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From chapter four, "The Shape of the Missional Church"
The fourth section of this book deals with the issue of incarnation and apostolic biblical leadership, so we don't need to preempt what we will say later. However, we will put on the table our belief that the New Testament teaches a fivefold leadership matrix that implies a community of leadership made up of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Eph 4:1 1-13). We think it is the legacy of the Christendom mode that sees Christian community in terms of a triangular hierarchy, with pastor-teachers at the pinnacle. In a post-Christendom world, the yearning for an egalitarian, gracious community of faith requires that leadership be egalitarian and cooperative as well.
We cannot find the term Senior pastor in the New Testament, but we can find Paul's desire for the church to be led by all five leadership giftings, acting in concert for a balanced biblical equipping of the saints. The church's current emphasis on pastors and teachers means chat the cross-cultural missionary heart of the apostles and prophets is always quenched by the concerns for good teaching and pastoral care. So-called "good teaching" is not occurring in a church that has no heart for its community, since the purpose of teaching is to equip Christians for service.
This is not to say that the church should nor be effectively shepherded by godly leaders ("elders" to be precise), but we see Christian leadership operating best as a community within a community. Any suggestion that there should be a distinct class of "priest" in the Christian church is clearly a contradiction of Pauline teaching. And this is not just a criticism to be leveled at the Episcopal churches. The evangelical and Pentecostal churches, with their hierarchies of pastors, are functioning with a priesthood in all but name. The New Testament radically reshapes the language of priesthood, presuming all believers to be priests, able to make their lives sacrifices, and able to gain personal access to the grace of God. There is no distinction in the New Testament between priest and laity, the sacred and the secular, the religious and the everyday. Only when all five functions of leadership are equally balanced do we have a leadership team worthy of Paul's vision in Ephesians. A new congregation should establish a full-fledged leadership matrix from the beginning. But as we said, more on that later.
Watch Your Use of Buildings
Michael attended a church once that had a sign out front that proudly announced: Minister: The whole congregation!" Of course, as we've just mentioned, this is a very biblical way ot looking at the church, with every believer involved actively in ministry But upon entering the church it was apparent that a different message was operational. All the seating faced in one direction coward a high pulpit. The vicar wore a white surplice and a dog collar. During the service, he did about ninety percent of the talking. It might well have been that in the seven-days-a-week life of that congregation every member was involved in ministry, but their public church service sent some very clear signals that day. You can say that there is no distinction between clergy and laity in your church brochure or sign, but the medium is the message. In a later chapter on the medium being message we will address the various unspoken messages we send. But for now, while thinking about the shape of church, we can say that our church buildings and practices betray our refusal to embrace the radical biblical teaching on Christian community.
We advise church planters to watch for the problem of buildings. It seems most churches that don't have their own sanctuary building are devoted to getting one, but we're not so sure this is always necessary. Church planter Andrew Jones cleverly says, "Any church that cannot get by without buildings, finances and paid experts is not fully being church." Having a building, some shared money, and some paid staff doesn't preclude you from being an effective church, but if your church would be lost without them, there is a core problem. Where the church is thriving in Asia Africa, and Latin and South America, many churches are meeting in homes, under trees, beside rivers, in cares, and in public meeting halls. It's in the West, where the institutional church is slowly dying, that there seems to be such a reliance on church buildings. It's been called the church's edifice complex.
In his classic 1975 book, The Problem of Wineskins, Howard Snyder writes that church buildings attest to five facts about the Western church: its immobility, inflexibility, lack of fellowship, pride, and class divisions, "The gospel says 'Go.' but our church buildings say. 'Stay.' The gospel says, 'Seek the lost,' hut our churches say, 'Let the lost seek the church.' "& The medium is the message. And more than that, once a building has been erected, the church program and budget are largely determined by it. In order to service the mortgage, the church has to keep the pews filled and the offerings up, and so the pattern of the attractional mode is reinforced and confirmed. Next time you attend a church service, listen to all the language that betrays a belief that we come into the church building to "meet" God. Subtly the building starts to direct the theology presented in it. We build a sanctuary in which to worship God, and then that building slowly enforces a sacred-versus-secular worldview upon us. What of God's words to King David?
