The Church in the City

Foreword: I realize the previous article, “Waiting for the Turn” and
this one, “The Church in the City,” are both long pieces. “You should
write a book!” one friend said, and I intend to. But for these lengthy
words of late, I do apologize. I really wish I could say it in fewer
words. Pray for me to be a better teacher/writer and to have better
illustrations so I can say it succinctly. But the subject matter is so
serious and requires us to re-think our beliefs so deeply, that a
change of mind won’t happen without us thoroughly reconsidering our
ways. And that requires work. Okay? Thank you for understanding, and
it’ll get better, I promise!

The Church in the City
The early church fathers “turned the world upside down” with their
witness. They did not have automobiles, telephones, the internet, or
airplanes. Yet they successfully planted kingdom colonies in city after
city. They had something that God was pleased to bear witness to with
supernatural signs and gifts of the Holy Spirit. Since that first
generation of pioneers, the world has not been the same!

You can see evidence of their effective strategy in the New Testament
epistles written to the churches in the Bible. For example, 1 Cor 1:2
says “…to the church of God which is at Corinth….” Eph 1:1 reads, “…to
the saints who are at Ephesus….” Phil 1:1 mentions “…the saints in
Christ Jesus who are in Philippi….” Col 1:2 is addressed “…to the
saints and faithful brethren in Christ who are at Colossae…” Ah, you
noticed the Letter to the Galatians? Yes, it references churches-
plural. But Galatia was a province, not a city!

In each city there was only one church made up of many house-churches.
There was no branding or franchising. When Paul called for the elders
of the church at Ephesus, they knew who they were, they knew one
another, they knew who they were accountable to, and they came together
as one man (Acts 20:17). They were the house-church leaders of the
entire city. They were given one new mandate by their apostle (Acts
20:28).

The historic church of the first Apostolic Era had two expressions of
corporate life: small groups meeting in homes and the city-wide
gathering or network of all the saints. There was no hybrid church like
we have today, local congregations. Facility-based congregations are
like synagogues in that they have a building devoted to their meetings.
Christian congregations as such have been and always will be a
blessing. But they do have two major problems: 1) They are too large to
meet in private homes. 2) They don’t interconnect with the rest of the
Body of Christ in the city.

If you add to this dilemma another reality, that modern churches were
not founded on the proper foundation of apostles and prophets (Eph
2:20), you have another difficulty interjected into the challenge. Most
contemporary churches are not answerable to apostles nor do they
receive regular input from prophets. They are usually governed by
pastors or elders or boards and these usually fight to maintain the
status quo.

These early Christian pioneers transformed a fiercely antagonistic
Roman Empire that crucified thousands of them and fed hundreds of them
to the lions or burned them at the stake. They endured awesome
tribulation. Their brave preachers had one basic strategy. Wherever
there was a Jewish synagogue that would receive them, they went there
first and proclaimed the same Messiah their prophets had foretold in
their sacred Scriptures. Then, expelled or persecuted, they would go
from house to house among the Gentiles, meeting with groups of new
believers in their homes. It was this latter strategy, seemingly
accidental-- the development of small house churches throughout each
city-- that was the true secret to their phenomenal success.

The only way they could do this was by turning laymen into leaders.
(I’ll say more on this in a future article when I develop the Grace
Matrix concept.) They did this in small group settings or sometimes in
rented halls. These new leaders could in turn tend to the sheep and
could continue to expand the ministry of the gospel without becoming
paid professionals or becoming priests in a synagogue performing sacred
services for their livelihood. These leaders invaded and conquered
their pagan cultures, waging spiritual war while remaining below enemy
radar.

These heroes of the faith were nameless, faceless, ordinary men and
women, not superstars. But they were outstanding workers. And they were
all home group leaders and also members of a apostolic teams. The
apostle Paul names many of them in his greetings at the end of some of
his letters, folks like Phoebe, Priscilla and Aquilla, Mary, Andronicus
and Junia, and others too numerous to mention. The apostolic ministry
was not a one-man show but a team constantly qualifying and multiplying
new workers. You may have noticed many of them were women. Others were
husband and wife. By every measure of success, they succeeded.

