Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity

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5 out of 5 stars

The Dream of Organic Christianity July 31, 2008
26 out of 27 found this review helpful

"Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity" by Frank Viola, is sure to send every "clergy-laity" member scratching around for a biblical defense to the claims made against the 1700 year old institutional form of church. And according to Viola, they will not find a "shred of biblical warrant" to support its existence.

At last, the sequel to the highly controversial book, "Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices," has arrived! And it is for certain that not all will applaud its arrival to the bookstore. No doubt, many readers are still trying to grapple with the favorable recognition and popularity of the first book to this series of 4 books (2 not yet released) on organic Christianity. The first time, Viola had the help of George Barna and Tyndale in gaining a few listening ears. Now that he has the attention of no small number of readers... he has set off to propose serious answers to an audience that is filled with sincere questions. And "Reimgaining Church" will not leave readers dissatisfied in their quest for the normal Christian church life. In fact, it will leave them hungering for authenticity in the New Testament fashion.

As the saying goes, "You can't judge a book by its cover." Many readers have learned that from PC. So let the reader first understand the title. Viola states, "it's the present practices of the church that I'm seeking to reimagine, not the church itself" (p.13). He clearly outlines his purpose so that there is no misunderstanding. He writes that the purpose of the book is: "to articulate a biblical, spiritual, theological, and practical answer to the question, Is there a viable way of doing church outside the institutional church experience, and if so, what does it look like" (p.12)?

Let there be no mistake, any serious reader cannot accuse Viola of impure motives or building the house of God on sand. Indeed, the foundation of the ideas communicated in this book are constructed upon the triune God (i.e. Trinity as archetype for the church). Therefore, RC should be understood as a proposal that the church of Jesus Christ mirror the very image of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Viola writes, "the church is the earthly image of the triune God" (p.35). In the spirit of Stanley Grenz, Leonardo Boff, and Miroslav Volf... Viola has wonderfully woven together the fabric of God's eternal purpose in a clear, concise, and intelligent way. Its inspiration can be questioned, as with any author, but its scholarship is insurmountable in its presentation. This is a work for the carpenter and the scholar.

"The Reformation recovered the truth of the priesthood of all believers. But it failed to restore the organic practices that embody this teaching. It was restricted to soteriology (salvation) and didn't involve ecclesiology (the church)" (p.59). In the pursuit of an organic Christianity that is rooted in the triune God, the greatest hurdle will be with what lies at the heart of the institutional model of the church: hierarchal leadership. And Viola goes to great lengths in addressing the error we have made in our teaching and practice of authority and "spiritual covering." He even extends his address in the appendix "Objections and Responses about Leadership."

In every chapter, Viola seems to anticipate the objections and rebukes... and very skillfully, with ease, answers those objections and the many misconceptions that are born out of a first-reading of the ideas presented in PC and RC. I have read all of Viola's similar writings in his original series... and RC in this new series is definitely his finest presentation thus far. He leaves little in his language to trip over... just a great deal of truth to bear.

Readers will appreciate Viola's honesty and sensitivity to the issues. Each chapter builds one upon the other and guides you to the end. I found that when a question would arise, it would quickly be addressed to satisfy a deep-seeded longing to know and follow the truth. Although it is not necessary for the reader to have previously read PC... it is recommended. It is always best to start listening to a conversation from the beginning.

Finally, I want to communicate to the reader that only those interested in spiritual revolution, instead of religious reformation, will benefit from RC. We must be willing to forsake all the new recovery methods of the institution and leave behind all the drama surrounding passions, programs, methods, and movements. It is time for a paradigm shift! Viola writes, "Recovering the organic expression of the church and the practical headship of Jesus Christ necessitates that we forsake our ecclesiastical patches and Band-Aids" (p.270). Only a life fixated on the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ and longing to see that expressed in the church...will find comfort in the reading of this book.

A great exodus is occurring even as I write this book review. It is not one of rebellion, but one of submission. Dear reader, consider a renewed Christology that gives birth to a glorious ecclesiology. Consider the message of this book... and let Christ's person and work be reflected in all compartments of life.

I recommend reading:
Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices
The Untold Story of the New Testament Church: An Extraordinary Guide to Understanding the New Testament
Paul's Idea of Community: The Early House Churches in Their Cultural Setting, Revised Edition
Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community
Created for Community: Connecting Christian Belief with Christian Living
The Centrality of Jesus Christ (Works of T. Austin-Sparks) Volume One

2 out of 5 stars

The reductio ad absurdum of what began at the Protestant Reformation September 12, 2008
19 out of 35 found this review helpful

Oh dear. Where to start? How does one go about offering a response to a book with so many problems?

