The Massaging of Today’s Church Language by Gary Goodell

Author:		Gary Goodell
Posted:		11/25/2007; 4:37:40 PM
Topic:		The Massaging of Today’s Church Language by Gary Goodell
Msg #:		399 (top msg in thread)
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One of the big battlefields we face in today’s church is this “war over words.” Somehow the enemy has dupped us into believing that if we just change what we “call” something, it changes everything. Too often, giving something a new name merely clouds, or even hides its true meaning, masking it and preventing us from getting to the core or root of why it is being called something to begin with.

We are in the beginning stages of the Third Reformation. Being purged and cleansed from so many old practices and so many dangerous old teachings reveals that so many of our practices are a picture of cultural adaptation and a lot of bad habits. The fact is that whereas most of our theology is sound, our practice is not. While most evangelical churches are orthodox in belief, they are heretical in practice.

It is getting harder and harder to discern the old wineskin because of all the paint jobs with all of these subtle shifts in our language, our nomenclature, our semantics, our glossary of terms which keep us from being changed, and being reformed. So, how do we ever get out of this quagmire and into true reformation if they keep changing the rules by changing the terms?

I have often said, one of our biggest battles is, “talking new and acting old,” and that “the biggest enemy of the new is the part of the old that still works.”

In this season, when, “Permission Is Granted To Do Church Differently In The 21st Century,” some of our enemies are the titles or names or labels we use to “do” church, and even the new names of the places where we “do” church.

But instead of dealing with and repenting off these wrong practices, we just keep playing the “name game.” Instead of having local church leaders addressed as Senior Pastors (by the way, ever wondered that if someone is a “senior” pastor, does that make everyone else “junior” pastors?) we now call them Lead Pastors, or even the newest one, Biblical Life Coaches.

Sadly, we are missing the whole point. No matter what we call them, we are still addicted to the hierarchical protocol for local church leaders that is neither biblical nor helpful, and quite frankly, dangerous. There are no “pastor led” churches in the Book of Acts, and Ephesians 4 “pastors” are a part of a larger context of a regional apostolic team.

We also enjoying calling our buildings or facilities “centers,” or “campuses,” or “gathering places.”

Well, it sounds good on paper (or in the church bulletin), but nothing has changed. It is still a building, and whether it is leased, rented or owned, it is where, in the mind of the average body of believers, that all of the activities of the church happens. And afterall, we have to steward our facilities and all our stuff, right? Funny things, our stuff!? For followers of Jesus, who had no place to lay His head, with the only thing of value He owned (a seamless robe) being gambled for at His death. What stuff!?

The Bible calls the church the “ekklesia,” or “called out ones,” but today’s church is not a “called out” group at all, it is but more like a “called in” one. “Called in” to gather at a certain address, at a certain time, to do things in a certain way, to listen to certain professionals under certain practices, only to be counted and to be charged for the usage.

The very word “church” when defined means a community of people called by God, called from the world, and called to reach the world. The Scriptures teach that the church is not a building or a location, but rather the church is the “people” of God on a mission.

In essence, the church is people who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who is transforming their character and giving them gifts they are to use for service. Every believer is to use whatever he or she has to serve one another and his or her neighbors. Not to just pad a pew and pay the professional to pontificate.

By the way, as I have recently being criticized for becoming more forceful and even bolder in confronting the church, I was reminded of Chesterton. “Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.” (G.K. Chesterton). Quit frankly “Scarlet,” I am more angry and less tolerant than I have ever been. Probably because the bar has been raised and the price is higher than ever for setting God’s people free.

Facilities or Freedom?

I am not exactly sure why a small group of believers growing in a home setting suddenly gets dissatisfied with the weekly “building up” of the saints and suddenly decide they need to put the saints in a “building.” But I can tell you by first-hand experience, when you get a facility, everything radically changes.

The church was designed to be a movement. That dynamic seems to change rapidly when the church gets an address. Somehow, someway, our infatuation with facilities takes us out of the fluid mode to the maintenance mode in a nano-second.

How can we "be" the church if we keep "going" to church? God wants to have full custody of us rather than just weekend visits. Probably one of the biggest strongholds that keep us from the freedom offered in the Third Day is our "edifice complex," and how the building dictates our priorities, our purpose and consistently aborts our freed passions. All of this, along with simply being a very poor use of our resources. Just how much of the gross national debt is actually spiritual in nature as leaders of the body of Christ have hocked the resources of the church, mortgaged us to the hilt and now we are broke with no resources to obey the Great Commission and hasten the second coming of Christ?

I have many friends who tell me how they have learned to steward real estate in such a way that it does not dictate to them as to what they do as a church. Trying to use facilities for a sending center, an equipping base, marketplace ministries, etc., is very different than the poorly used facilities of our day that constantly demand upkeep and care.

We too rent and use facilities all over our city for the larger regional meetings and conferences we have. We will rent a hotel banquet room, a school auditorium, or even a convention center and invite the five-fold ministers that influence our Region to come together to equip the saints.

By networking with the simple house churches and marketplace ministries within our Region, we blend together the multi-gifted worship expressions within and throw one or two of these larger conference-type parties per year, with some of these gatherings actually growing into an elep, the word for thousands in Exodus 18:21.

But we do not have to own or become mortgaged to the hilt to successfully use these facilities. The first century church grew quite well within the context of organic city-wide church without building buildings to meet in.

Too often, the vision, the flexibility and the freedom of a local body of believers meeting when God leads and where God leads must submit to the meetings that must happen weekly in the same spot, at the same time and for the same purpose. Mainly, to pass the plate to pay the mortgage and steward the budget.