God’s Performance Evaluation for church leaders today could be, “Are
you equipping the saints?” A performance evaluation precedes a
promotion. Ask yourself: Are the believers sitting in our congregations
discovering their purpose in life, learning the awesome power of
prayer, growing in their knowledge of the Lord, and excitedly thwarting
the devil’s work? Or, are they frustrated, bored, and over-fed?

Admittedly, equipping believers for the work of the ministry is nearly
an impossible task given our present church structures and religious
expectations. Our meetings are too big, too formal, and too dependent
on skilled oratory, amplified music, and polished presentations. Church
has become big business. As a result, church staff is usually too busy
caring for programs, budgets, and buildings to develop the ministries
that God has hidden among the saints. Besides that, making the mental
and theological transition from “me fulfilling my ministry” to “helping
equip them to fulfill their ministry” is too big a hurdle for many
contemporary church leaders to jump over.

I love pastors. But they are too few to get the job done. And often
their good past prevents their better future. Most modern pastors are
good preachers. They are the product of good seminaries, Bible
colleges, and historic denominational church models. They may not
realize the standard their Chief Shepherd uses to measure success.
Christ uses Ephesians 4:11 as his baseline for evaluating performance.
In this Scripture, our Risen Lord says he deliberately gave certain
ministries (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers) in
order to do one main thing: equip the saints. What ever this means,
equipping the saints is apparently their main job description. Note, in
this Scripture, it is not to win souls, which is certainly necessary,
nor is it to erect buildings, which may not be necessary at all. We
know Jesus came to save sinners (1 Tim 1:15) and we are ordered to
participate in prayer for all men to be saved (1 Tim 2:1-8). Yet Jesus
placed the emphasis on more workers (Matt 9:37-38). With God, the
harvest is never an issue.

Soul-winning would be far more effective if the sheep were the ones
reproducing. That’s multiplication. If the shepherd of the flock is
winning all the converts, that’s merely addition. Erecting more church
buildings may in fact be the greatest hindrance to fulfilling the great
commission. It begs for more professionals to run the business, thus
leaving out the huge pool of laymen who are indeed qualified by
biblical standards (Titus 1:5-9). Buildings formalize our meetings
whereas the Body of Christ is a living organism, not an organization.
The real church is alive and corporate, the ekklesia. In the Greek
language and custom, this word meant “an assembly of called out ones.”
These Greek citizens, when assembled, had power to legislate local
affairs. This is still true today for the saints: they have spiritual
authority when coming into agreement in prayer. This also illustrates
the truth that the church is not a building on the street corner but a
body of people. As Derek Prince said, “There is no way to say in the
New Testament Greek language, ‘Let’s go to church.’” Why? Because the
people are the church not the meeting place.

The five ministries named in Eph 4:11 were meant to function even in
the context of the post-Temple era, after the fall of Judaism in 70 AD.
For awhile, the Church was mostly Jewish. Later, starting in Acts 10,
it became mostly Gentile. Until the third century after Roman Emperor
Constantine, the church was an underground movement without formal
houses of worship. It was led by laypeople energized by the Holy Spirit
but touched at foundations and transitions by apostles and prophets.
They went from city to city and from house to house ministering the
Word and training more workers. They were (and are) post-resurrection
gifts to the Body of Christ, not organizational titles in a religious
hierarchy.

Yes, these five titles are ministry offices-- real badges of heaven’s
authority-- but even more than that, they are job-descriptions for
workers set apart for specific missions. These Five-Fold ministry gifts
(Greek, doma) are Ascension Gifts by Christ. They are unique in that
the man or woman who occupies this office, the person himself, is the
gift. The office gifts are distinct from the charismatic gifts
(grace-lets) of the Holy Spirit (also called the pneumaticos or
spiritual gifts of grace). The Five-Fold persons themselves are gifts
given by the ascended Savior to the whole Body of Christ. Therefore,
the office-gift is an identity, a role, and a calling based on God’s
choice with specific power to act received from the Head of the Church
not from men. It is not a charismatic anointing that briefly rests upon
someone and then quickly departs. What I mean is this: apostles are
still apostles even when they are not obviously anointed. The same is
true for God’s prophets, and for all the Five Fold ministries.