Let's start with the book's title, which presupposes that the church is the product of a process of imagining, that it has been wrongly imagined, and that it ought to be reimagined. Whether or not the author realizes it, this is a very postmodern way of looking at the church, what with his implicit but unstated deep-seated suspicion of origins, traditions, and structures, as well as his embedded idea that everything is a construct that can be deconstructed. Looked at this way, the "institutional church" is simply an epiphenomenon, or worse, a kind of Christian metanarrative, that has oppressed people over the centuries and from which people must be liberated and for which Reimagining Church provides emancipation.

Another place to start is with the author's (and Protestantism's) own starting point: that the church is the assembly or coming together of all those who have put their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. In this understanding, the church is an EFFECT or RESULT of conversion. As such it is contingent, it has no essence. It literally comes into being on account of individuals' conversion to faith in Jesus Christ. It is not understood to be an entity that exists prior to one's conversion that one enters into; it is literally the product or entailment of that conversion experience. Since it has no visible extension in space and time, since it is contingent, since it isn't essential (that is, it lacks essence), it can be left without consequence, as the author left the institutional church 20 years ago. To put it simply, the church is a PROJECT that Christians put together. That's all. In this view, at least in regards to the church, the New Testament is seen as a kind of manual for how to go about assembling or constructing the project which is the church.

Or not. There are many Evangelicals today who no longer (or very infrequently) go to church, and see nothing wrong with that. There are even wildly popular books out there that portray such behavior in a favorable light (The Shack and So You Don't Want to Go to Church Anymore, both having protagonists who have left the church or infrequently attend). And that, I submit, is the logical conclusion of an understanding that church is contingent, non-essential, and basically a project of believers' imagining. With that self-understanding, you can pretty much have any kind of church you want, or no church at all.

But what if the Church isn't a project (the shift to a capital "C" is intentional)? What if the Church is an entity that was brought into being by Jesus Christ, who before he ascended back to the Father gave certain of his prerogatives (the keys to the kingdom, binding and loosing, forgiving and retaining sins) to those who first constituted her and who were her first overseers, that is the Apostles, who in turn passed these prerogatives on to their successors? What if the Church is a visible society, essential in its sacrificial life and mission of bringing all into the economy of God's salvation, that has endured through time for two thousand years? What if she is entered through the initiation rite of baptism, which is for the forgiveness of sins as Peter states in Acts 2, where those joining her sacramentally enter into Christ's death and resurrection (as Paul states in Romans 6)? What if she nourishes her sons and daughters with the Bread of Heaven, the Eucharist, through the ministration of her duly appointed priests who are in an unbroken line of succession from the Apostles? What if this Eucharist is an anamnesis, an effectual remembering, so that in and through the celebration of the Paschal Mystery all those who eat and drink are put in touch with the saving events of all mankind, Jesus' death resurrection, just as Passover, in Jewish understanding, mystically places all Jews who celebrate it at the first Passover when God brought his people up from slavery in Egypt?

If this is what the Church is, and that's how an unbroken line of writers from sub-Apostolic times (around the end of the first century) all the way up to the sixteenth century understood her, then she can hardly be reimagined. She has a life, an essence, a visible reality, a structure, a ministry perhaps best stated in the Nicene Creed, which proclaims her ONE (that is, indivisible), HOLY (that is, imbued with the power of God to bring salvation to the world through Word and Sacrament), CATHOLIC (that is, universally extended in space and time), and APOSTOLIC (that is, sharing in the consecrated life of the Apostles in unbroken succession throughout history and up till today). Or, as my son likes to say, "The Church is a miracle, the visible, continuous extension of Jesus throughout history, the sacrament of Christ in the world, so that we don't have to be the sacrament of our own salvation."

Now let's move on to look at three areas where Viola thinks the Church has gotten it wrong: ministry, the sermon, and church unity. As regards ministry, Viola is a radical egalitarian. In the Preface he says, "The Church as we know it today evolved (or more accurately, devolved) from a living, breathing, organic expression of Jesus Christ into a top-heavy, hierarchical organization whose basic structure is patterned after the ancient Roman Empire." But wait a minute. Doesn't the Church from her very beginning already have a hierarchy, namely the Apostles? Doesn't the Apostle Paul authoritatively oversee the churches he founds? And don't the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) provide us a picture of that oversight being passed on to his successors? If this is true, the Church isn't a hierarchical organization "whose basic structure is patterned after the Roman Empire"; her basic structure is inherent in her founding by Jesus who called the Twelve to be the reconstitution of Israel and passed on to them the authority to bind and loose and to forgive sins (Matthew 16 and John 20). The Church, according to Paul in Ephesians, is "built on the foundation of the Apostles." As early as A.D. 100, Ignatius of Antioch gives us a clear picture of the Church's self-understanding that she is a hierarchy overseen by bishops. Which is more likely, that 35-40 years after Paul is writing his Pastoral Epistles the Church has begun to pattern herself after the structure of the Roman Empire, or that from earliest times she understood that an Apostolic hierarchical pattern was an essential part of her nature and that that pattern was clearly made manifest in her first sub-Apostolic expressions? Are we really to believe that the first generation of Christians after the Apostles got such an essential thing as the structure and organization of the Church wrong?