The two phone calls the average pastor makes each Monday upon which his or her identity hangs must stop. The call to the usher for the head count and the call to the treasurer for the coin count get very old. Especially when these quantifiers of “nickels” and “noses,” are far from the call to “equip” and release others.”

Paul Viera’s new book, Jesus Has Left The Building summarizes the litany of what facilities do and what facilities dictate:

• it’s somewhere you go
• it happens on a special day of the week
• you have a professional to tell you what to do
• all it requires of you is attendance and fees paid
• there exists a hierarchical command structure
• meetings come before people
• it has committees
• it has programs
• it has a corporate vision
• it has a corporate name
• it segregates itself from other believers
• it is more concerned with structure than content
• quality is sacrificed for quantity

This House-to-House Simple Church model tied together with Medium-size worship gatherings and Larger Regional Celebrations and/or Conferences really does release to us the best of both the bigger and smaller than Church-as-we-know-it paradigm.

Most of us live in a culture that has buildings we can rent and use, many of which sit idle and available during those times when we need them for those larger meetings, those equipping times, those Regional Expressions.

Meanwhile, our weekly house churches (it is estimated that 20 million adults in American now attend a weekly house church) meet where we live, in what we already have, our homes and apartments, with the schools, the clubhouses, the recreation centers, the auditoriums and the banquet rooms just waiting to be scheduled and used. And God forbid that we might actually meet outside the four walls in parks, beaches, streets and campgrounds.

Imagine your normal local church with 50% to 70% of its budget going to maintaining the poorly used campus suddenly being released to a house church model. Those monies now used for outreach, missions and people. A single-cell weekend meeting gets multiplied to ten, twenty, thirty simple house churches, with the staff of the church leading through these new house church leaders.

You call these groups together in a rented space for a monthly worship celebration and an annual conference with the weekly activities centered around the relational house churches with the ongoing mentoring and coaching of those house church leaders.

Imagine doing this with half the cost of the weekend meeting, and also with the full benefit of the leadership team being able to do their Ephesians 4 job of equipping others.

Barna states in his newest book Revolution, cultural trends indicate an unleashed massive shift in emphasis from the congregational-Sunday-building-based modality to other modalities or expressions of the Church. There are other micro-models, like House Church, or “simple church” fellowships. These are small aggregations of people who meet in someone’s home on a regular basis to fulfill all the functions of a traditional congregation, especially such elements as worship, teaching, fellowship and stewardship. Barna notes, that these groups are not the same as the widespread small groups, cell groups, and home fellowships that are spawned by local churches to supplement what occurs on the local church campus.

There is the family faith experience as he describes that becomes the primary spiritual unit that pursues faith matters, together, with parents and their children. Cyberchurch, referring to the range of spiritual experiences delivered through the Internet. I would also add to this list the shift to the rebirth marketplace ministries, where believers function together with like passion in a certain gift or task-driven ministry that becomes their mainstay of Kingdom involvement.

Without grasping the science of all this, we found portions of this almost invisible network within our geographic sphere, region and county. They were already living in organic communities through small group relationships and yet were also longing to be a part of a larger worship expression.

The need and to practice Regional Church has become more and more defined. Our goal is to create a permissive atmosphere in which we cultivate the local passions and giftings that are on people in our larger area, and then to create an umbrella, or “covering” that allows these individual ministries, churches, fellowships and groups to function both with their individual sphere and calling. To do this means to make room and bless all that the Father is doing in the region, and then invite all of these unique expressions to come together for the bigger picture as well.

Our goals have not been just to bless existing ministries, but to help identify, recruit, birth and engage a whole new generation of believers to see how God wants to use them, all of them. So whether you lead an outreach ministry, or intercession ministry, or care ministry, or ministry to the poor, or an equipping ministry, you are part of the bigger picture of the fabric of the region - His church in your area, in your locale.

This Is All Simple Church!

It is a church planter’s dream to be encouraging and releasing and planting organic, relational, simple churches, all over the world as a growing missional network.

By “simple church,” we mean a way of doing and being church that is so simple that any believer would respond by saying, “I could do that!” A church not constrained by structure or buildings or programs or professionals, but by the ongoing needs of a group of people who act like extended family. Where the family or household (oikos) is the focus, and change to becoming spiritual parents willing to raise or disciple spiritual sons and daughters.

And by “simple” we do not mean a lower quality of church life. Just the opposite! While no structure or format can guarantee quality, smaller, participatory, family-like environments are ideally suited for today’s culture and will assist greatly is helping people to become passionate disciples of Jesus Christ.

But all of this requires a new kind of training for a new kind of church. Years of sitting in traditional church has not prepared us to do church in the manner described in the New Testament. We have been taught to come, to sit, to watch and to listen to what others have prepared. (Someone described it as “sit, soak and sour”.) This is Spectator Church. And is no way to train believers to be priests.

By contrast, the church described in the Bible invites us to engage in a kind of Participatory Church, where everybody talks, laughs, eats, worships, in an atmosphere where all learn, all minister, and all grow.

Simple Church, what a thought? No props, no pulpits, no pews, no platforms, no professionals, no public address systems. Simple Church, just participation.

We have watched now as, over the years, a permissional and missional church gets released in a region. Suddenly, equipping-leaders are equipping, teaching-leaders are teaching, and everyone gets something to do. The dancers dance, the singers sing, the prophets prophesy, the teachers teach, the caregivers care, the vision-casters cast.

The morale of God’s people perks up with more hands-on ministry getting done than any planned program could hope to foster. We know that the only way to reach the nations is through the “saints movement."