Church-in-a-Box
Church-in-a-Box
By Ron Wood
The church-in-a-box is stuck in its own success. Read on and you’ll see why.
Based on the previous article, Present Perspective, let’s accept the fact that the church has been injected with the Holy Spirit who has interspersed his dynamic potential of gifts and grace into the church’s corporate life. The Church will never be the same.
Some Presbyterian churches now pray for deliverance for members with addictions; Some Baptist churches now sing Scripture choruses from overheads instead of old hymn books; Some Catholic believers sing songs of the Spirit while on weekend retreats; Some Methodist churches pray for the sick to be healed; and Some Assembly of God churches are dignified, orderly, and look just like Baptist churches. Go figure.
But there is a problem: so much of the wineskin (an allegory for church tradition) is still stiff and inflexible and thus the new wine often splits the wineskin, thereby losing the fresh outpouring and damaging the church’s structure at the same time. Jesus warned that this could happen. In early America, when John Wesley first started his classes (house churches or cells where small groups of believers met), they were persecuted by other Christians in the more organized churches that happened to meet in buildings. Wesley’s followers had a method of mutual care that worked. I have many Methodist ancestors on my mother’s side, the Christenberry clan, who were notable for their pioneering faith.
You may have noticed that the illustrations I used to discuss previous revivals that brought us the Pentecostal movement and the healing revival all came through anointed individuals. In fact, many of these key individuals, manifesting great gifts of grace, were very independent people. A Baptist pastor once said, “If you say ‘independent Baptist’, you’ve said the same thing twice.” Independence seems to be an American virtue.
These revival leaders of a bygone era in America were often brash, prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement, and frequently fell prey to sins of the flesh. But they were pioneers. Pioneers aren’t always nice. They grow tough due to facing the enemy and enduring hardships. They may be bent in one direction, not well-balanced, because of the emphasis they are called to carry. They are fighters, rugged pathfinders and explorers, who have withstood stubborn opponents and vicious devils in order to lay claim to new territory. Those of us who follow their pathways in later generations have had decades to easily sort out difficult doctrines and to bring healthy balance to the newly revealed truths of God. We had time and perspective, a luxury our forefather pioneers did not have.
Despite receiving the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Latter Rain revivals, even the Pentecostals missed it. We didn’t go far enough. Basically, we embraced the gifts of the Spirit but rejected the offices of the Ascended Christ. We accepted the nine gifts but failed to understand or receive the restoration of Christ’s five-fold ministry, especially apostles and prophets. Without these architects of the new kingdom order, we fell back into the old non-renewed systems of doing church. We kept the church-in-a-box. We substituted Roberts Rules of Order for the Book of Acts. Well, God may not be through with us yet.
What are some of the wrong things that we are still battling? What do we keep and what do we discard? What hindrances are we facing that resist the next wave of God’s glory in the church? Why aren’t we growing more churches, saving more souls, producing more workers, finishing the Great Commission? God hasn’t changed, but some of our ways do need to change.
Hyper-Individualism
If I were to diagnose our dilemma based on my perspective, which includes a love of church history, a degree in Missiology and a minor in Bible from Southeastern University, and our experiences in pastoring a variety of churches for more than thirty years), I would say the key error we have propagated is hyper-individualism.
Hyper-individualism is behavior that glorifies individual achievement to the detriment of the corporate community. Hyper-individualism moves beyond healthy boundaries or a wholesome sense of personal responsibility. It makes it all about me rather than about us. As a result, we tend to focus on the superstar who does the preaching, the CEO who makes it all happen, the high-finance high-profile celebrity-type leader who makes us bask in his or her glow. The problem is− this is NOT normal Christianity!
The church of Jesus Christ, his body of redeemed members, is more corporate than we realize. It’s more of a body than a building, an organism rather than an organization, a mutual honor society rather than a kingpin club. We’re born into it, baptized into it, intrinsically joined to it by virtue of being joined to Christ. We are members of one another. God’s agape love inside us creates a new level of natural unity, without striving, from a heart captured by the Son of God. The new birth is individual and personal but it doesn’t stop there. We are meant to live our lives in relationship, in community. The Father’s family is our new home. We are not alone.
Selfish ambition disguised as passionate ministry, flaming theatrical powerful preaching, volatile autocratic personalities, and ego-driven church growth campaigns actually make ordinary church members feel less-than-adequate. Who could measure up if that is the model of successful ministry? The end result is we leave the work of the ministry to the paid professionals, since no one could possibly match their performance.