As regards the sermon, Viola ignores the fact that the very first thing Jesus did when he began his ministry was preach a sermon. In Luke 4, Jesus, just after having been tempted by Satan in the wilderness, "in the power of the Spirit," went around Galilee and "taught in their synagogues and everyone praised him." Jesus is given a scroll of Isaiah, reads from it, and, as was typical in Jewish synagogue worship, expounds on it. Doesn't this sound a lot like what happens in the Church today: the Scriptures are read, and a sermon is preached? As was perfectly natural during New Testament times and shortly thereafter, when she is beginning to sort herself out in relation to Israel, the Church adopted and transformed much of her Jewish heritage. Indeed, the structure of Christian worship is a combination of synagogue and Passover. Thus the reading the Scriptures, the proclamation of the Word, and the breaking of bread are themselves the form of Christian worship. This is so from earliest times up to the present. There is no pattern in all of Church history of "doing church" in any other way.

As regards church unity, Viola couldn't be farther from the truth. In his chapter "Reimagining Church Unity" he says, "I believe the division of the Christian church is rooted in the evolution of the clergy/laity class distinction. This distinction began to crystallize around the third century. The emergence of this hierarchical system, which violently ruptured the priesthood of all believers into a clergy class and a laity class, was the first major division known to the body of Christ." First of all, as we have seen, the hierarchy of the Church is there from the very beginning, with the principle of Apostolicity and overseers in the Church. Secondly, the structure of the threefold ministry of bishop, priest, and deacon, with its inherent distinction between clergy and laity, did not "crystallize around the third century." It was already everywhere in place by the beginning of the second century, arose universally in the Church without controversy, and was always understood from earliest times to be the proper expression of the Church's ministry. Next we come to one of the most curious passages about heresy in the Church that I have ever read: "Once the clergy/laity fault line was created, various clergymen began to divide amongst themselves on theological matters. This spawned a self-perpetuating movement that has reproduced a raft if new sects in every generation." This is a novel way to look at the development of doctrine in Church history: it reduces crucial theological understandings, such as Monism vs. Trinitarianism (Modalism), Jesus as essentially equal to the Father vs. Jesus essentially subordinate to the Father (Arianism), to sectarianism. In this understanding, the long line of heresiarchs stretching from Marcion to Valentinus to Noetus to Paul of Samosata to Arius to Apollinarius and beyond could have been easily dealt with if only the Church had retained the putative New Testament house-church model. False understandings like Gnosticism, Docetism, Modal Monarchianism, Monophysitism, and Monothelitism are in reality merely sectarian divisions that presumably would have never arisen or been easily handled if the Church had not devolved into the division of clergy/laity. This is nonsense. Not only does it completely trivialize the actual protracted and painful process by which the Church arrived at theological understandings of which all orthodox Christians are the inheritors, it makes a mockery of heroes and giants of the Church such as Iranaeus, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nanzianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Leo the Great, and a host of others. Also, it assumes that doctrines like the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, and the hypostatic union are either ready-to-hand, not the result of a long-drawn-out process that at one time (during the Arian controversy) threatened to completely destroy the integrity of the Church, or not particularly important. This is a clear case of the children spitting on the heritage of the fathers, or, more properly, the Fathers. What it says is, "Thanks for the getting the doctrinal part right, which, in any case, is no big deal and clear from Scripture, but I reject the rest of the heritage, the structure, the ministry, and the worship." Once again, this is a thoroughly postmodern way of looking at things.

One final point. In the Preface, Viola asks the question, "Is there a viable way of doing church outside the institutional church, and if so, what does it look like?" The question implies that there's a dichotomy between what the Church is and what she does, that she has a certain presence (only vaguely defined in the book) which can be expressed in a variety of ways, more or less adequately. But the classic way of regarding the Church is as a whole: who she is and what she does are of a piece; she is not free to conjure up new ways of "doing church," because her structure, ministry, and worship are an expression of who she is. If they're not properly expressed, who she is is not properly made manifest.

5 out of 5 stars

4 1/2 Stars . . . I Hope This Takes Hold September 16, 2008
17 out of 20 found this review helpful

Three years ago, I too "pulled the plug" and stopped attending institutional church. I know the real deal. I've youth pastored, done missions in four continents, and gone to Bible college. Sorry, but I can't fake it any longer. I've struggled, however, in knowing how to be part of the solution, and so I picked up Viola's book in hopes of finding some direction.

