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The Emmanuel Research Review is a publication of the Emmanuel Gospel Center, and features articles, papers, resources, and information that we believe are helpful and relevant to urban pastors, leaders, and community members in their efforts to serve their communities effectively. |
Introduced by Brian Corcoran
Research Associate, Emmanuel
Gospel Center
Managing Editor, Emmanuel Research Review
The New England region and its churches are famous for their history. Across Massachusetts and in Boston, there are numerous, traditional, white-steepled church buildings that both memorialize the past and house active congregations. New Englanders will proudly remind you that people have gathered for hundreds of years at some of these places. Revivals in which hundreds were dramatically saved or inspired to serve as missionaries happened in some of these places, while other congregations might claim a famous fiery preacher or political leader as a former member. So what happens when someone comes along and questions the traditional pastor-pulpit-pew-people church as we know it in New England? Last month, Wolfgang Simson, author of Houses That Change the World (1999), and soon to be released, The Starfish Vision (2008), was in Boston speaking on what he and others call “House Church” or “Simple Church” and the nature of apostolic ministry. Wolf’s reflection on western church history suggests five overlapping and escalating phases since 1945 within which he observes a “progressive recapturing” or rediscovery process regarding the church and its mission. He continues to suggest that there is a moment of opportunity for the “return of the church towards its own apostolic roots and the reemergence of organic, home-based forms of Christianity.” However, Wolf also cautions, a deeper, more radical expression of the church as found in the scriptures may appear somewhat different than what many Christians have become accustomed to.
In this issue of the Emmanuel Research Review we have grouped three articles that restate the essence of Wolf’s talk last month: “Progressive Revelation in Mission,” Wolf’s reflection on the history of the western church from 1945 to present; “15 Theses,” from Houses That Change the World; and “Spider or Starfish,” an article suggesting a new organizational approach for the church.
“As form follows function, my life and existence is best described by the vision that has me. As a result, I have three passions: the reshaping of the Church of Jesus Christ to accurately reflect the design of its author and King; an economic reformation by returning to Kingdom Economics, the messianic principles of money and work; and a reformation of unity, that will happen as the Body of Christ repents of its human fragmentization and returns to its original design, the smashingly attractive Bride of Christ.” —Wolfgang Simson
Be sure to check out additional resources at the end of the article for futher study. As always, we welcome your feedback!
by Wolfgang Simson
If church is about mission, and if God is the true author of mission, then what the Spirit says at various moments in history to the churches is highly relevant for missions. “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches,” the book of Revelation admonishes us (chapters 2 and 3). As Paul says that we all “know in part,” I observe a progressive recapturing of the revealed truth of God in our recent global missions history. It is as if God is opening new doors of old revelation again and again, maybe even allowing us to break biblical seals guarding age-old mysteries until the end of days. Those who are inquisitive enough to enter these doors find themselves in new realms of understanding, see new things, and are so given a new vantage and rallying point from which to re-interpret—and re-challenge—current Christian leadership to move into the prophetic directions of the day.
In an age that has been termed the Age of Modern Missions (1780-1945), starting with William Carey, the Western Church exported and translated the Gospel to other languages and cultures, complete with its own belief, Episcopal, and financial systems. The results were mainly foreign, transplanted national church-beachheads and imported denominations with headquarters mainly in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, and Italy. It created both an acceptance as well as a rejection of a Western, imposed religious system. Much of this age came to a grinding halt at the end of the second World War in 1945, as the main missionary sending nations, the missionary superpowers of the world, were involved in a gruesome war, throwing bombs at each other in plain sight of a pagan world.
From 1945 onwards, I observe five distinct pieces of revelation that the Spirit of God seems to have dropped into the Church. Each of them has generated a new era and a new phase that, like steps on a staircase, lead up to the next level. Each phase brought something vitally new to the table, and after the era was gone, it does not mean the emphasis was gone and the movement faded, but that a new emphasis was now on God’s agenda, a new class was on, whereby the last emphasis of the Spirit of God was to be solidly built into the entire equation.
