Setting the Church Free

 

There are many voices today calling for the renewal of the church. You cannot be involved in church ministry for long without being deluged with mail offers for books, tapes, and seminars which promise to give you that missing ingredient which will revitalize your church and bring you back to the very times of the apostles.

One thing I have noticed, however. Most of us who have tried the various remedies that promise transformation have found to our dismay that our churches did not change much. More specifically, our people did not change much—even after convincing the Eldership to implement yet another evangelism plan, or discipleship program, or Vacation Bible School, or stewardship program.

What is going on with the church in America? How is it that after all the decades of talking and writing and experimenting on the subject of church renewal that the American church is still pretty lifeless and ineffective? Most of any church's new members are "transfer growth" from other churches. Most Christians do not change very much from year to year in terms of their practice of biblical faith. Most ministers and elders are discontent with themselves and the progress of their people in the things of the Lord. What is going on here?

The Cell Church Movement

We may begin to find part of the answer if we consider how the church has been prospering in Third World countries around the globe. As we are preoccupied with the failures of the stagnating version of church life in America, we may not notice how the Lord has been blessing his church in other cultures. In many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America, for example, Christ's church has been growing by leaps and bounds and average Christians have been maturing to rather impressive spiritual stature.

Many of these spiritually-dynamic churches follow a pattern that has come to be identified by the description "cell church." A cell church is one whose structure is based on small, home-based "cells" which carry on the ministry of the church in that small, intimate setting. They emphasize the Scriptural teaching that each member has spiritual gifts which are vital to church health, that Christian growth occurs best in the context of a face-to-face relationship, that the church is people, not programs. These churches are not oriented toward a building or a single leader; they are de-centralized, and for this reason they grow at sometimes phenomenal rates. Cells split and beget new cells, over and over, and leaders are constantly being developed in each generation of cell life.

The cell-church movement has begun to catch on in the United States with most major cities now having at least one church proclaiming its commitment to these proven principles of church life. Most cell-based churches that are really successful are those that have begun from scratch with their philosophy clearly spelled out in advance. It is next to impossible to transform the typical American church into a cell church model because of some of the root assumptions that hamper most churches here.

I believe that the cell church people are onto something. They have rediscovered some very important principles for how the Lord wants his church to be shaped in the New Testament era. The model is by no means perfect (for example, it generally does not emphasize the importance of the family unit as the basis of the church's strength and therefore does not necessarily train men to be biblical family leaders). However, the patterns of cell church life do point out, by way of contrast, some of the weaknesses that afflict most American churches.

Let's look at three assumptions that have created a cultural straitjacket for the churches of our land, assumptions which have no basis in the Word of God. Each of these is a gut-level, unexamined presupposition that dramatically influences the church of America, to its hurt. The cell church concept recognizes and overcomes these limitations. So should any church that hopes to regain New Testament vitality.

1. The Church as Building and Programs

"Here's the church, and here's the steeple; open the doors, and see all the people." Do you remember that little hand game you were taught as a child as you interlocked your fingers, folding your hands palmward, and using your index fingers as a steeple and your thumbs as doors? Then when you opened the "doors" you exposed all the other finger-people.

The subtle message of this nifty bit of finger play is one that is consistently reinforced throughout our culture, including among Christians: "Church" means a building in which religious people gather to worship. "We are going to church," most of us still say week after week, meaning: we are going to that building we call a "church". (I still fall into this usage even after years of trying to make my language fit biblical standards.)

Now, of course, most of us quickly recognize the error of this way of speaking if we stop and think about it. We know better: the church is people, not a building. The point is, though, that the idea that the church is a place is strongly embedded in our thinking and in the practice of most churches. Church life revolves around the building. New churches measure their health by how soon they can begin their building program (usually by becoming financial slaves to pagans—borrowing from a bank). Older churches gauge their ongoing vitality by whether they need an addition to their building. Most of the life of the church people revolves around the building and its usage.

That usage is the church's programs. This is the other side of this cultural trap: a church is defined by the programs that it conducts for its constituents. All of church life is viewed in terms of the building and the programs. There are programs related to worship; programs for teaching; programs for evangelism; programs for men, for women, and especially for children; programs for missions; programs for helping the poor; programs to help keep track of the programs. And committees—do churches ever love committees! They go hand in hand with programs, and they usually meet in church buildings.

Cell church people refer to entities that function this way as "program base design" churches. Sincere, gospel-believing, Christ-loving Christians in most every church are trying to build on the foundation of Jesus Christ. The trouble is, what they are building on the foundation is programs and facilities instead of people.

Jesus said he would build his church (Matthew 16:18), but the building his Word describes is one made up of "living stones" being built into a "spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5). The "temple" his apostle was concerned to preserve was composed of the Christians in Corinth who were indwelt by God's Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16). In the New Testament the church has nothing to do with buildings and programs. The church is the people of God, gathered together by the Holy Spirit for worship, fellowship, instruction, and ministry.

Buildings can serve the purposes of the church of Jesus Christ, and programming is unavoidable insofar as anything people do in an organized and systematic way is a program. The problem is that today Christians see the building and the programs as the church. People come and go, but the building and the programming remain. When there is a need, the instinctual response is to create a program to meet the need. The programs are supposed to be for the people, but in practice the people are often for the programs (and the church staff functions to keep the program slots full of the necessary people to make them run). In the New Testament needs were met in the context of an intimate family-like group of people who were connected to other such groups.

