Frank Viola’s Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity is a vitally important — even radical — reassessment of the church that attempts to encourage evangelicals out of clericalism and into something much more like what was taught by the apostles and practiced in the first century. Several summers ago, I examined it here, here and here.
Have you ever thought about why the books of our New Testament are ordered the way they are?
They’re not alphabetical, like a reference work. We can see that right away.
They’re definitely not completely chronological, like most novels or histories. Read the NT through a few times and that will certainly become evident. There is some evidence of chronology, certainly, in the sense that the four gospels come first, but Acts is a history that spans a period of decades during which most of Paul’s epistles were written. If we were able to determine precisely when each epistle was written, we might try to slot them in between chapters of Acts, but that would make for an awkward read.
Some have argued that the order is providential (in fact, in 1864, Thomas D. Bernard did that precisely), but good luck trying to make that case. You’d pretty much have to take that on faith.
The role of women in the church is one of those topics that I’ve spent little time examining in this forum for various personal reasons.
But you may remember that despite my general enthusiasm expressed a few weeks back for Frank Viola’s “reimagination” of the church in all its various aspects, I found myself unable to get on board with all his views in the area of church authority and decision-making, and also expressed concerns about what I suspected might be Viola’s view of the role of women in the church (though in the pages of Reimagining Church, he never quite spells it out).
Other than that, I love much of what he has to say.
How do we make decisions in the church? What is the teaching of the New Testament?
In his book Reimagining Church, Frank Viola contends that the normal method of making major decisions in the church is by consensus, not just of leadership but of every believer in a local church. (You can find my review here.)
He uses the council at Jerusalem in Acts 15 as his sole scriptural evidence.
How does your church go about making decisions?
Perhaps you don’t actually know. In very large churches, the process of deciding what is going to be done may be quite opaque to those who meet there. Where there is a very distinct hierarchy in place, perhaps decisions are made unilaterally, or maybe they are initiated by a ‘head pastor’ or equivalent and signed off on by a board or council of elders. Then again, maybe they are arrived at by discussion among elders and presented fait accompli to the congregation. Or perhaps opinions are solicited and discussed, and a decision is later made with the promise that “all voices have been heard and all opinions considered”.
Maybe there are lots of ugly politics involved that nobody really wants to talk about. I don’t know your church, so I won’t presume.
I wouldn’t normally be the type to start writing a positive review before completely finishing a book, but I’ve been enjoying Frank Viola’s Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity immensely.
Viola is not merely a theorist. In 1988, he left what he calls “institutional Christianity” and began meeting in “organic churches”.
Organic churches are not the latest vegan trend. They are local gatherings mapped to what we read in the New Testament. They seek to practice Christianity as it was practiced in the first century, minus any details that were merely a product of the culture(s) in which the early church grew and thrived. The result is a church that, at least on paper, seems both relevant and authentically “New Testament” in ways I’ve never seen before.
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You know how it goes: you find a blog or website you enjoy, with writers who grab your attention and content you can really sink your teeth into. You devour everything you can find in their archive, bookmark it and wait expectantly for more of the same.
Then ... nothing.
Okay, this may not be everybody’s experience; not everyone reads as voraciously as I do. But if you do, you recognize the creeping feeling of disappointment when something you like doesn’t appear predictably, when the quality becomes spotty or the posts are so short they don’t even merit a “[Read More]” link.