Here is a quick run-down of those five important phases of missionary revelation until today. Each one had its own forerunners, organizations—even fakes, distortions of the true original that were able to burn some of the ground before the real thing even came onto the scene. Each phase had a few original voices and pioneers—and thousands of healthy echoes and followers. The five phases, which overlap each other again and again, are:
1) Age of Evangelism (1945-1978)
After World War II, ideologically driven by personalities like Billy Graham, evangelistic (“parachurch”) organizations like Operation Mobilization (OM), Youth With A Mission (YWAM), The Navigators, CFC, Youth For Christ (YFC), etc., emerged. These organizations greatly molded the shape of Christian ministry and mission. In an age of church apathy and self-concern, evangelistic firebrands carried the torch of reaching the world, “one soul at a time.” The main methods and means for this were crusades, tracts, door-to-door visiting, and evangelistically used media within a concept of evangelism & follow-up, or “outreach and in-drag.”
As this was a clearly modern and highly packaged, individual, and compartmentalized approach to missions, its influence began to wane and ceased to be the cutting edge in the mid-70s. However, it served as a great wake-up call of God to a sleepy church, and where people were not challenged by the evangelists’ dramatic messages, they at least felt the tug of the Spirit of God in some areas. And if some churches did not respond positively to the evangelistic challenge that was laid at their doorstep, they at least were forced to look into it for another reason: many churches were both drained of their most enthusiastic people and, probably most worrisome, a significant amount of money that went away from the churches’ budget into evangelistic “things.”
2) Era of Church Growth (1955-1990)
Donald McGavran was one of the pioneers of a revolutionary new approach that would soon mold the thinking and policy of many old and new movements of God: Church Growth. His book The Bridges of God (1955) started a new school of thinking: how to win, keep and grow people into a large church, and how to organize a church for growth. This became the core aspect of the “Fuller School of World Missions” in Pasadena, California, and led to the emergence of national, continental, and global church growth societies and the worldwide propagation of growth-oriented church models like those by David Yonggi Cho and others.
Technically speaking, the era still lives on in the form of the more church-health oriented Natural Church Development movement developed by my friend Christian Schwarz, and some rather superficial remnants of this movement as so-called seeker-oriented church models and some emergent church developments. Although the physical growth of existing churches is not really the way to win the planet, and can lead to churches suffering of “membership bloating,” being trapped into their own success stories with all the hype that goes with it, growth is an important Kingdom issue to grasp. And as such, the Church Growth movement has been further plowing the ground, preparing the global Church for the next message of the Spirit of God to the churches.
3) Age of Church Planting (1980-2001)
The move from addition-oriented Church Growth (“how can I grow my church?”) to multiplication-based church planting was only logical; however, it required a huge step for many. For most Christians, the concept of new wine into new wineskins required a new interpretation and paradigm of tradition, methodology, training, and outlook. The word Church Planting itself is a relatively new term that can be associated to the original pioneering Baptists and Methodists of old, and, more recently, to people such as Bob Logan or English church pioneers Roger Forster, Terry Virgo, Gerald Coates, the early days of John Wimber, and others. In the 1980s, Church planting was popularized by C. Peter Wagner’s catchy quote, “Planting new churches is the most effective evangelistic methodology known under heaven.” Writers like David Garrison recently made it abundantly clear that church planting is far bigger than a new evangelistic method, but literally the only way ever to see the Great Commission fulfilled.
Aided by both the retreat of colonialism and the development of new and mainly charismatic independent churches, church planting became the new cutting edge. However, it quickly ran into a brick wall: the inbuilt inabilities of the hierarchical command structure and spiritual architecture of classical denominations, with its traditional Bible school, pastor/teacher-based approach of leadership development, complete with its obsession with church buildings and consumer- and program-oriented finance concepts. This severely crippled the original huge expectations and served as a healthy reality check, especially in the early 90s. One of the developments that put church planting on steroids, so to speak, was the Saturation Church Planting movement, most tangibly through the DAWN movement since 1984. Jim Montgomery and the Dawn movement he started were addressing the question of whole-nation church planting projects (the Greek word ethne—peoples—of Matthew 28:18-20 being interpreted mainly as “nation states”). Based on empirical missionary research and intercessory prayer this leads to corporate, denominationally based national church planting strategies.
Church Planting here was not an end in itself, but a means to fill and saturate whole nations with the presence of Christ as it was expressed in local churches. The Dawn Movement found its echo in almost all nations, and strongly influenced many of the young leaders with both an end vision mindset (rather to finish the task of discipling all nations in our time than to build your new Megachurch) and a missional mind: rather than thinking centrifugal (expand the own church empire around a small pope), think centripetal: only a viral, multiplying movement will ever be able to finish the task Jesus has given us.
