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. 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 professionalisation of the church since Constantine has now been a pervasive influence long enough, dividing the people of God artificially intolaity and clergy. 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?”
Linear Mode