But the Scriptures lay out a crystal clear order for the true work of the ministry, and it is to be done by the saints, not by the professional clergy.
Square Watermelons
In Florida as a boy, I helped harvest ripe succulent juicy watermelons. I carried some weighing thirty pounds from the field to the truck. In nature, they’re always round or oval. But you can put a young melon inside a square box and it will grow to fit the shape of its container. You can make something that Mother Nature never intended- fruit shaped like a box. This is our next church problem: the artificial structures we’ve created for the members of the Body of Christ to live in.
Even those of us who are energized by the gifts of the Holy Spirit (pentecostals and charismatics) always seem to default to the same man-made systems for church life. Why? It is expected of us. But it is designed for maintenance, not mission. It barely keeps the lights on, much less conquers a city. It makes no disciples, just spectators. It robs the people of the ministry by putting it all in the hands of the clergy. It creates an artificial divide between clergy and laity, something God hates. It perpetuates the idea of church as a building rather than church as the ekklesia (an assembly of called-out ones).
This edifice-complex that dominates modern western Christianity is mostly void of power. God has said all along that He does not dwell in buildings made with hands, but we keep putting God in a box along with all his kids. This facility-based pattern of doing church came about after Constantine’s reign in Rome in 313 AD. He closed temples to false gods and made them into houses of worship for the formerly persecuted Christians. He reinstated the priesthood-type of ministry where a one-man mediator with special qualifications stood between the people and God. He thought he was helping, but he actually gutted the church of its secret dynamic. Prior to that change, the church in each city was based in many homes. The true church of the Bible is more like the underground church in China than it is the yellow page listings of familiar facilities on street corners.
History has shown that this traditional way of doing church is stale and sterile. We can no longer say, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee. In the name of Jesus Christ rise up and walk.” We’ve got the silver, we’ve got the gold, we’ve got millions of dollars in property, but we’ve lost the power to make the lame walk. We have denominational order but we’ve displaced the pioneering spirit and the prophetic edge that gave the church its power to withstand tyrants and demons. Nations no longer quake when the gospel arrives. Now the modern church struggles to grow, to win converts, to train disciples. We spend enormous amounts of money to keep the programs going, when the original simple pattern of kinship and extended spiritual family works so much better, without straining. The fact is, the church of Acts multiplied greatly, without buildings and budgets and buses.
A phenomenon is happening. At the same time as mega-churches are cropping up that hold thousands of sincere believers, in America and across the globe millions of other sincere followers of Jesus are choosing to no longer invest in Christianity-lite. They are abandoning traditional building-based worship for low-key house churches. I’m reporting this news live, about an event happening right now. Right or wrong, it is occurring as we speak.
In their home meetings, they usually gather weekly. They foster informal fellowship as the church meets in someone’s home rather than a separate sacred building. Food, fun, and laughter are common. They usually grow and multiply rapidly. They pray for each other, they love one another, study the Scriptures together, allow anyone among them to minister freely, and quickly attract and absorb newcomers in this non-threatening environment. Authentic Christians, without any special qualifications or performances, open up their lives to inquirers and help them come to faith in Jesus. Everyone is an equal minister and everyone has a place to be valued and to function. It feels safe in Father’s house as an elder/pastor keeps the peace with gentle guidance.
This Simple Church model is effective. It threatens the kingdom of Satan in any city where it takes root. It multiplies gospel laborers and plants colonies of the kingdom faster than any other known system. It is the most effective method of evangelism known. But it has one draw back: there is not much money in it, at least not at first. No salary for a paid professional preacher is in the budget of a house church.
In fact, it has become my considered opinion that most pastors (i.e.- elders) should NOT be salaried, but be supported by their secular work. It is only when someone is set apart for the work of apostolic ministry requiring travel or has the oversight of an expansive network of house churches that the shift from a secular vocation to a full time ministry employment becomes necessary. In other words, apostles should be full time in the ministry, not elder/pastors.
This shift to a new mode of church life will not come easily. Tradition mitigates against it. The primary reason for the difficulty will not be doctrinal- after all, it’s in the Bible. The true difficulty in adopting this change is financial. The present day church-in-a-box is ruled by pastors; the preaching is done by pastors; the seminaries and Bible schools are controlled by pastors; the denominations are governed by pastors; and all the Sunday School literature is written by pastors or people with pastoral mindsets.
