SimpleChurch Journal aka House Church Blog

Honest Look at Jesus

This is a blog about "church," so-to-speak, but maybe we miss the mark a bit if we don't keep putting the focus back on the One who precedes the church and everything else.  The church is, no doubt, meant to be a much more radical movement than we have understood it to be.  How much more important is it for us to see that Jesus, the head of the church, is a far more radical man/God than we can even begin to understand.  He is the One we, His church, are designed to imitate.  Perhaps if we get Jesus right, and our imitation of Him in keeping with who He is, we will naturally get church right.

Jesus is so... much... more than we can begin to define in a few words, or thoughts, or even a lifetime of both.

He is uncontainable, unpredictable, unorthodox, and unconventional.  As soon as someone would try to put Him in a box, He would break the mold.  If you thought He was meek, He would pick up a whip.  If you thought He was kosher, He would start talking about other people eating his flesh.  If you thought He was a paragon of mercy, He would pronounce woes and judgements.

But wait!  If you asked Him to condemn a sinful woman, He proclaimed forgiveness and grace.  If you told Him a man was a tax-collecting thief, he loved him all the more.  If you nailed Him to a cross, He prayed for you.

He was (and is) radically and completely God... living above the expectations of others, the mores of his culture, and the rules of society.  Tell Him that the Sabbath was for resting, and He would work.  Tell Him not to touch lepers, and He would hold and heal them.  Tell him not to socialize with Samaritans, and He would deliberately converse with a Samaritan woman.

He marched to His own drumbeat.  He lived with a vision set only on kingdom.  He walked out of a perspective that never placed value on temporal things.  He was not of this world and every moment that He lived and word that He spoke portrayed this.

Do we really even know who He is, really?  How honestly are we willing to look at Him knowing that our calling is to imitate Him and be like Him?

I'm just thinking that if we kept our focus really on Him, every church, house church, simple church, and mega-church would be absolutely, thoroughly, and completely transformed and turned upside down in more ways than we can imagine merely by the irresistable force of the life of Jesus pulsing through His imitators.

Hierarchies Create Dependency

We westerners tend to think of ourselves as independent people who are learning to live fully our God-given life and potential.  But Kirshenbaum (Finding The True Meaning Of The Events In Our Lives) challenges this:

I think people today have trouble being who they really are because as social creatures we live in a hierarchical world in which we're highly dependent on others.

She suggests that the reason we become dependent on the hierarchical systems we live in is because of our need for approval and our need to keep relationships intact.  She says that we tend to feel that in order to survive and "to get what we need we sometimes have to become less like the people we authentically are."

I have not read this book, I was only provided with some quotes from a friend (John Gray).

However, it is worth looking at the way that hierarchy in our culture has shaped the way we are and has caused us to become comfortable (dependent?) on similar structures within our churches.  Perhaps the problem is not just hierarchy within churches but our own inability to find our authentic identity in Christ.  The result is that out of our neediness we fall into a dependency on external authorities to tell us how to live and act in order to be "approved by" or "okay" with others.  In other words, at some level we are comfortable with hierarchical structures because they meet our need for external affirmation and approval.

As long as we need our approval and identity to be affirmed by externals, we will likely create hierarchical type systems to be part of--even in simple/house church models.  As long as we need our approval and identity to be affirmed by others, we will probably relate wrongly to spiritual authority including genuine, servant, spiritual authority.

The answer, therefore, is not simply to reject forms of church that are hierarchical.  Nor is the answer to reject community all together.

Somehow, we are going to come to the place where whole people, fully alive in God, are able to join with one another in healthy interdependence.  We know that a healthly marriage relationship comes from two healthy people who are not emotionally dependent on each but healthy enough to support, give, love, and care for the other.  Perhaps that is exactly what is necessary for healthy spiritual community: a group of people who are emotionally, authentically whole who are able to fully commit themselves to love, care for, and support others.

In other words, just attempting to come out from under "hierarchical, unbiblical church structures" does not get to the root of the issue.  It's growing out of our unhealthy dependencies so that, as whole people, we can contribute generously to our spiritual communities and world from a place of authentic fullness in Christ while developing vibrant "one another" relationships.

Time Magazine Weighs In... Hot Off the Press

It took Time magazine several months to publish an article they have been working on regarding house churches.  Their reporters were hanging out at the Denver House Church Conference last September!  But... the article (quite well done) just came out in the recent issue with the headline:

"There's No Pulpit Like Home"

and the subheading:

"Some Evangelicals are abandoning megachurches for minichurches--based in their own living rooms"

You can download a pdf version here: Download time_magazine.pdf

Or You can read the whole article here thanks to SimplyChurch.