4) House/Simple Churches (from 1996 on)
Historically developed in areas specifically outside of a direct Western missionary jurisdiction (like China and Vietnam), a new phase of missions started when God began to reveal, mostly simultaneously to a number of people worldwide, that our historic and axiomatic assumptions about church-as-we-know-it (CAWKI) being church-as-God-wants-it (CAGWI) were wrong. We need to go back to the Book and rediscover New Testament forms and patterns of Church, which were mainly networks of house churches, by which I mean much more than CAWKI-meetings temporarily happening in homes. One of the questions that drove this movement is: what kind of churches would not only sacramentalize (what churches do that do not disciple—they make sure everyone is christened, baptized, receive communion, enrolled, and has a place reserved in the churchyard) but would truly disciple a population? This quality question connected with the missional challenge of today and invited the seemingly lost potential of millions of Out-Of-Church-Christians—people who leave the traditional church in search for God. Prophetically foreseen and described by writers such as Robert Banks or Met Castillo, it was in 1996 when probably the first intentional house church planting movement outside rather closed nations like China, Vietnam, or Cuba, was initiated by Dr. Victor Choudhrie in North India. In later years, other initiatives followed, initiated by IBRA Radio, a Swedish Pentecostal Radio ministry, who started an immensely successful house church planting ministry in the Arab World, or apostolic persons like Bruce Carlton, inside, but clearly on the fringes of existing mission agencies like the Southern Baptists’ IMB (International Mission Board). First greatly ridiculed by traditional churches in almost all nations, the house church movement has grown to many hundreds of thousands of churches in an amazingly short period of time, and is, at this point, not only the main harvesting tool God seems to use in Muslim nations like Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Indonesia, but making its presence felt in many Western nations as well.
Apostolic church planters like Neil Cole or Tony Dale, Florian Bärtsch or Bernard Sanders, Victor John and David Watson, Noralv Askeland, Peter Wenz, or Jonathan Pattiasina are leading the way, and many in traditional churches who were watching are not laughing any more. In summer of 2006, we know of about 300,000 house churches (outside China), and, if George Barna is right in his predictions, published in his book Revolution, it will take but a few more years for house churches to become not only an extremely vital harvesting instrument of God, but quite simply the new mainline church, replacing CAWKI with something introduced to the mindset of most Christians only a few years ago. Aided greatly by the “flat world,” the borderless-ness created by the digital media of Internet-based communication, house churches have first been embraced by pioneers, then early adopters, those who needed a new idea to be sanctioned and accredited by “respectful people,” and soon will even be embraced by “late adopters,” those who take on new ideas only if they are the new law.
5) Apostolic-Prophetic Reformation (from 1999 on)
With the emergence of indigenous leaders who did not fit the mold of traditional Christendom (and its missionary expressions) at all, a new and very radical return to the principles of New Testament Christianity emerged that suggested not only a gradual “evolution” of Christendom, but a “reformation” to its original apostolic roots, values, foundations, and principles. The prophetic movements of the 1980s have been somewhat of a Samuel-type forerunner of this, prophesying a new apostolic future for the church, and sometimes even speaking this into the new Davids of God, those apostolic people in preparation, in “Adullam situations” as the “Saul System” was still going on. Prophetic people like John Paul Jackson, Cindy Jacobs, Andrea Xandry, Paul Cain, Rick Joyner, Martin Scott, Michael Sullivant, Scott McLeod, Erich Reber, and others have seen it, spoken of it, but many, almost like looking into the promised land from their own respective mount Nebos like Moses of old, were never really able to enter it without the help of apostolic people who were, however, only emerging on the scene at that time.