(Note: We are not suggesting that traditional church buildings are unhelpful per se. In fact, we know of several Inner-city churches that have incarnated themselves within trendy young urban communities and have found that meeting in a grand old cathedral like building is very contextual. By lighting the Gothic style building only in candles, and making creative use of shadows and darkness, the echoing acoustics, and the artwork and .sculpture, these churches see it as a contextualization issue. Communities made up artists, film makers, and young people working in new media find the Gothic feel very stimulating. Missional considerations are driving such a choice of building, not faulty theological ones.)
David, living in his own house of cedar, assumed that nothing less should he done for God. But the temple was not God's idea. Even though he accommodated human weakness and allowed David his temple, and the medieval church its cathedrals, and the modern church its sanctuaries, God docs nor need a home- As Stephen says at the moment of his martyrdom, ''The Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands" (Acts 7:48 NASB). Many ministers today would know these biblical verses and agree that God doesn't live in church buildings. But the arrangement of their buildings, the language used in worship services, the myriad unspoken messages that clergy send, belie an unconscious belief in the holiness of church buildings. It is not uncommon to see in older church buildings the following, oh-so-welcoming sign in the church foyer:
THIS IS THE HOUSE OF GOD ENTER IT WITH REVERENCE AND QUIETNESS
And while we don't deny any church its preference for reverential and silent worship meetings, we take issue with the unspoken message that such churches send to their communities, that is, God lives here (and its underlying assumption, "and only here!").
Rob Warner, an English church leader, refers to this in his book, 21sc Century Church, as old temple thinking. Such thinking, he writes, consists of seven assumptions:
1. Since many other cultures have religious buildings it seems natural 10 refer to Christian buildings as the house of the Lord.
2. It is assumed, then, that "proper" worship can only take place in properly constituted religious buildings.
3. Since it is the only designated place of worship, the church building must be a sacred space.
4. Therefore, the only place Christians can meet with God or receive divine revelations must be
in a church building.
5. The church's buildings are a symbol of permanence and stability, like a beacon on a hill.
6. As such a beacon, the church building represents the presence of God in "Christian" countries-
7. If the church's buildings are representative of God, it follows that they must be grander or more impressive than the buildings of other religions.
In effect, this is Christianity attempting to play by the rules of other human religions. T here's a kind of keeping up with the religious Joneses going on here. But as French theologian Jacques Ellul points out, "For the Romans nascent Christianity was not at all a new religion. It was 'antireligion.' This view was well founded. What the first Christian generations were putting on trial was not just the imperial religion, as is often said, but every religion in the known world."8 Christianity is antireligion, not just another religion competing with all other pretenders to the Way. Jesus and his earliest followers saw themselves as ushering in something much more radical than a new religion. Jesus called it the kingdom of God and referred to it in a manner that in no way resembles talk about a new institution or religion. Rob Warner writes ("21st Century Church"),
And so even though Jesus and the early church completely revolutionized the idea of temple worship, the church has failed to sustain this revolution. For the early church, the home was the assumed meeting place. In fact, Robert Banks points out something interesting about the first purpose-built church buildings,
"Not until the third century do we have evidence of special buildings being constructed for Christian gatherings and, even then, they were modeled on the room into which guests were received in the typical Roman and Greek household." (Paul's Idea of Community)
Even when the church was able to erect their own buildings, they modeled them on contemporary lounge rooms able to accommodate around thirty people. The medium is the message. A lounge room is a place of friendship, hospitality, and safety. It is a place where anyone can have his or her say. It is a place where food is shared and discussion can be frank. We do not want to limit church meetings to the home. We know of churches that meet in all sorts of environments (nightclubs, garages, wineries). We simply think it's important to remember what message we sending by our physical environments. If we were doing it all again, we would watch the buildings and the programs.- We would watch the subtle things we do - they communicate a great deal.
pp.68-71
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• © 1999-2004 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on April 25, 2004
