December, 2008:

( The following is a response to a BodyLife article by Wayne Jacobsen that can be found here )

I have not read Barna’s Revolution, but I know that in recent years he has tended to play down the big/attractional church model and promote the house/missional church model instead. I think both forms can work and would say, with Ed Stetzer, that: “I am pro-house church (largely because I believe God uses all kinds of churches). I want house churches to ‘work.’”  (link to Stetzer article addressing both Barna’s book and the house-church movement in general here )

From the same Stetzer article:

“New biblical forms [of church] need to be welcomed and affirmed, particularly those that evidence more of the true community that many are finding in alternative faith communities. We need to bless all forms of scripturally-sound churches. Why? Because the church is essential. The church is not the center of God’s plan– Christ is. But the church is central to the plan of Christ for His name and fame to be more widely known.”

The writer the BodyLife article (Wayne Jacobsen) has a bit of an “anti-organization” bias and almost uses phrases like “organized religion” as a pejorative term. I would like to hear him define a bit more clearly what he means when he mentions “the religious systems that permeates[sic] much of our congregational life.”

It seems to me that organization is not the enemy of effectiveness, it is the facilitator of it (although it ceases to be a facilitator when it leaves no room for spontaneity or a movement of the spirit.) On the flip-side, spontaneity apart from organization or structure often leads to chaos and disorder.

Neither organization not spontaneity are bad things when they co-exist. Divorced from each other, however, organization leads to death and spontaneity leads to disorganized distraction (I am thinking here of excessively charismatic gatherings). And I think this is the crux of the problem, we tend towards one or the other – either structure or spontaneity – when we should be working hard at having both.

Where organization and spontaneity meet, a relational culture results. This is a culture that can exist in the smallest house-church as well as the largest mega-church. This culture consists of cells of people who know each other well, coexisting and working in cooperation with other similar cells who perform a different function in the body.  A large church with this type of culture is more like a network of these cells than the one amorphous blob that many would like to say is the only option for large-church culture. (to put some perspective on this… I was always a bit of an anti-big-church guy… until I became a member of one and saw this culture in action)

Here are some questions I have asked house-church advocates:
What if it becomes too ‘successful’?
What if you start with 10 people in a living room and that quickly blossoms 100 and then 1000?
Do you put a cap on membership?
Is there an attendance figure where, if you get above it, the house church becomes the very thing it’s trying to be an alternative to?

I ask these questions not to disprove the value of the model, but because I sincerely wonder about them and because I believe the jury is still out on the enduring effectiveness of this model. Dan Kimball recently wrote an excellent article on Missional vs. Attractional church forms here . If you know Dan Kimball, you can appreciate that he is not from the ‘old guard’ trying to protect an antiquated system as he himself has been often criticized as a planter and pastor of a non-traditional church.

Jacobsen is too narrow in his statement that “‘assembling together’ is not a matter of attendance at a meeting, but the joining of lives in a common journey.” It is both, as Hebrews 10:24 and 25 states “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”  It is not merely attendance at a meeting (regardless of size), but it is certainly part of it.

A good article in all… although I have responded to more points I disagreed with than ones I agreed with.

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