"Reimagining Church" doesn't have the bitter edge I expected, but neither does it get as practical as I'd hoped. What it does is establish the biblical description of a New Testament church, minus the clergy system and the church polity that have grown up around that. It points out the way western Christianity has become a reflection of its society, basing church structure on secular business systems. I can verify this, having gone through four years of Bible college, during which I grew sick of hearing CEO terminology applied to the vibrant life of organic church.

Viola does a great job of driving home his points about the church's purpose, it's headship (under Christ alone), and its ability to function without sinking millions into building projects while the poor among us remain unfed. I've seen the things he exposes here, and he does not exaggerate. He also tries to point out the errors of recent church movements (mega-churches, emergent churches, etc.) while underlining the good they've set out to do. I sense a heart of love behind this strident call back to biblical, organic church through homes. I'm with Viola one hundred percent.

In studying Scripture, I'd come to many of the same conclusions about fellowship, accountability, and such, but a few questions remained unanswered. I hope Viola addresses some of these in his next book, already in the works. While this particular title gives the theological and biblical basis for organic church, it deals very little with practical issues, such as how to handle a brother who tries to take over, or gets off base theologically, or how to handle offerings and disbursement of funds to those in need, without getting taken advantage of or being embezzled. The list could go on.

He does admit that organic church will be much messier than institutional church--no facades, no two-hour fashion shows, or worship calisthenics, on Sunday morning. Instead, organic church will have all the vibrancy and untidiness of a family. (With families crumbling, maybe this is why so many gravitate to the safe, sterile environment of most Sunday gatherings.)

I love the church, meaning those who know and follow Jesus and are part of His bride. I've watched for forty years while the institutional church at large spins its wheels, and the society around us gets further and further away from wanting anything to do with religion as they've seen it portrayed. I hope this "reimagining" takes hold in believers' hearts everywhere, so that we can see true life rise up again from the ruins of our man-made efforts.

5 out of 5 stars

Timeless and Timely - A Captivating Vision of a New Kind of Church August 10, 2008
15 out of 18 found this review helpful

In "Reimagining Church," Frank Viola has crafted a powerful and engaging book that combines theological precision, spiritual depth, and practical demonstrations which together offer a new vision of church for the twenty-first century. No one can read this book without discovering something fresh about the many texts in the New Testament that describe church and leadership as well as being provoked to look at both in an entirely new way.

I found the book's consistent emphasis on the orthodox teaching of the trinitarian nature of God and how it relates to church practices to be refreshing and insightful. The experiential stories the author presents after each chapter make this a functionally practical book as well as a theological savvy one.

Viola deals with such topics as the role of culture on church practice, the so called doctrine of "covering" and its abuses, the different models of church leadership, apostolic tradition, God's eternal mission and purpose, recent movements that have sought to reform the church, and the organic nature of church - all in a brilliantly provocative and winsome manner.

The first section of the book deals with Community and Gatherings. Here the church is beautifully portrayed as a living organism. An explanation of how this bears upon each dimension of its community life and meetings follows.

The second section deals with Leadership and Accountability. A fresh model of leadership and discipleship is worked out, one that I've not seen before in other books.

In the end, there is an appendix that answers every conceivable objection to the book's arguments. The appendix alone is worth the price of the book in my opinion.

"Reimagining Church" is very comprehensive in what it deals with, yet it is easy to read. Those two elements are rare to find in a non-fiction book today.

I've read many books on mission, church renewal, discipleship, and ecclesiology, and this one is among the very best. Like a skilled instructor, Viola gently walks the reader through his line of thinking point by point. The book is friendly, thought-provoking, persuasive and inspiring.

It forces the reader think in new ways on almost every page. Each chapter builds on the other as an attractive picture of church life based in the nature of God, New Testament teachings, and life experience is sketched out.

Whether or not you've read the deconstructive prequel, "Pagan Christianity?", this is a must-read book. "Reimagining Church" constructively develops the many themes discussed in the first book, but it goes much further, making it a book that stands on its own.

Since I have been a Christian I have always heard that the church is an organism, but this is the first book I have read that develops the implications of that statement and shows why it is relevant to every follower of Jesus.

Some books are timeless in the issues they address. Others are timely. "Reimagining Church" is one of those rare books that are both.

5 out of 5 stars

Finally, some answers to my questions August 1, 2008
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

A great follow-up to Pagan Christianity. As I am beginning a new experience of organic church, Reimagining Church brought answers to some nagging questions, like "How do you celebrate the Lord's Supper without it being a ritual?", "What about biblical church leadership?", and "What does an every-member functioning church look like?". The last chapter is worth the price of the whole book. In it, the author outlines various recent solutions to problems typical to the Church, and gives an insightful and inspiring alternative. I was left with an appetite for more. If you're searching for the kind of church life you see in the New Testament, this book will show you that it is not only possible, but it is happening in our generation. Read it!

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