What is the mission of the Five Fold Ministry? It certainly includes
The Great Commission. (Matthew 28:18-20) This is the record of Jesus’
final orders to the Church. Jesus spoke this commandment to his eleven
remaining apostles. Remember, Judas had killed himself, reducing the
Twelve to eleven, and Matthias wasn’t yet chosen to replace Judas until
days later in the upper room (Acts 1:26). Just so you know, the Bible
has fourteen apostles mentioned by name before the resurrection of
Jesus and fourteen more are identified by name after his resurrection
and ascension. Let this startling fact sink in: The Ascended Lord Jesus
is still doing what he did then-- recruiting, equipping, and sending
forth apostles and prophets to the Church today!

Jesus showed us how to do it when he gathered his original twelve
disciples. Yes, he preached to the mixed multitudes, but he also drew
aside his devoted followers for special hands-on training. During his
earthly ministry, he demonstrated the kingdom of God by driving demons
out of suffering people, by healing people of sickness and disease, by
raising the dead, and by preaching the good news of the gospel to the
poor. He had both good words and good works. But did he stop at
preaching?

No… but that’s where most of us draw the line. For modern Christians,
church is all about preaching and worshipping. Basically, we think good
preaching is what the work of the ministry is all about. We tell the
pastor, “Great sermon, Preacher!” We never think to say, “Wonderful to
hear that you spent all week with those young people desiring to serve
God.”

Jesus did more than preach. He modeled a small mobile community of
faith (at first, a deeply committed team) that displayed the values of
his new kingdom. He loved and trained this small band of brothers so
they could know God’s will. He showed them how to pray persistently,
how to stop reacting in sinful ways, and how to stop judging sinners.
He forgave others freely right up to the cross. He gave generously to
the poor and he gave away everything the Father had given to him. He
deployed these raw recruits, these agents of the kingdom, these
revolutionaries of a new age, into the same kind of preaching and
healing and mentoring work that he had been doing. Then he did
something truly amazing… he got out of their way so they could do it
themselves in the Holy Spirit’s power.

Understanding Jesus’ method helps us see the challenges we are now
facing. The congregational model of contemporary Christianity brings
with it an unquestioned assumption: that is, if we fill the building
with hundreds of people and a few people are being saved, we must be
successfully doing the work of the ministry.

For many evangelicals, the problem is that they don’t know there is a
problem. Our small success deceives us. The paradigm of professional
clergy in front of laymen as listeners is so pervasive that we don’t
question it anymore. The perks of success are too powerful to ignore in
our church culture so now we have new ministries springing up with a TV
mentality and even small churches in poverty-stricken Third World
countries that think they can’t do church without a PA system. We’ve
made the building and the size of the crowd our status symbol and the
validation of our success.

However, even if successful, this paradigm has several problems
associated with it. The first problem is that it is unbiblical. The
second problem is that it isn’t working well enough to get the job done
in our lifetime. The third problem is that it robs ordinary believers
of the opportunity to do the work of the ministry by keeping it in the
hands of paid professionals. The fourth problem is that there aren’t
enough resources to build enough buildings to gather everyone inside
that God wants saved… such as whole cities!

About thirty years ago, I wrote an article while pastoring my first
(organized, traditional, Spirit-filled) church. It was entitled “The
Church in the City.” That article, quite ahead of its time for the
prophetic insight in that day, was published by New Wine Magazine. That
word described how the Lord looks at his church in each city. Let me
summarize what I said. When the Lord looks down from heaven into a
major metropolitan area, does he see only Baptist churches? Does he see
only Spirit-filled churches? Does he see only churches inside
buildings? What does he see? The answer is—he sees the whole church at
once, all of it, every flavor and variety and style you can imagine.
They are all his people, everyone who names the name of the Lord and
has been redeemed by the blood of his Son.

If you’re saved, you’d better learn to love your brothers and sisters,
even those of different races or liturgies, since we’ll all going to
spend eternity together! And if you’re following the pattern of the
apostles and prophets settled in the Bible and affirmed in church
history, you’d better start believing in the legitimate church as it
really is: congregations plus a myriad of small house groups and the
whole network of all the saints in your city.

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Recommended reading: Houses that Change the World, by Wolfgang Simson, reprinted 2004 by Authentic Media.

“The Church in the City” © 2005 by Ron Wood, Touched by Grace Inc., P. O. Box 12749, Wilmington, NC 28405. Write to us at ron@touchedbygrace.org. Feel free to copy and share this post with your friends.

We are touched by grace to touch the world!