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Fifteen
Theses
By Wolfgang Simson
Wolfgang Simson is of Hungarian, German and Jewish
descent, and is married to Mercy (Indian). They have three sons, and
have recently moved from Madras, South India, to live in Germany.
The Dawn International Network is a vision- and
friendship-based global strategy network, not a headquartered
organization with members or staff. The goal is to facilitate, be
available to and cheerlead national and regional movements for
saturation church planting led by those individuals, groups or
movements God calls and gifts from within each nation or people group
or area for that express purpose.
From his book "Houses that changed the world."
A vision too good to be true?
A church that not only has a message, but is a message.
Being brought up in "Christian" Germany with
churches everywhere, I have always felt that there must be something
exciting about the Church which Jesus started and about which I read
in the New Testament - but somehow I have yet to discover what it is.
I dreamed - together with many friends and colleagues, of a church,
that is as simple as One-Two-Three, yet is dynamic; an explosive
thing, able to turn the world and a neighborhood upside down. The
church as a supernatural invention; endowed with God's gift of
immortality; the way to disciple each other, and to transfer the life
of Jesus to each other. An experience of grace and grapes, love and
laughter, joy and jellybeans, forgiveness and fun, power and - yes,
why not, paper. A church, which does not need much finances, rhetoric,
control and manipulation, which can do without powerful and
charismatic heroes, which is non-religious at heart, which can thrill
people to the core, make them loose their head for joy, and simply
teach us The Way to live. The church which not only has a message, but
is the message; which spreads like an unstoppable virus, infects
whatever it touches, and ultimately covers the Earth with the glory
and knowledge of God. It's power stems from it's inventor, who has
equipped it with the most genius spiritual genetical code - a sort of
heavenly DNA, which allows it to transfer and reproduce Kingdom values
from Heaven to Earth, and transform not only water into wine, but
atheists into fascinated apostles, policewomen into prophetesses,
terrorists into teachers, plumbers into pastors, and dignified village
elders into beaming evangelists in the process. It is like a spiritual
family - organic, not organized, relational, not formal; it has a
persecution-proof structure, matures under tears, multiplies under
pressure, grows under the carpet, flourishes in the desert, sees in
the dark, and thrives on chaos. A church that can multiply like two
fish and five breads in the Hands of Jesus, were the fathers turn
their hearts to the sons and the sons their hearts to the fathers,
were it's people are it's resources, and which has only one name to
brag about, the Lamb of God
God is changing the Church, and that, in turn, will
change the world. Millions of Christians around the world are aware of
an imminent reformation of global proportions. They say, in effect:
"Church as we know it is preventing Church as God wants it." A growing
number of them are surprisingly hearing God say the very same things.
There is a collective new awareness of age-old revelations, a
corporate spiritual echo. In the following "15 Theses" I will
summarize a part of this, and I am convinced that it reflects a part
of what the Spirit of God is saying to the Church today. For some, it
might be the proverbial fist-sized cloud on Elijah's sky. Others
already feel the pouring rain.
1. Church is a Way of Life, not a series of
religious meetings.
Before they where called Christians, followers of
Christ have been called "The Way". One of the reasons was, that they
have literally found "the way to live." The nature of Church is not
reflected in a constant series of religious meetings lead by
professional clergy in holy rooms specially reserved to experience
Jesus, but in the prophetic way followers of Christ live their
everyday life in spiritual extended families as a vivid answer to the
questions society faces, at the place where it counts most: in their
homes.
2. Time to change the "Cathegogue-system"
The historic Orthodox and Catholic Church after
Constantine in the 4th century AD developed and adopted a religious
system, that was in essence the combination of two elements: a
Christian version of the Old Testament temple, the cathedral, and a
worship pattern styled after the Jewish synagogue. This meant that
since then a blueprint for Christian meetings and worship was adopted
as the foundational pattern for the times to follow, which was
expressively not revealed nor ever endorsed by God in New Testament
times: the cathegogue, linking the house-of-God mentality and the
synagogue. Baptized with Greek pagan philosophy, separating the sacred
from the secular, the cathegogue-system developed into the Black Hole
of Christianity, swallowing most of it's own spiritual energies and
absorbing the Church with itself for centuries to come. The Roman
Catholic Church went on to canonize the system. Luther did reform the
content of the gospel, but left the outer forms of "church" remarkably
untouched; the Free-Churches freed the system from the State, the
Baptists then baptized it, the Quakers dry-cleaned it, the Salvation
Army put it into a uniform, the Pentecostals anointed it and the
Charismatics renewed it, but until today nobody has really changed the
system. It is about time to do just that.
3. The Third Reformation.
In rediscovering the gospel of salvation by faith
and grace alone, Luther started to reform the Church through a
reformation of theology. In the 18th century through movements like
the Moravians there was a recovery of a new intimacy with God, which
led to a reformation of spirituality, the Second Reformation. Now God
is touching the wineskins themselves, initiating a Third Reformation,
a reformation of structure.