It is an axiom that whatever you invest money into, whatever you honor, whatever you reward financially, is what you will get more of. That’s why businesses give bonuses to top salesmen and managers. It is financially rewarding for ministers to NOT rock the boat. So, since the pastoral mindset is in charge, leaders have no motivation to give up their facility-based perks to an emerging network of house churches led by a new generation of young apostles. Therefore, we keep building expensive structures that keep feeding spectator oriented church members led by skilled performance driven preachers.
Is this how we describe a successful New Testament church? Is that all there is?
So here’s the dilemma: The Apostolic Reformation may stall for lack of money. The present paradigm we have of church is facility based, not based on Ephesians 4:11-16. It is pastor led, not founded on or led by apostles or prophets. This dilemma is not a minor problem. The church is failing in its mission because of its paralyzing, impotent, anti-apostolic paradigm. The church-in-a-box is stuck in its own success.
What work-around does the Lord have in mind? God is never without a plan!
First: Believers in Jesus who meet in house churches should tithe, but save it for the day when someone among them is set apart and sent out (see Acts 13:1-4). The problem isn’t tithing, since Jesus is to be honored. The problem is spending it on buildings rather than workers. House church members should not tithe to their local elder/pastor, but tithe in the hope of an apostle being equipped and deployed from among them. Or, they should tithe from their home church to the apostle overseeing their network of house churches. A local elder/pastor of a house church can quite easily handle his work, his family, and the church that meets in his or her house. When the work gets too big, either split the meeting and deploy another worker, or consecrate someone to the ministry as an apostle.
Second: God is already raising up new apostles and prophets outside the religious structure. They are not indebted to the current religious system but are experiencing God’s grace and great financial blessings due to God’s favor on their life and business. They will become free of care and be able to be devoted to the Word of God and to prayer and even able to travel to strengthen the church in various locations beyond their home base. God has a creative way to guide the growth of the church and to prepare and commission a new generation of emerging leaders (see Romans 1:5).
Third: Option three is for the institutional church to repent, change its way of thinking, prepare to lay down its church-in-a-box methodology, and adopt a radical new way of sharing life in Christ. But I don’t have enough faith for that to happen.
Church-in-a-Box © 2007 by Ron Wood. Visit our website at www.touchedbygrace.org
By Ron Wood
The church-in-a-box is stuck in its own success. Read on and you’ll see why.
Based on the previous article, Present Perspective, let’s accept the fact that the church has been injected with the Holy Spirit who has interspersed his dynamic potential of gifts and grace into the church’s corporate life. The Church will never be the same.
Some Presbyterian churches now pray for deliverance for members with addictions; Some Baptist churches now sing Scripture choruses from overheads instead of old hymn books; Some Catholic believers sing songs of the Spirit while on weekend retreats; Some Methodist churches pray for the sick to be healed; and Some Assembly of God churches are dignified, orderly, and look just like Baptist churches. Go figure.
But there is a problem: so much of the wineskin (an allegory for church tradition) is still stiff and inflexible and thus the new wine often splits the wineskin, thereby losing the fresh outpouring and damaging the church’s structure at the same time. Jesus warned that this could happen. In early America, when John Wesley first started his classes (house churches or cells where small groups of believers met), they were persecuted by other Christians in the more organized churches that happened to meet in buildings. Wesley’s followers had a method of mutual care that worked. I have many Methodist ancestors on my mother’s side, the Christenberry clan, who were notable for their pioneering faith.
You may have noticed that the illustrations I used to discuss previous revivals that brought us the Pentecostal movement and the healing revival all came through anointed individuals. In fact, many of these key individuals, manifesting great gifts of grace, were very independent people. A Baptist pastor once said, “If you say ‘independent Baptist’, you’ve said the same thing twice.” Independence seems to be an American virtue.
These revival leaders of a bygone era in America were often brash, prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement, and frequently fell prey to sins of the flesh. But they were pioneers. Pioneers aren’t always nice. They grow tough due to facing the enemy and enduring hardships. They may be bent in one direction, not well-balanced, because of the emphasis they are called to carry. They are fighters, rugged pathfinders and explorers, who have withstood stubborn opponents and vicious devils in order to lay claim to new territory. Those of us who follow their pathways in later generations have had decades to easily sort out difficult doctrines and to bring healthy balance to the newly revealed truths of God. We had time and perspective, a luxury our forefather pioneers did not have.