Around 1999, just before the turn of the century, it was, as some are referring to it, as if God suddenly switched on the light and the whole apostolic issue was placed in broad daylight before the church. Apostolic forerunners like Watchman Nee, Arthur Wallis, Arthur Katz, and John Wimber have ploughed the ground for this before, and as my soon-to-be-released book is dedicated to the exploration of this present apostolic-prophetic reformation, it is not necessary to say more about the content of it at this point. However, it will be vital to understand some of the initial attempts that have been made more recently to grasp, understand, and even to make instrumental the new-found apostolic dimension from the perspective of CAWKI. Not all of these attempts were mature; many were simply expressions of the spirit of the time. So rather than look down on people who made mistakes in dealing with the apostolic (which we probably all have done), I much prefer to appreciate the various aspects and pieces of the puzzle people have discovered in dealing with the subject, because we can learn even from folks who have found a diamond, but thought the very best use of it was to cut glass!
We all know the statement that “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Being in the right place at the right time with the right message is crucial if we don’t want to be found trying to persuade God to bless what we are doing, but rather, to start doing what God is blessing. This is why relatively few people, and relatively few and predominantly small organizations that make themselves available to be the spokesmen of a respective message from the Spirit of God to the Churches during a given window of time, can have most far-reaching results and be of truly global significance. However, once the Spirit of God moves on to the next emphasis, and asks us all to move into the next phase, we can quickly get tied up in a mission of the past, hang on to our past roles and identities, and start being absolutely the right person with an outdated message, or even find ourselves in a ministry or organization whose sell-by date has passed. In that case we would begin to live backward-oriented rather than forward, becoming reactive instead of prophetic, and, far from being part of the solution, we become part of the problem.
This is exactly the moment when it shows whether we are truly fathers, or just men: can we happily give over the baton to the new generation and release and bless them for their new adventures climbing the next few steps, or do we wish to remain the men in command, non-fathers, non-releasers, who ultimately become aging control freaks whose hands will have to be literally pried from the steering wheel of their respective organizations or churches, usually when it is far too late to release anyone into anything? The prevailing immaturity of even very senior Christian leaders in exactly this aspect—combined with a lack of understanding of this progressive revelation in Missions—is precisely the reason why most new waves of the spirit find their fiercest opponents in the last wave. But it does not have to remain that way. Why not break a huge taboo and do things differently from now on—like retiring at 50, making every effort to connect and bridge the dots of recent salvation history in an inclusive spirit, and for each new phase of the spirit, bless both the former one as well as the one to come?
Apostolic Ministry Instrumented by CAWKI
One of the biggest, but foreseeable mistakes made so far in engaging with the apostolic is the simplistic belief that this ministry and calling could be easily integrated into traditional forms of churches, denominations, or ministries, just like all the other spiritual gifts. The charismatic renewal movements, for example, have attempted to integrate the gifts of the Holy Spirit into existing church systems of all kinds, with very mixed success. And so it is no surprise that as the Church in general started to discover the apostolic ministry, there were numerous attempts made to integrate the apostolic ministry into historic forms of Church, to explain it as the real drive behind unusual or new types of church, or even to instrumentalize it for the furthering of CAWKI.
As an example of the latter, David Cartledge, working with the Australian Assemblies of God and only recently went on to be with God, wrote a book called The Apostolic Revolution. This book, symptomatically subtitled “The Restoration of Apostles and Prophets in the Assemblies of God in Australia,” is a classical example of misinterpreting the very nature of apostolic ministry. Apostolic ministry is not primarily sent to reinvigorate the existing church, but to plant the future one. The very goal of apostolic ministry is to plant the church in areas where it does not exist, with the valid exception of the “Petrine type” of apostleship Dick Scoggins has suggested, that is, steering traditional churches to new horizons. But to assume that apostolic ministries can be used like oxen put before a cart that is somewhat stuck in the mud, as some sort of spiritual AAA road service, ready to help pull the cart out and put it back on the road again and then simply trod off, would greatly misunderstand the scope, nature, and calling of apostolic people.