4. From Church-Houses to house-churches
Since New Testament times, there is no such thing
as "a house of God". At the cost of his life, Stephen reminded
clearly: God does not live in temples made by human hands. The Church
is the people of God. The Church, therefore, was and is at home where
people are at home: in ordinary houses. There, the people of God share
their lives in the power of the Holy Spirit, have "meetings," that is,
they eat when they meet; they often do not even hesitate to sell
private property and share material and spiritual blessings, teach
each other in real-life situations how to obey God's word— dialogue-
and not professor-style, pray and prophesy with each other, baptize,
'lose their face' and their ego by confessing their sins, and regain a
new corporate identity by experiencing love, acceptance and
forgiveness.
5. The church has to become small in order to grow
big
Most churches of today are simply too big to
provide real fellowship. They have too often become "fellowships
without fellowship." The New Testament Church was a mass of small
groups, typically between 10 and 15 people. It grew not upward into
big congregations between 20 and 300 people filling a cathedral and
making real, mutual communication improbable. Instead, it multiplied
"sidewards"—like organic cells—once these groups reached around 15-20
people. Then, if possible, it drew all the Christians together into
citywide celebrations, as with Solomon's Temple court in Jerusalem.
The traditional congregational church as we know it is, statistically
speaking, neither big nor beautiful, but rather a sad compromise, an
overgrown house-church and an under-grown celebration, often missing
the dynamics of both.
6. No church is led by a Pastor alone
The local church is not lead by a Pastor, but
fathered by an Elder, a local person of wisdom and reality. The local
house-churches are then networked into a movement by the combination
of elders and members of the so-called five-fold ministries (Apostles,
Prophets, Pastors, Evangelists and Teachers) circulating "from house
to house," whereby there is a special foundational role to play for
the apostolic and prophetic ministries (Eph. 2:20, and 4:11.12). A
Pastor (shepherd) is a very necessary part of the whole team, but he
cannot fulfill more than a part of the whole task of "equipping the
saints for the ministry," and has to be complemented synergistically
by the other four ministries in order to function properly.
7. The right pieces – fitted together in the wrong
way
In doing a puzzle, we need to have the right
original for the pieces, otherwise the final product, the whole
picture, turns out wrong, and the individual pieces do not make much
sense. This has happened to large parts of the Christian world: we
have all the right pieces, but have fitted them together wrong,
because of fear, tradition, religious jealousy and a power-and-control
mentality. As water is found in three forms—ice, water and steam—the
five ministries mentioned in Eph. 4:11-12, the Apostles, Prophets,
Pastors, Teachers and Evangelists are also found today, but not always
in the right forms and in the right places: they are often frozen to
ice in the rigid system of institutionalized Christianity; they
sometimes exist as clear water; or they have vanished like steam into
the thin air of free-flying ministries and "independent" churches,
accountable to no-one. As it is best to water flowers with the fluid
version of water, these five equipping ministries will have to be
transformed back into new—and at the same time age-old—forms, so that
the whole spiritual organism can flourish and the individual
"ministers" can find their proper role and place in the whole. That is
one more reason why we need to return back to the Maker's original and
blueprint for the Church.
8. Out of the hands of bureaucratic clergy towards
the priesthood of all believers
No expression of a New Testament church is ever led
by just one professional "holy man" doing the business of
communicating with God and then feeding some relatively passive
religious consumers Moses-style. Christianity has adopted this method
from pagan religions, or at best from the Old Testament. The heavy
professionalisation of the church since Constantine has now been a
pervasive influence long enough, dividing the people of God
artificially into laity and clergy, and developed power-based
mentalities and pyramid structures. According to the New Testament (1
Tim. 2:5), "there is one God, and one mediator also between God and
men, the man Christ Jesus." God simply does not bless religious
professionals to force themselves in-between people and God forever.
The veil is torn, and God is allowing people to access Himself
directly through Jesus Christ, the only Way. To enable the priesthood
of all believers, the present system will have to change completely.
Bureaucracy is the most dubious of all administrative systems, because
it basically asks only two questions: yes or no. There is no room for
spontaneity and humanity, no room for real life. This may be OK for
politics and companies, but not the Church. God seems to be in the
business of delivering His Church from a Babylonian captivity of
religious bureaucrats and controlling spirits into the public domain,
the hands of ordinary people made extraordinary by God, who, like in
the old days, may still smell of fish, perfume and revolution.
9. Return from organized to organic forms of
Christianity
The "Body of Christ" is a vivid description of an
organic, not an organized, being. Church consists on its local level
of a multitude of spiritual families, which are organically related to
each other as a network, where the way the pieces are functioning
together is an integral part of the message of the whole. What has
become a maximum of organization with a minimum of organism, has to be
changed into a minimum of organization to allow a maximum of organism.
Too much organization has, like a straightjacket, often choked the
organism for fear that something might go wrong. Fear is the opposite
of faith, and not exactly a Christian virtue. Fear wants to control,
faith can trust. Control, therefore, may be good, but trust is better.
The Body of Christ is entrusted by God into the hands of
steward-minded people with a supernatural charismatic gift to believe
God that He is still in control, even if they are not. A development
of trust-related regional and national networks, not a new arrangement
of political ecumenism is necessary for organic forms of Christianity
to reemerge.