Despite receiving the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Latter Rain revivals, even the Pentecostals missed it. We didn’t go far enough. Basically, we embraced the gifts of the Spirit but rejected the offices of the Ascended Christ. We accepted the nine gifts but failed to understand or receive the restoration of Christ’s five-fold ministry, especially apostles and prophets. Without these architects of the new kingdom order, we fell back into the old non-renewed systems of doing church. We kept the church-in-a-box. We substituted Roberts Rules of Order for the Book of Acts. Well, God may not be through with us yet.
What are some of the wrong things that we are still battling? What do we keep and what do we discard? What hindrances are we facing that resist the next wave of God’s glory in the church? Why aren’t we growing more churches, saving more souls, producing more workers, finishing the Great Commission? God hasn’t changed, but some of our ways do need to change.
Hyper-Individualism
If I were to diagnose our dilemma based on my perspective, which includes a love of church history, a degree in Missiology and a minor in Bible from Southeastern University, and our experiences in pastoring a variety of churches for more than thirty years), I would say the key error we have propagated is hyper-individualism.
Hyper-individualism is behavior that glorifies individual achievement to the detriment of the corporate community. Hyper-individualism moves beyond healthy boundaries or a wholesome sense of personal responsibility. It makes it all about me rather than about us. As a result, we tend to focus on the superstar who does the preaching, the CEO who makes it all happen, the high-finance high-profile celebrity-type leader who makes us bask in his or her glow. The problem is− this is NOT normal Christianity!
The church of Jesus Christ, his body of redeemed members, is more corporate than we realize. It’s more of a body than a building, an organism rather than an organization, a mutual honor society rather than a kingpin club. We’re born into it, baptized into it, intrinsically joined to it by virtue of being joined to Christ. We are members of one another. God’s agape love inside us creates a new level of natural unity, without striving, from a heart captured by the Son of God. The new birth is individual and personal but it doesn’t stop there. We are meant to live our lives in relationship, in community. The Father’s family is our new home. We are not alone.
Selfish ambition disguised as passionate ministry, flaming theatrical powerful preaching, volatile autocratic personalities, and ego-driven church growth campaigns actually make ordinary church members feel less-than-adequate. Who could measure up if that is the model of successful ministry? The end result is we leave the work of the ministry to the paid professionals, since no one could possibly match their performance.
But the Scriptures lay out a crystal clear order for the true work of the ministry, and it is to be done by the saints, not by the professional clergy.
Square Watermelons
In Florida as a boy, I helped harvest ripe succulent juicy watermelons. I carried some weighing thirty pounds from the field to the truck. In nature, they’re always round or oval. But you can put a young melon inside a square box and it will grow to fit the shape of its container. You can make something that Mother Nature never intended- fruit shaped like a box. This is our next church problem: the artificial structures we’ve created for the members of the Body of Christ to live in.
Even those of us who are energized by the gifts of the Holy Spirit (pentecostals and charismatics) always seem to default to the same man-made systems for church life. Why? It is expected of us. But it is designed for maintenance, not mission. It barely keeps the lights on, much less conquers a city. It makes no disciples, just spectators. It robs the people of the ministry by putting it all in the hands of the clergy. It creates an artificial divide between clergy and laity, something God hates. It perpetuates the idea of church as a building rather than church as the ekklesia (an assembly of called-out ones).
This edifice-complex that dominates modern western Christianity is mostly void of power. God has said all along that He does not dwell in buildings made with hands, but we keep putting God in a box along with all his kids. This facility-based pattern of doing church came about after Constantine’s reign in Rome in 313 AD. He closed temples to false gods and made them into houses of worship for the formerly persecuted Christians. He reinstated the priesthood-type of ministry where a one-man mediator with special qualifications stood between the people and God. He thought he was helping, but he actually gutted the church of its secret dynamic. Prior to that change, the church in each city was based in many homes. The true church of the Bible is more like the underground church in China than it is the yellow page listings of familiar facilities on street corners.
History has shown that this traditional way of doing church is stale and sterile. We can no longer say, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee. In the name of Jesus Christ rise up and walk.” We’ve got the silver, we’ve got the gold, we’ve got millions of dollars in property, but we’ve lost the power to make the lame walk. We have denominational order but we’ve displaced the pioneering spirit and the prophetic edge that gave the church its power to withstand tyrants and demons. Nations no longer quake when the gospel arrives. Now the modern church struggles to grow, to win converts, to train disciples. We spend enormous amounts of money to keep the programs going, when the original simple pattern of kinship and extended spiritual family works so much better, without straining. The fact is, the church of Acts multiplied greatly, without buildings and budgets and buses.