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by Wolfgang Simson
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 were called Christians, followers of Christ have been called “The Way.” One of the reasons was that they literally found “the way to live.” The nature of Church is not reflected in a constant series of religious meetings led by professional clergy in holy rooms specially reserved to experience Jesus, but in the prophetic way followers of Christ live their everyday life in spiritually 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 system
In aligning itself to the religious patterns of the day, the historic Orthodox Church after Constantine in the fourth century A.D. adopted a religious system that was in essence Old Testament, complete with priests, altar, a Christian temple (cathedral), frankincense and a Jewish, synagogue-style worship pattern. 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 superstructure. 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 unequivocally: 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: 1. Share their lives in the power of the Holy Spirit; 2. Have “meatings,” that is, they eat when they meet; 3. Often do not even hesitate to sell private property and share material and spiritual blessings; 4. Teach each other in real-life situations how to obey God’s word, dialogue—and not professor-style; 5. Pray and prophesy with each other, baptize, “lose their face” and their ego by confessing their sins; 6. 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 city-wide 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 led 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 (Ephesians 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 Ephesians 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. God does not leave the Church in the hands of bureaucratic clergy
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 professionalization of the Church since Constantine has now been a pervasive influence long enough, dividing the people of God artificially into laity and clergy. According to the New Testament (1 Timothy 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 okay 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 Go
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 led 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 denominations. 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 corporate-ness 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.
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 that has lost any absolutes and therefore refuses to recognize and obey its creator God with His absolute standards. Coupled with the growing ideologizing, 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.
As Christians of all walks of life, from all denominations and backgrounds, feel a clear echo in their spirit to what God's Spirit is saying to the Church, and start to hear globally in order to act locally, they begin to function again as one body. They organize themselves into neighborhood house-churches and meet in regional or city-celebrations. You are invited to become part of this movement and make your own contribution. Maybe your home, too, will become a house that changes the world.
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by Wolfgang Simson
Have you ever asked yourself, what does Craigslist have in common with al Qaeda? How were Skype and the Apache Nation linked? Or why people rather nowadays turn to Wikipedia than to Encyclopedia Britannica for information? And do you recall the so-called “open-source movement?” Officially born in 1998, rather than trying to monopolize the market like Microsoft and make the most of it, computer software developers actually published the source code and made it available, enabling anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. This new philosophy has given the world Linux, Apache, or Mozilla Firefox, and many other excellent programs. And have you thought about what all of this has to do with the current global reformation that sweeps and reshapes Christianity?
It’s a revolution out there, according to TIME Magazine in a recent article on YouTube. You probably have heard that two young guys called Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had started an Internet platform for ordinary people to share their videos, and search, watch, and rate those of others (even I am online there; go to www.youtube.com and watch a short interview called “Simple Church Interviews”). That was in 2004. On October 16, 2006, the company was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, a phenomenal success story. There are three revolutions going on out there, says TIME: a technological revolution by ever-cheaper hard- and software, a social revolution that analysts have called Web 2.0, where people create and share information together, and a cultural revolution, where people turn away from mainstream media and its top-down culture (talking heads spoon-feed passive spectators’ ideas about what’s happening in the world) and rather choose to listen to unfiltered news and stories from folks like themselves.
The Decentralized Revolution
It all has to do with the big difference between a spider and a starfish, argues Rod A. Beckstrom and Ori Brafman, two young entrepreneurs, both with an MBA from Stanford who, on October 5, 2006, came out with a new book called The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. “If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg, it grows a new one—and the cut off leg can grow an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world,” they say. Using the stories of Grokster, Napster, Emule, Skype, eBay, Wikipedia, and other recent movements with phenomenal success, and linking it with the stories of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), the abolishment of slavery in England or even early Christianity, they “lift the lid on a massive revolution in the making, certain to reshape every organization on the planet from bridge clubs to global government,” comments Paul Saffo, director of Institute for the Future. Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum in Davos, proposed ten action points for his own organization after reading the book. But what is this decentralized revolution (the original title for the book) all about? A spider is a creature with a head and eight legs. It’s a symbol of a centralized, top-down, hierarchical structure. In a spider structure, there has to be a king, someone who is in charge, and legs: those who do the work, but are not required to think. In comparison, starfishes have no head; they are a flat neural system, a decentralized network of cells. If cut into pieces, the entire animal can replicate itself from a single piece of an arm. As a starfish has five arms, starfish organizations, Beckstrom and Brafman content, have five important foundations on which they stand:
1) Circles. Circles are self-organizing groups of people with a common cause or interest that can emerge, expand, multiply, or die spontaneously, without red tape or authorization “from above.” Circles are not lawless; they don’t have rules (someone else’s idea of what you should do), but they depend on norms (values, ethics, codes) that are the backbone of the circle. The members who start or join a circle, own, embrace, and even enforce these norms themselves, and this is exactly why norms become more powerful than rules. A typical circle would be a group of Alcoholics Anonymous, peer-to-peer file-sharing Internet users, a group of Quakers (or a house church). “Ordinary people, organized into circles, gain immense power,” say Beckstrom and Brafman.