10. From worshipping our worship to worshipping God
The image of much of contemporary Christianity can
be summarized, a bit euphemistically, as holy people coming regularly
to a holy place at a holy day at a holy hour to participate in a holy
ritual lead by a holy man dressed in holy clothes against a holy fee.
Since this regular performance-oriented enterprise called "worship
service" requires a lot of organizational talent and administrative
bureaucracy to keep going, formalized and institutionalized patterns
developed quickly into rigid traditions. Statistically, a traditional
1-2 hour "worship service" is very resource-hungry but actually
produces very little fruit in terms of discipling people, that is, in
changed lives. Economically speaking, it might be a "high input and
low output" structure. Traditionally, the desire to "worship in the
right way" has led to much denominationalism, confessionalism and
nominalism. This not only ignores that Christians are called to
"worship in truth and in spirit," not in cathedrals holding songbooks,
but also ignores that most of life is informal, and so is Christianity
as "the Way of Life." Do we need to change from being powerful actors
to start "acting powerfully?"
11. Stop bringing people to church, and start
bringing the church to the people
The church is changing back from being a
Come-structure to being again a Go-structure. As one result, the
Church needs to stop trying to bring people "into the church," and
start bringing the Church to the people. The mission of the Church
will never be accomplished just by adding to the existing structure;
it will take nothing less than a mushrooming of the church through
spontaneous multiplication of itself into areas of the population of
the world, where Christ is not yet known.
12. Rediscovering the "Lord's Supper" to be a real
supper with real food
Church tradition has managed to "celebrate the
Lord's Supper" in a homeopathic and deeply religious form,
characteristically with a few drops of wine, a tasteless cookie and a
sad face. However, the "Lord's Supper" was actually more a substantial
supper with a symbolic meaning, than a symbolic supper with a
substantial meaning. God is restoring eating back into our meeting.
13. From Denominations to city-wide celebrations
Jesus called a universal movement, and what came
was a series of religious companies with global chains marketing their
special brands of Christianity and competing with each other. Through
this branding of Christianity most of Protestantism has, therefore,
become politically insignificant and often more concerned with
traditional specialties and religious infighting than with developing
a collective testimony before the world. Jesus simply never asked
people to organize themselves into factions and denominations, and
Paul spoke of it as "worldly", the issue of baby Christians. In the
early days of the Church, Christians had a dual identity: they were
truly His church and vertically converted to God, and then organized
themselves according to geography, that is, converting also
horizontally to each other on earth. This means not only Christian
neighbors organizing themselves into neighborhood- or house-churches,
where they share their lives locally, but Christians coming together
as a collective identity as much as they can for citywide or regional
celebrations expressing the corporateness of the Church of the city or
region. Authenticity in the neighborhoods connected with a regional or
citywide corporate identity will make the Church not only politically
significant and spiritually convincing, but will allow a return to the
biblical model of the City-Church, the sum total of all born again
Christians of a city or an area.
14. Developing a persecution-proof spirit
They crucified Jesus, the Boss of all the
Christians. Today, his followers are often more into titles, medals
and social respectability, or, worst of all, they remain silent and
are not worth being noticed at all. "Blessed are you when you are
persecuted", says Jesus. Biblical Christianity is a healthy threat to
pagan godlessness and sinfulness, a world overcome by greed,
materialism, jealousy and any amount of demonic standards of ethics,
sex, money and power. Contemporary Christianity in many countries is
simply too harmless and polite to be worth persecuting. But as
Christians again live out New Testament standards of life and, for
example, call sin as sin, conversion or persecution has been, is and
will be the natural reaction of the world. Instead of nesting
comfortably in temporary zones of religious liberty, Christians will
have to prepare to be again discovered as the main culprits against
global humanism, the modern slavery of having to have fun and the
outright worship of Self, the wrong center of the universe. That is
why Christians will and must feel the "repressive tolerance" of a
world which has lost any absolutes and therefore refuses to recognize
and obey its creator God with his absolute standards. Coupled with the
growing ideologization, privatization and spiritualization of politics
and economics, Christians will—sooner than most think—have their
chance to stand happily accused in the company of Jesus. They need to
prepare now for the future by developing a persecution-proof spirit
and an even more persecution-proof structure.
15. The Church comes home
Where is the easiest place, say, for a man to be
spiritual? Maybe again, is it hiding behind a big pulpit, dressed up
in holy robes, preaching holy words to a faceless crowd and then
disappearing into an office? And what is the most difficult—and
therefore most meaningful—place for a man to be spiritual? At home, in
the presence of his wife and children, where everything he does and
says is automatically put through a spiritual litmus test against
reality, where hypocrisy can be effectively weeded out and
authenticity can grow. Much of Christianity has fled the family, often
as a place of its own spiritual defeat, and then has organized
artificial performances in sacred buildings far from the atmosphere of
real life. As God is in the business of recapturing the homes, the
church turns back to its roots—back to where it came from. It
literally comes home, completing the circle of Church history at the
end of world history.
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