Authentic Means Real

Not good enough.

As a leader in a house church planting ministry, I so wanted to like this book! Frank Viola has been writing in favor of a more organic understanding of church life for years. Observers have often pointed out similarities between his books and some of mine. I see the overlap as well, along with some differences, which should be clear from my most recent book, Organic Disciplemaking. [The need for, and nature of disciplemaking was one area of solid agreement!] Readers like me who share the authors’ desire for an organic, New Testament-style church will experience real excitement while reading some parts of this courageous critique of the modern institutional church. But I’m afraid the work is seriously flawed.

We’ve all seen steer wrestling at rodeos. The cowboy seized the horns of the steer and twists his head, eventually forcing the hapless animal in a direction he never wanted to go. Some interpreters steer-wrestle the Bible and history to fit pre-conceived views of the church. I’m not denying that many, and maybe most of their claims are true. But mixing in exaggeration and selectivity can seriously distort the picture.

I am on their side of the river, and I’m recommending this book, even though I think they over-reached on a number of their points and weakened their case as a result.

Buildings: They show how the concept of church buildings as holy places originated and drew most of its content from pagan influences. They focus on the major formalism added at the time of Constantine, but in fact, church buildings were around, and were viewed as holy houses of God well before Constantine. He did greatly expand the acceptance and the number of “churches” throughout the empire. They then over-reach to the extreme of implying that using buildings at all is pagan and alien to the New Testament.

Their suggestion that the church could just rent or borrow a building like the schoolroom of Tyrannus or Solomon’s portico for “special occasions” doesn’t match New Testament precedent. Paul didn’t rent the schoolroom for a special occasion, but as a base of ministry that he carried on “daily.” (Acts 19:9) Solomon’s portico was in regular use also. Acts 2:46 says, “Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart.” Why should we conclude that large venues like this were for special occasions only, when they appear in the same sentence with things like breaking bread and house church meeting? Outdoor venues like that work well for warm-climates like Jerusalem. It wouldn’t work so well where I live in Ohio.

The point is that the poisonous part—viewing buildings as the “house of God” and auditoriums as “sanctuaries” (which means “holy places”)—should be decried without discrediting the whole argument by exaggerating. The authors think any ownership or regular use of buildings is bad, and steer-wrestle the scriptures to suit their preconceived view.

Read on to Part 2

Filed under: Barna, Pagan Christianity, Viola, church history, discipleship, early church, history by Dennis McCallum
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Read Part 1

George Barna and Frank Viola have written a new book, Pagan Christianity? Exploring the roots of our church practices. In part 1 I explained why I’m unhappy that they took valid points and pressed them to extremes that undermined their thesis. In that post, I discussed their coverage of church buildings.

Their coverage of buildings was similar to their work on church leadership, the subject of this post.

They start out with an important point–that the early church developed the unbiblical concept of clergy and laity–a concept that has been catastrophic in the history of the church. They trace the development of this concept through the second century and into the third by which time the notions of the clergyman as a priest and the monarchical bishop were well-entrenched.

The only addition I would suggest is more discussion on why some of the early fathers went so extreme in insisting that people listen to nobody but the bishop or those authorized by the bishop (priests). I don’t accept that it was simply a case of them imitating Roman pagan culture. I think the main reason was that they were terrified at how rapidly false doctrine was spreading through the church. Gnosticism and related teachings posed a real threat to the future of Christianity in the second century. But instead of teaching people why it was messed up and how to refute it from scripture, the leadership tried to silence the voice of gnostics by outlawing their teaching in favor of approved, or official teachers. This same faulty strategy for maintaining doctrinal purity has been used down through history and up to the present day.

But on the whole, Barna’s and Viola’s coverage of this unfortunate development and the damage it did to the body of Christ was good. Once ministry came to be viewed as the province of the clergy, Christianity became a new religion, unrecognizable from a biblical perspective. As I argued in Organic Disciplemaking, one horrific result was that disciple making in the New Testament sense diminished to the vanishing point. Only clergy would be discipled from then on, so 99% of all Christians were left to languish in spiritual ignorance and immaturity. The notion of practicing your spiritual gifts and developing your own ministry disappeared from Christian history for almost all Christians during this period.

