So call me a pagan... 2

A number of people have commented here and elsewhere, that you have to look past the "overstatements"  in "Pagan Christianity" and once you do that, there really are some good ideas in the book.

Well...

I'm certainly going to try. No, really!
But here's the thing.

What if the whole premise of the book is not just an "overstatement"... but a kind of big, huge, whopping over-reach of such grand proportions and sheer arrogance that whatever good is said later is completely eclipsed by the magnitude and complete nerve it takes to open one's mouth (or type on one's keyboard) and make such an Al-Gorsian I-Invented-The-Internet kind of statement?

You know... what if?

Before we go chapter-by-chapter, I just wanted to deal with a couple of key statements.

The first is arguably the central tenet, the supporting pillar of the whole book. It's found on page xx of the intro, written by Frank Viola, and it says this:

"We are also making an outrageous proposal: that the church in its contemporary, institutional form has neither a biblical nor a historical right to exist."

Again, I'll give you a moment to go back and read that again. Slowly.

Okay- got it?
1st Baptist down the street? Illegitimate.
Willow Creek? Saddleback? Illegitimate.
Mars Hill (pick one)? No right to exist.

Okay, everybody... shut 'em down!
Seriously- party's over. We're done here.

Please do as Frank has done and leave "the institutional church to begin gathering with Christians in the New Testament fashion..."

Can someone call Rick and Bill and let them know? And you better break the news to Mark Driscoll. This is really gonna hit him hard.

Viola is absolutely correct about one thing, though. This is an "outrageous" statement.
("Outrageous - greatly exceeding bounds of reason or moderation")

So far beyond the pale is this central tenet of the book that I have trouble taking the rest seriously- even on the parts where I might agree.

And the whole book seems BUILT on silly, misguided ideas like this and like "Nothing so hinders the fulfillment of God's eternal purpose as does the present-day pastoral role."

Really?

"Nothing"?

NOTHING?

So... ME. I'm doing more to hinder God's purpose in the world than say... sin, than Satan, than brokenness and selfishness and all the other crap out there.

Little old me?

Like I said before- Whoa.

Joe Thorn encapsultes the problem here well:
"I do not want to dismiss the authors’ concerns, but it’s hard for me to take them seriously when they so grossly overstate things.Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy provocative books. I want others to challenge me and force me to re-think my practices and beliefs. The problem for me is that the book reads more like an ecclesiological version of the Loose Change conspiracy theories concerning the 9/11 attack. A lot of information is collected, assumptions are made, and in the end the final interpretation of history is simply wrong. Not only does their attempt to uncover the truth fail, but more importantly I fear their legit concerns will be ignored by many while others will read the book as gospel because it presents itself as unquestionable history with Barna’s research seal of approval."

Just the page before he drops the whole "right to exist" bomb, Viola makes this other central-to-the-book statement: "I believe the first-century church was the church in its purest form, before it was tainted or corrupted."

Now, while that's not outrageous, per se, it's simply wrong.
Viola acknowledges that the church had problems, but was "an organic entity" that "expressed itself far differently from the institutional church today."

As someone who's thought a lot about organic expressions of church in the last couple of years, and is doing his best to lead and coach a community in being an organic expression of who they are as Christ-followers, not who I desire them to be, one of the things I've had to learn is that everyone is different. Big revelation, eh?

That is, an organic expression of church here in Portland will probably look and feel and even function differently than one, in say, Idaho or Florida- different people, different place, different outworking of church.

Here's my outrageous proposal: The same holds true for different times as well.

See, I'm not in the "back to the first church!" camp. Maybe briefly in Bible College, but now?

I'm just in the "back to loving Jesus and working that out in community" camp.  I see the church  both dealing with problems and maturing over the centuries. A living organism changes, it grows.

And the problem with making a statement (as Viola does) like "I left  the institutional church to begin gathering with Christians in the New Testament fashion..." is that it implies that it's impossible to be an organic, faithful-to-Jesus community of people, unless you look just like they did back then- you know, when the church was "in its purest form, before it was tainted and corrupted." 

This, I think, was the 5 minute period between the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and whenever someone said "Okay- what's next?" And it for sure was before the Corinthians decided to "go organic" with some fairly radical ideas about family relations.

My point is this: Organic expressions of church today can and do happen in house churches, in pub churches and even in churches with (gasp) buildings. The church is a spiritual entity and endeavor. The outside trappings that this book rails against may or may not be healthy, depending on how they are used, and I'm going to be the last one to say that we don't need to rethink how we use things like buildings and programs and video venues (especially video venues).

But for all my critique of consumeristic church as unhealthy and all my emphasis on and hope in organic expressions of Church, even my cajones aren't sufficiently large to enough to do what Viola and Barna are doing here.

Tell everyone else they have no right to do church they way they want to.

Man.

And I sure hope I'm not the only one who sees telling people they have no right to do church a certain way while trying to wave the flag of "organic" church is inherently self-contradictory.