2) Catalysts. A catalyst is an element that initiates (or speeds up) a reaction of other elements without being used up in the process. Catalysts in starfish organizations are the inventors, ideologists, inspirational people that refuse to control; they are like architects that are vital to build a house, but then don’t move in. They function entirely different from a CEO (see table). Catalysts that stay around for too long become absorbed into their own creation and start to centralize the whole structure—the very opposite of what they want to achieve!
| Command-and-Control Rational Powerful Directive In the Spotlight Order Organizing |
Trust Emotionally Intelligent Inspirational Collaborative Behind the Scenes Ambiguity Connecting |
3) Ideology. A starfish organization needs a “Big Idea”—a founding vision. For AA the ideology is simple: “If you have a problem with alcohol, stop consulting the experts, and let’s help each other and follow simple twelve steps,” which is the implication of the ideology. For Skype, the motto is: “Let’s talk on the phone for free!”
4) Pre-Existing Networks. As much as you can’t launch a rocket without a launching pad or a ramp, an idea needs a place, a platform from which to start. Bill W., the founder of AA, started with “The Oxford Group,” an independent Christian movement launched by a renegade Lutheran minister. Another historical example for this is the role of the Quakers in the abolishing of slavery in England. Here, Granville Sharp was the catalyst, Thomas Clarkson the champion, and the network of about 20,000 Quakers became the platform which helped birth a nationwide and finally successful movement (interestingly enough, failing to understand the power of a starfish organization, William Wilberforce, a politician, ally, and spokesman for the movement in Parliament, has been wrongly credited for the main success of the movement). Centralized organizations are not set up to launch decentralized movements, and so the Internet is today a huge “breeding ground” for many starfish organizations.
5) Champions. While catalysts are the visionaries, champions are the implementers. They apply, embody, promote, or sell the idea of someone else and give it wings. By yielding and becoming the echo to a voice, they make the vision work and incarnate the catalysts’ original design. Both catalysts and champions are very different, but both desperately need each other for the entire enterprise to work.
Tools of a Catalyst
While a CEO is the Boss who is in charge and occupies the top of the hierarchy, he must be rational. Catalysts are different. Their job is to create personal relationships, networks, and instead of “maximizing profit,” they are mission-oriented. A good catalyst is a master at pitching the big idea, full of inspiring ideas, able to mobilize people by sharing inspirational stories, someone that can get people to do what they would not dream of doing on their own. “Catalysts have mysterious ways of getting things done,” say Brafman and Beckstrom. However, by taking a closer look, their tools seem to be similar. Here a few of them that Beckstrom & Brafman mention:
Genuine Interest in Others. To a catalyst, people are like walking novels. Having a passion for people, asking the right questions brings out their true passion—and extremely valuable insights and information.
Loose Connections. Most people have a few trusted and close friends; catalysts have genuine interactions with thousands; they thrive on meeting new people all the time.
Mapping. If our personal maps are a sketch of a neighborhood or a city, the catalyst’s map is a detailed satellite image of an entire country. Catalysts don’t just know more people; they constantly think of how people fit into their huge mental map.
Trust. Flattened hierarchies are unpredictable, and therefore require a new level of trust. Catalysts cannot control outcome, but they can “trust the network.” And “the network trusts the catalyst because people know he trusts them.”
Hands-Off Approach. Probably the most counterintuitive element of being a catalyst is getting out of the way of people. Rather than being an automatic answer-man for “what are we supposed to be doing?”-questions, people need to learn to answer these questions themselves as they go—and that is exactly how such a high level of ownership evolves in starfish organizations.
Receding. After a catalyst has done his job, what do they do? They leave. If they stay around, catalysts might block the decentralized organization’s growth. Only in the absence of the catalysts will people take the reins and move forward.
What could happen to Christianity if nobody’s the Boss?
Officially, Christianity has no human boss. Jesus is the only head it needs. At the beginning, this is what Christianity looked like—and that is why on Brafman’s and Beckstrom’s website www.starfishandspider.com they mention early Christianity as a model of a starfish organization.
The Starfish Manifesto: Prophetic Intelligence for Apostolic Architecture by Wolfgang Simson will be coming soon.