Another awful result was the complete loss of accountability for church leaders. People today are generally unaware that the Bible was taken out of people’s hands very early in the history of the church. Reading and interpreting the Bible was reserved for the clergy. Increasingly, people had no way to know whether the things their priest or bishop said were of God or whether they made it up. Once this happened, anything was possible. Back in New Testament times, God had prescribed that prophets should speak, and the rest should “pass judgment.” (1 Cor. 14:29) Without access to the Bible, this practice disappeared very early in the church’s history.

So this section of the book was off to a great start, like most of their chapters. Then came the over-reaching and the extreme conclusions.

Instead of leaving it that the church never should have designated clergy as some special class who were alone capable of interpreting scripture and preaching, they advance a mode of church life virtually devoid of human leadership! When discussing the early church, they give their definition of a New Testament meeting straight out: “What do we mean by a first-century-styled church? It is a group of people who know how to experience Jesus Christ and express him in a meeting without any human officiation.” They add that “the one who plants a first-century-styled church leaves that church without a pastor, elders, a music leader, a Bible facilitator, or a Bible teacher… those believers will know how to sense and follow the living, breathing, headship of Jesus Christ in a meeting. They will know how to let Him invisibly lead their gatherings.” (234)

Viola describes going to a house church today where people show up, begin singing, someone else sings and they hold hands, someone shares what God showed them that week, someone else shares, and that’s it. The only Bible teaching is a guy standing up and reading some scripture and showing how it glorifies Christ for a couple of minutes. Someone else stands and adds some thoughts. More singing, poems, sharing, and “none of this was rehearsed, prescribed, or planned.” (78,79) They think if a group “has a leader present who is the head of the meetings… such meetings are directed by a human head who either controls or facilitates it.” Instead, meetings should be “without human control or interference.” (266)

As someone whose mother was Quaker, I fully understand the longing some feel for spontaneous worship as the mark of authenticity. This is exactly how Quaker worship times work. I also was at a ton of meetings like this back in the Jesus movement, and more recently when visiting house churches in the U.S. But ask yourself, “Why can God only lead after the meeting starts, rather than beforehand?” Just because someone prepares their teaching or preaching doesn’t imply that God isn’t leading, as these authors repeatedly claim. And this assertion—that only impromptu speech is spiritual—is so extreme and unbiblical that it undermines the whole case against formalism. Note: they aren’t just saying that spontaneous meetings are okay, they argue that this is the ONLY valid kind of ongoing meeting for churches. Stay tuned for why this is wrong.

Yes, the Bible portrays a interactive meeting with all using their gifts in 1 Cor. 14. but it never says the meeting has no leader, and other portrayals of meetings in the New Testament definitely show a leader present, and planned preaching and teaching, as I will show in my next post.

I’ve attended these kind of house churches, and I find them boring, often strange, overly subjective, uninformative, and sometimes narcissistic. Being spontaneous doesn’t translate into spirituality, and planning doesn’t equate to ity. These are simply false dichotomies, and extremism. Instead, meetings should have both planned parts (like teaching and preaching) and spontaneous parts, and there’s nothing contradictory or wrong in that.

The house church movement associated with Viola holds that human leadership violates the leadership of the Holy Spirit.This movement rejects the validity of human leadership in a way that is every bit as alien to the New Testament as many of the other features detailed in this book. From one end of the Bible to the other, God uses human leaders. Early church members are repeatedly called on to respect and follow their leaders. (Heb. 13:7; 17; 1Cor. 16:15,16, etc.) By over-reaching in this way, Barna and Viola undermine the credibility of their own argument, which is a shame because these are points that need to be made.

Read on to Part 3

Filed under: Pagan Christianity, church leadership, pastors, preaching by Dennis McCallum
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While reading and critiquing Pagan Christianity, I saw that one of the sources in their bibliography was a book that was popular in some circles in the 80’s called The Torch of the Testimony by John W. Kennedy.