A phenomenon is happening. At the same time as mega-churches are cropping up that hold thousands of sincere believers, in America and across the globe millions of other sincere followers of Jesus are choosing to no longer invest in Christianity-lite. They are abandoning traditional building-based worship for low-key house churches. I’m reporting this news live, about an event happening right now. Right or wrong, it is occurring as we speak.
In their home meetings, they usually gather weekly. They foster informal fellowship as the church meets in someone’s home rather than a separate sacred building. Food, fun, and laughter are common. They usually grow and multiply rapidly. They pray for each other, they love one another, study the Scriptures together, allow anyone among them to minister freely, and quickly attract and absorb newcomers in this non-threatening environment. Authentic Christians, without any special qualifications or performances, open up their lives to inquirers and help them come to faith in Jesus. Everyone is an equal minister and everyone has a place to be valued and to function. It feels safe in Father’s house as an elder/pastor keeps the peace with gentle guidance.
This Simple Church model is effective. It threatens the kingdom of Satan in any city where it takes root. It multiplies gospel laborers and plants colonies of the kingdom faster than any other known system. It is the most effective method of evangelism known. But it has one draw back: there is not much money in it, at least not at first. No salary for a paid professional preacher is in the budget of a house church.
In fact, it has become my considered opinion that most pastors (i.e.- elders) should NOT be salaried, but be supported by their secular work. It is only when someone is set apart for the work of apostolic ministry requiring travel or has the oversight of an expansive network of house churches that the shift from a secular vocation to a full time ministry employment becomes necessary. In other words, apostles should be full time in the ministry, not elder/pastors.
This shift to a new mode of church life will not come easily. Tradition mitigates against it. The primary reason for the difficulty will not be doctrinal- after all, it’s in the Bible. The true difficulty in adopting this change is financial. The present day church-in-a-box is ruled by pastors; the preaching is done by pastors; the seminaries and Bible schools are controlled by pastors; the denominations are governed by pastors; and all the Sunday School literature is written by pastors or people with pastoral mindsets.
It is an axiom that whatever you invest money into, whatever you honor, whatever you reward financially, is what you will get more of. That’s why businesses give bonuses to top salesmen and managers. It is financially rewarding for ministers to NOT rock the boat. So, since the pastoral mindset is in charge, leaders have no motivation to give up their facility-based perks to an emerging network of house churches led by a new generation of young apostles. Therefore, we keep building expensive structures that keep feeding spectator oriented church members led by skilled performance driven preachers.
Is this how we describe a successful New Testament church? Is that all there is?
So here’s the dilemma: The Apostolic Reformation may stall for lack of money. The present paradigm we have of church is facility based, not based on Ephesians 4:11-16. It is pastor led, not founded on or led by apostles or prophets. This dilemma is not a minor problem. The church is failing in its mission because of its paralyzing, impotent, anti-apostolic paradigm. The church-in-a-box is stuck in its own success.
What work-around does the Lord have in mind? God is never without a plan!
First: Believers in Jesus who meet in house churches should tithe, but save it for the day when someone among them is set apart and sent out (see Acts 13:1-4). The problem isn’t tithing, since Jesus is to be honored. The problem is spending it on buildings rather than workers. House church members should not tithe to their local elder/pastor, but tithe in the hope of an apostle being equipped and deployed from among them. Or, they should tithe from their home church to the apostle overseeing their network of house churches. A local elder/pastor of a house church can quite easily handle his work, his family, and the church that meets in his or her house. When the work gets too big, either split the meeting and deploy another worker, or consecrate someone to the ministry as an apostle.
Second: God is already raising up new apostles and prophets outside the religious structure. They are not indebted to the current religious system but are experiencing God’s grace and great financial blessings due to God’s favor on their life and business. They will become free of care and be able to be devoted to the Word of God and to prayer and even able to travel to strengthen the church in various locations beyond their home base. God has a creative way to guide the growth of the church and to prepare and commission a new generation of emerging leaders (see Romans 1:5).
Third: Option three is for the institutional church to repent, change its way of thinking, prepare to lay down its church-in-a-box methodology, and adopt a radical new way of sharing life in Christ. But I don’t have enough faith for that to happen.
Church-in-a-Box © 2007 by Ron Wood. Visit our website at www.touchedbygrace.org