If the church is to be truly revitalized in our day, it must return to this simple bit of Bible wisdom: the church is people, and people, not programs, meet needs.

2. The Clergy/Laity Distinction (Ministers and Elders)

The idea of the professional church leader is so deeply embedded in the consciousness of most Christians as to be almost beyond recognition and challenge. But challenge it we must, for it has devastating consequences for the church.

Leadership must have academic training and credentials, or at least a special "call" from God—so states this unbiblical trap into which the church has fallen. Professional ministers are a holdover from the ancient corruption of church practice and are antithetical to biblical patterns for church leadership.

The one version of this fallacy says that a man must have special academic training, like college degrees, to be qualified to serve God's people. That is bad enough. But the full concept is worse: if he has college training he is qualified to lead the church. Since when? Where did biblical people get this idea? It only proves how thoroughly the church has bought into the world's system.

In Scripture the only way to become a leader is through an extended period of service, first in the home, and then in the church, during which the fruit of godly character and maturity is evidenced in observable ways. Read and consider the qualifications for elders, deacons recorded in 1 Timothy 3:1-13 and Titus 1:6-9. A man is qualified to lead the church after he has a proven track record of spiritual leadership in the home, after he has lived and served among God's people long enough for them to see the fruit of spiritual maturity, after he has lived in the Word and the world long enough to be able to use the Word to guard and build up God's people. You do not become a church leader by going to school.

Nor do we see any biblical warrant for the idea that a man is to be set apart for leadership on the basis of some subjective "call" he has received. The calls in Scripture were special calls of God to particular historical tasks. The only call a church should heed is the call of God upon a man who has demonstrated the qualities of service and leadership already in his life, particularly in his home life.

Church leaders are supposed to be home-grown. They arise in the context of a local church where the members of the body can see their spiritual qualifications. They are trained on-the-job as they expand their leadership beyond their families and begin to shepherd other families in the body. Leadership grows out of service to others, not out of schooling or a private sense of calling. Because of its distorted approach to choosing leaders, the church today has many unqualified men in that position.

The "minister or elder" philosophy also tends to stifle the full use of the gifts of the body of Christ. It is commonplace for a church today to expect the professional minister to do the ministry when the Bible says that a leader's job is to equip the members to do the ministry (Ephesians 4:11,12).

If the church is to be revitalized it must begin to practice biblical patterns for selecting its leaders.

3. Teaching Removed from Life

Another element of the cultural trap in which the church finds itself is its concept of teaching. In most American churches today discipleship is believed to be accomplished primarily through passing on information.

Every evangelical church stresses the need for teaching God's Word, and this is indeed one of the hallmarks of any true church of Jesus Christ. However, the definition of teaching used in our culture (and therefore in our churches) is one shaped by the Western emphasis on the mind. Teaching is understood to be transferring information from one person to another.

Biblical discipleship includes such a transference of facts, but it is much more. Discipleship moves beyond teaching to training and modeling. Making disciples is a matter of shaping not just the mind but the whole life of a convert to Christ. Sitting in a classroom discussing truth, or even the application of truth to life, is not adequate to produce a disciple of Jesus.

A disciple must share the life of a more mature disciple, modeling his life and shaping his values according to the living pattern he is following. Just as a leader must be produced on-the-job, so a church member must be trained to maturity on-the-job, in the context of real life situations as they are lived and shared with other believers. This cannot occur very well in the typical classroom setting of a church Sunday School of Bible study. It requires an intimate association of a small number of believers who spend a good deal of time together and who are committed to each other's growth.

Returning to the Family-Based Church

The cell church concept is on target in a number of the insights it has gained from Scripture. The church needs to be set free from the numerous cultural traps into which it has fallen. We would do well to learn from this model. However, as I wrote above, this particular movement has weaknesses in other areas, particularly when it comes to families.

Here is what I am excited about. I think the Lord is giving us a wonderful opportunity to marry the insights and strengths of two movements of God's Spirit: home education and cell churches. Home education has been playing an unparalleled role in renewing the family, calling it back to God's plan. Cell churches have been playing a similar role in renewing the church. Unfortunately, most home educators have not seen the need to connect their renewed family to a renewed church; and cell churches have not seen that the church must be founded on godly family units.

What we need is a return to the family-based church. This is a church that is characterized by:

 1) a family-like quality in its life and ministry, with an emphasis on relationships and discipleship within a small group of believers (cell church);

 2) an emphasis on building biblical family units where parents disciple their children and fathers learn spiritual leadership at home (home education).

Families need the church family; the church needs godly family units. These two institutions are God's means of spreading his kingdom in the world. It is time they began working together again.

I can foresee home educating families gathering together across the nation (and the world) to form churches of the cell church model. It is a natural combination. And it is a model that can be reproduced without limit all over the globe . Call them "family churches;" call them "house churches;" call them anything you like. But the family-church combination could be the basis of a thorough renewal and revival.

It is time to create "new wineskins" to hold the new wine that God is pouring out in our day. The family-based church idea may sound new to most modern ears, but to ears attuned to the Word of God it is an old idea whose time has returned.

Comments RKM: Need I say any more. Emph. are in bold are done by me.