The book came to my attention at the time because it was making the rounds in my own group, Xenos Fellowship. The book argues the thesis that the Spirit wants to operate His church based on Scriptural authority and direct guidance, but that man always replaces these with his own institutional framework designed to preserve his power and control over others. He argues that throughout the history of the church, God has again and again broken out of the old wine skins in underground New Testament style lay-led movements.

Such a thesis contains much truth, and is very tantalizing to readers from a lay-led New Testament “no frills” group like Xenos. I’ve written on the subject myself in Organic Disciplemaking and other essays. The question that must be asked in the case of this book is whether Kennedy is a faithful teacher of such an important point. I read the book, and became immediately alarmed that a piece like this could cause serious damage in our church unless carefully critiqued. I felt the need to warn our people that when Kennedy teaches church history, he is not true to the record. These were some of my comments:

Kennedy’s coverage of the themes of Church History are objectionable for two very important reasons. First, his work contains no documentation. A book of this type, which refers to the teachings of historical figures not familiar to the modern reader should be carefully and fairly documented in order to deserve any credibility whatsoever. Apart from such documentation we are really left with the claim of the author that certain things are true, without any proof. In this case the saying of the ancients applies, “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.” (“That which is offered without proof may be rejected without proof.”)

Secondly, Kennedy is repeatedly and flagrantly one-sided in his coverage of history. He characterizes various movements and leaders either as eager servants of Satan, or as servants in the very image of Christ, whereas the truth is rarely so black and white. The figures we really meet with in Church History are much more of a mixture of good and evil than Kennedy admits. Therefore his work lacks balance and hence ultimately, truth. A few examples will demonstrate this lamentable feature in his work.

Of the early father Origen, nothing critical is offered. He is praised for having “particularly clear idea of the nature of the church. The church, he held, was spiritually based, and all those who were recipients of divine life belonged to it.” Kennedy goes on to say that “It should not worry us that some of Origen’s views were later stigmatized as heresy… few men particularly used of God…[who have not] been called heretics.”1

Unfortunately, while this may be somewhat true, Kennedy fails to mention that Origen actually was heretical on several key points. He was affected heavily by neo-platonism.2 He taught that humans existed before their physical birth, and that sins committed in the previous life had led to their imprisonment in physical bodies. Origen was also a leading exponent of the allegorical hermeneutic which has generated more heresy than almost any other thing. He taught that even Satan will be saved.3

On the medieval “Cathari” protesters, Kennedy points out that they were iconoclastic, and anti-sacramental. However, he fails to mention that they were Manichaen-style dualists who believed in two gods. Their resistance to icons and ritual was not based on scriptural reasoning, but on a philosophical dichotomization of the physical and the spiritual.4

On the Waldensians, Kennedy recounts their reversion to scripture as the source of authority for the church, but fails to mention that they were essentially Roman Catholic in their doctrine on other points. He also naively accepts the claim of fourteenth century Waldensians that their movement began at the time of Pope Sylvester in the 300’s AD—a position that is absent from all early Waldensian literature, and is not accepted by any competent modern historians.5

Kennedy’s evaluation of the Montanist movement in the late second century includes the thought that “dependence upon learning… was slowly paralyzing the church’s life.”6 These dichotomizations between knowledge and form on one hand, and spiritually on the other are so common throughout the book, that they spoil what good historical work was done. As a result, The Torch of the Testimony becomes, not a balanced recounting and analysis of church history, but a one-sided and simplistic sermon.

Even though we may find ourselves in sympathy with some of the positions argued in this book, the absence of balance, and the dishonest omission of important contradictory material place the book, in my view, in the category of irresponsible historical polemicizing. This book should not be read without critical examination of every position offered. Those who are not in a position to check Kennedy’s work would probably do well to stick with a more main-stream historical survey such as Lauteurette or Gonzalez.

Filed under: Barna, Historical research, John Kennedy, Pagan Christianity, The Torch of the Testimony, Underground church, Viola by Dennis McCallum
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