s)
KEEPING CHURCH SIMPLE – PART 1B
I then suspected that the problem with the church was a theological problem.
I had only been in Las Vegas for a few months when my fellow Apex leaders and I began sensing some issues brewing beneath the surface of our seemingly “successful” church. These issues would have been easy for us to ignore since people were coming to our church, and offerings were steadily increasing. But we were not satisfied with that. The church had grown to hundreds of people. The crowd dynamic was exciting. But those of us who had first “dreamed her up” in college had begun missing the radical and intimate community we had experienced in college.
We began to realize that somehow we had accidentally experienced what it really meant to be church with each other back in our college days. Back then we cherished our experience of community with each other so much that we had covenanted to start a church together someday. We were largely motivated by an intense desire to keep our community together. Yet in the process of starting and leading this church, we were on the verge of losing our community with one another. Beyond that, to the extent that we still were living in community with one another, only about fifty out of our five hundred people were really connecting to each other in a deep and meaningful way. The others enjoyed our Sunday “show,” but they frequently came and went. Apex attracted many visitors, but although the front door was “wide open” bringing these visitors to our church service, our “back door” was cracked open as well. In response to this, we tried implementing small group programs, but in the end, most of the groups were small and unhealthy and were not effectively closing the back door. We felt a dilemma. How could we really be what the New Testament Church was?
Some of our leaders went out on a week-long trip to visit innovative ministries around the country who were reaching our generation. The ministries we visited used a wide variety of approaches. At one particular stop on our trip, we visited a church that was in the process of decentralizing into a group of smaller churches, or house churches. It was this stop that impacted us the most. What we saw happening in these house churches was exactly what we were missing. We had based our entire ministry on our “show,” which was exciting and good, but missing the essence of what church really was.
In the following months as we processed our discovery, we began reading books from people who were further along on the same journey. Through our reading we saw that what we were contemplating was not just the next great model for church. Instead it was much more radical. What we were contemplating was a better understanding of our theology of church.
At this point in my life I already had a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from CBS&S. I was certainly capable of writing a theologically accurate and Biblically sound definition of “church.” However, what I knew was not reflected in what I practiced. I was living with a blind spot. Though I knew in my head what church really was, I practiced a different idea of what church was, one that was conditioned by my culture. I was living out an understanding of church centered on the assumption that church was a “place where” certain things happened. I knew better, yet I played along!
Apex was different from most of the churches I had known. We had enhanced much of the stuff that happened at our “place.” We had made the music, the teaching, the atmosphere, and even the attitude of the place more authentic and more relevant to our generation and to the emerging culture. Yet we had never challenged the “place where” assumption behind church. We just assumed that church must be a “place where” certain things happened, and we had set out to make the things that happened as good as they could be in our context.
Our culture’s “place where” assumption about church comes out in many of the simple, innocent phrases we commonly use regarding church, such as:
• Where do you go to church?
• What time does church start?
• We don’t go to church anymore.
Our culture has allowed the North American entrepreneurial spirit to control our theology of church. Because of this, our real primary definition of church (though we would never say this) is that church is a non-profit organization! Church in North America has become the spiritual version of the corporation, only with kingdom growth as the bottom line. So when we examine questions like “what is wrong with the church?” we automatically begin by trying to make the non-profit organization more effective. It never even occurs to us to question whether or not the non-profit organization is really the best understanding of what church is.
This leads to logical outcomes. Non-profit organizations (though not bad or good things in and of themselves) must put on excellent programs if they hope to impact the busy, distracted people of their target audience. In order to put on excellent programs, they must hire talented staff people, they must recruit large pools of volunteers, and they must buy or rent first-class facilities. And, of course, in order to hire talented staff and to acquire first-class facilities, non-profit organizations must raise large sums of money. If the church understands itself as a non-profit organization, then it has little choice but to raise large sums of money so that it can hire talented staff and acquire first-class facilities so that it can put on excellent programs so that it can actually impact a busy and distracted target audience. There is no other way to operate if we understand the church primarily as non-profit organization.