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WOLFGANG SIMSON (1959) was born in Germany and has German, Jewish, and Hungarian roots. He is married to Mercy and they have three kids. After living in the United Kingdom and India, they now live in the south of Germany.
In the midst of beginning a political career, a number of supernatural experiences brought him to a confrontation with the reality of Christ. After working as a social worker and taxi driver in Stuttgart, Germany, he later (1987) graduated with a M.Th. from Free Evangelical Theological Academy (Basel, Switzerland), where he later taught courses on Church Growth and Mission Strategy and became the assistant of the Dean, late Prof. Samuel Külling. While pursuing a Ph.D. at various academic institutions in Belgium and the U.S.—doing postgraduate studies in Missions and Cultural Anthropology—he found out that academia did not have the answers to the questions he was after, but God had them. In yet another direct experience with God he was shown the purpose, direction, and path of his life, and he has been pursuing this ever since. Since 1983, Wolfgang has been involved in the planting of several churches and in church-based leadership positions, while at the same time beginning a life of extensive global research on growing churches, church planting movements, and revival and mission breakthroughs. Wolfgang worked for two decades (1986-2006) as a Church Growth, Evangelism and Strategy consultant, researcher, and journalist within various Christian networks and regional and global strategy thing tanks in close to 60 nations. One of the founders of Dawn Europa, he has been a board member of both the British and the German Church Growth Associations, a member of the Lausanne Movement in Germany, editor of the well-known E-Zines “Fridayfax,” “Fridayfax2” (now merged into StarFish Fax) and “The Mammon-Fax.” He is the author of 12 books that have been translated into 20 languages so far.
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Additional Online Articles by Wolfgang Simson
- Better than the Hippies: A New Look at the House Church Movement of the Future
- The Power of Nameless and Faceless People: Why Obedient Nobodies in the Kingdom of God Are More Powerful Than Famous Somebodies
Websites on House Church & Simple Church
- India Gateway
- Canadian Simple Church Network
- Oikos Australia
- House2House
- Church Multiplication Associates
- Simple Church Network
- House Church
- Simple Church - UK
- House Church - Denmark
Additional Resources
Atkinson, James A. House Church: A Biblical, Historical, and Practical Analysis of Selected Aspects of Wolfgang Simsons's Ecclesiology from a Southern Baptist Perspective. Thesis (Th.M.)—Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2006.
Barret, Lois. Building the House Church. Scottdale, PA: Kitchner, Ont.: Herald Press, 1986.
Beigler, Tom; et al. The House Church Movement. Jacksonville, FL: SeedSowers, 2001.
Birkey, Del. The House Church: A Model for Renewing the Church. Scottsdale, PA.: Herald Press, 1988.
Birkey, Del. The House Church as a Renewal/Missionary Model. Evangelical Theological Society papers, ETS-0209. Portland, Or: Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 2005.
Cartwright, Joseph L. House Church Planting: Multiplying Colonies of Christ. Dallas, Tex: Dallas Baptist Association House Church Network, 2001.
Gehring, Roger W. House Church and Mission: The Importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004.
Getting Started: A Practical Guide to House Church Planting. Austin, TX: House2House Ministries, 2003.
Hunt, S. 1999. “Andrew Walker. Restoring the Kingdom: The Radical Christianity of the House Church Movement.” SOCIOLOGY-LONDON. 33, no. 2: 465-466.
Kreider, Larry. House Church Networks: A Church for a New Generation. Ephrata, Pa: House to House Publications, 2001.
Krieder, Larry & McClung, Floyd. Starting a House Church. Ventura Calif.: Regal Books, 2007.
Pruter, Karl. The House Church Movement. Highlandville, Mo: St. Willibrord's Press, 1989.
Tenny-Brittain, William. House Church Manual. St. Louis, MO.: Chalice Press, 2004.
Thurman, Joyce V. New Wineskins: A Study of the House Church Movement. Frankfurt am Main; Bern: Verlag Peter Lang, 1982.
Walker, Andrew. Restoring the Kingdom: The Radical Christianity of the House Church Movement. London: Hidder and Stoughton, 1985.
Zdero, Rad. Nexus: The World House Church Movement Reader. Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 2007.
Zdero, Rad. The Global House Church Movement. Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 2004.
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