Pagan Christianity offers up many exciting thoughts on what it means to be an organic church but at the same time, the book is somewhat discouraging. While I believe Frank Viola is dead on, at least close, about the history of our Church practices and their pagan roots, I have to sit back and sort through what seems to be a very useful work written in a spirit of anger. I personally do not believe the book was written in a spirit of anger but unfortunately this is the way that it comes across.
Viola comes across as somewhat of an angry prophet and prophetic is the book indeed. PC is full of direction but it hard to sort through because of the many criticisms. Viola is heavily against the idea of “institutionalized church” which leads people to think that Viola is all about “house church”. This simply is not the case. Viola’s ultimate purpose seems to be about conveying organic church. There are ideas to be taken up that would immensely help us get back to being the Church instead of just going to church. Here are some of the ideas by chapter.
Chapter 2. The Church Building. The idea that Church is a building is destructive. Those that follow this notion generally meet on Sunday’s, maybe wednesday and that is Church to them. Church is not a building with walls. It’s a living and breathing organism that should infiltrate all aspects of our lives because we are the Church!
Chapter 3. Order of Worship. The takeaway from this chapter is making sure everyone is involved in worship and not just select individuals. It shouldn’t be one individual making the call on how to worship God. It should be a corporate experience where all believers can openly and spontaneously worship God together.
Chapter 4. The Sermon. What would happen if the sermon was removed from a worship service. Would you still be worshipping? While I disagree about the total destructiveness of sermons with Viola, they can be deteriorating to a Church to the point where everyone else comes as spectators instead of people who God speaks through also.
Chapter 5. The Pastor. The clergy/laity divide may be the most harmful language the church has internally. It is a greater division than denominations themselves so we must be careful to lead in such a way that all members are using what God has gifted them with and not just the pastor.
Chapter 6. Sunday Morning Costumes. Why we believe we have to dress up in expensive clothes to honor God I’ll never know. Wouldn’t the money we spend on expensive clothes be suited better to serving the poor? The real point is why dress up to look special on Sunday instead of dressing like we do the rest of the week? It puts on a false image that is not us. If we wanted to honor God by how we dress up on Sunday’s, then why don’t we do it the rest of the week to honor God? Sunday isn’t the only day we should be honoring God.
Chapter 7. Ministers of Music. The same concept as Chapter 5. There is a division that gets created between the worship team and others that have gathered in some churches. This causes others to not engage their God given gifts as a Church body.
Chapter 8. Tithing and Clergy Salaries. Not going to touch this for a while.
Chapter 9. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Viola argues that Baptism is conversion-initiation as practiced by the first Christians I have to agree with him. In American Christianity, people accept Christ and then get baptized. The early church model was to initiate following Christ by baptism. Viola gets closer to what the Lord’s Supper really is than what most suggest, yet I disagree with him still. The Lord’s Supper as we call it is symbolic of a marriage ceremony but that imagery has been lost. I’ll blog more on this later.
Chapter 10. Christian Education. Academic education is very valuable but has caused many Christians to miss what is really going on. We have set up institutions that qualify us for ministry but in God’s Kingdom it is God who gifts us to serve where He wants us to serve. It is not a matter of being called to ministry. As soon as we accept Christ into our lives, we are all ministers.
Chapter 11. Reapproaching the New Testament. Approach Scripture like its a narrative that God desires for you to be a part of. It’s time to quit picking it a part and creating lists and categories for everything. While we may never get things fully figured out (we really will not), we can be fully immersed into God’s story of redemption and restoration.