The problem is that our theological understanding of church is not primarily that of non-profit organization! Instead, we understand church primarily as being the people of God who are sent out on God’s mission. Once I came to admit this fact, then everything I had previously assumed about church began to rapidly change.
After spending a few years processing this renewed theological understanding of church, I began expressing the essence of church in even simpler terms. Now I would say that church, in its simplest form, is “plural for Christ-follower.” If two or more Christ-followers are together, they are an expression of church. Of course, there is ultimately the universal church made up of all Christ followers in all times and all places. But church often is expressed in more tangible, small meetings between two or more Christ followers.
This understanding was vital to me because I previously defined church by what it did instead of by who it was. Even in our early days of planting house churches, we insisted that a group must do certain things regularly in order to be considered a church. But we would never consider this as a viable way to identify a Christ-follower (the term I am using for Christian). We would insist that a Christ follower is one who follows Christ, or one who has been saved. We would not say that a Christ follower is one who reads the Bible, prays, and uses his spiritual gifts. Though a Christ follower will, in fact likely do these things, it is not the doing of these things that makes one a Christ follower. A Christ follower is identified by who he is (or, stated better, by whose he is), not by what he does. This is true because a Christ follower does not always perform perfectly to a set of standards, yet this does not change his identify as a follower of Christ. Once we accept that a Christ follower is identified by whose he is, not by what he does, then it is possible to see that church (defined as plural for Christ follower) is defined by who (or whose) it is, not by what it does. Two or more Christ followers coming together are church whether they are doing “Christian things” or whether they are watching television. Though a healthy church will do certain things, it is not the doing of these things that determines whether or not it is in fact an expression of church.
What a huge puzzle piece this discovery was for me! It led Apex into a five-year transition. We began to de-centralize our church into a network of smaller communities. As we decentralized, we were not against organizational tools like church buildings, paid church staff, and church programs. We had just come to understand these tools as totally optional and definitely secondary. This understanding changed everything. Although we held on to our weekly large meeting for awhile, we began meeting in smaller communities in each others homes (or wherever) for our primary church meetings. At first we called these smaller communities house churches. After a while, we found the term house church to be confusing, so we opted for more accurate descriptions such as simple church or organic church. However, even these terms confused the real point, which is that what we were becoming was actually just church. There was no need for labels or titles once we understood what we ourselves meant by church.
Our smaller communities began as mini-organized churches meeting in living rooms. We copied many of the elements of larger church in our homes because we did not what else to do. Although a few communities flourished this way, most began discovering that they had to function more like a family and less like an organization if their community was to survive and flourish. As a general rule, the communities that included a meal as part of their meetings were the ones that became healthy communities that functioned like families.
These theological issues of church, which were a key puzzle piece to understanding what was wrong with the North American Church, would cost me and our church many things. First, it cost us many people. Early on in the transition, we lost many people who decided to go back to mega-churches instead of completing our transitional process. Second, my convictions that paid staff persons were not essential to church would eventually cost me my “career” as a paid professional pastor. Third, it cost us our reputation in some circles as some long-time Christians misunderstood our intentions in de-centralizing our church and thought that we were, at worst, seriously misguided and, at best, not very strategic. In the end though, the benefits of a simple understanding of church would far outweigh its challenges as we started really being church more than doing church.
Supplemental Readings:
• Matthew 18:20
• Acts 2:42-47, 4:32-35
• Acts 16:11-15, 22-34
• Acts 18:6-7
• Romans 16:3-5
• The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
• The House Church by Del Birkey (Herald 1988)
• The Church Comes Home by Robert Banks
• The Naked Church by Wayne Jacobsen (BodyLife 1998)
• Houses That Change the World by Wolfgang Simson (OM Publishing 2001)
• Cultivating a Life For God by Neil Cole (ChurchSmart 1999)
• The Organic Church Planter’s Greenhouse Intensive Training Even Participation Notes by Neil Cole & Paul Kaak (CMA 2003)