Vol. 7, No. 1 - June 2001
HOUSE CHURCH DIRTY DIAPERS
CHRONICLES NUMBER ONE
A Plea for Some Fresh Air
I
really want the biblical house church movement to succeed. I really do. But after eight years in this thing, I am becoming increasingly convinced that unless some key issues are resolved, the house church movement will expire unhappily. I have categorized these crucial problems as "Dirty Diapers", which I list here alphabetically: (1) Cheap Talk and Potemkinism, (2) Doctrinal Nuttiness, (3) Feminazism, (4) Goo-Goo Eyed Mysticism, (5) Guruism, (6) Pinheaded Parochialism, and (7) Rebellion and Cynicism.
DIRTY DIAPER ONE
cheap talk and potemkinism
There was a Russian statesman who worked for Catherine
the Great named Potemkin, who, having decided that progress under his
administration was not quite as glorious as advertised, built false-faced
buildings, along the front of which he would parade impressed visitors. Should a
visitor have been allowed to enter into one of these Potemkin buildings, he
would have immediately noticed that... THERE WASN'T ANYTHING THERE! NADA! I
think you see the analogy I'm going to make. There are an awful lot of people
out there printing cogent and persuasive house church books, and building
beautful house church websites, but who aren't actually doing it. Or worse, they
are doing it, and their churches are blowing up in acrimony. THERE AIN'T NOTHING
THERE! NADA! It takes more than cheap talk to build the biblical church. It
takes people who are willing to get in the mud and DO IT!!! (And do it
right.)
N
ow don't get me wrong. I've got some far out doctrinal positions that would make you hair curl (and I bet you'd like to know what they are, wouldn't you?). But I don't consider them nutty, just advanced, correct, and biblical. An example of this is my ecclesiology. But I have run into a lot of house church folks who have not only left the confines of tradition, they have continued on into outer space, having left the bounds of Scripture as well. I give you some examples. One house church brother, for example, believes that keeping the Law of Moses was possible under the Old Covenant, has attacked publically in a booklet the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, and is even open to the possibility that the Trinity is a false doctrine. Yeah, right. Another house church brother, upon being chastized by me when I discovered he didn't believe in hell, informed me that for me to believe that I'm going to heaven, and Hitler to hell, made me a "self-righteous pharisee." He wrote: "you make yourself a self-righteous pharisee when you find yourself better than Hitler. ALLLLL have sinned and fallen short... where to you get off looking down on anyone, pharisee?" Folks, we have left the bondage of the organized church system which was authored by man, but we have not left the bounds of the Bible, which was authored by God! We are doing house church because it is BIBLICAL, not because it is ANTI-TRADITIONAL. My friend Beresford Job of London insists that we use the phrase "biblical house church" to describe what we are about, because while it is impossible to do biblical church without doing it in homes, it is definitely possible to do unbiblical church in houses. I think his point is well taken.If the house church movement is going to insist that to do biblical church, one has to swallow every silly nostrum of the late-twentieth century feminist zeitgeist, then I'm checking out.
DIRTY DIAPER THREE
feminazism
The house church movement is full of folks decrying "institutions." And hey, I admit, in NRR when I used the term it almost sounds like a cuss word. But its one thing to be against the UNBIBLICAL institutions established by modern western traditionalist ecclesiacrats, and quite another to be against the BIBLICAL form handed down to us by Jesus' inspired apostles. Goo-goo-eyed mystics are so anti-formal that they don't care what the biblical form of church was. That was for back then, they say, we can do what is right in our own eyes now, who cares what those old fuddy-duddy apostles did. "Where are two are three are gathered together" is one of their mantras, so they just sort of float through life like lonely atoms in the void, and when perchance they make contact, they look at each other and say: "We have a church!" To them, anything is a church, as long as it is so amorphously loosey-goosey that nobody looking at it would ever think it was anything worth remarking. To them, two cats sleeping in the corner of a living room is a house church. The goo-goo-eyed mystic either can't see that there is a biblical form of church (as simple and non-hierarchical as that may be), or else he knows there was a NT form, but he isn't going to be bothered with it. And the goo-goo-eyed mystic will keep on making home groups, and cell groups, and cell churches, and celebration meetings, and vision teams, and Bible Studies, and prayer meetings, and accountability groups, but he will not establish BIBLICAL churches, and he will not succeed in finding church life in Christ, and he will fail miserably.
It is an ignorant and inexcusable error to label someone who is trying to follow the Scripture as a "legalist"...
The goo-goo-eyed mystic hates the word "doctrine," and always uses the word in a perjorative sense (query: does the Bible ever use the word "doctrine" in a perjorative sense? I bet you it doesn't.) He's always using rhetoric like "Jesus Himself is the Goal. He is our life! It's just Jesus!", rhetoric by which, I must confess, I have been charmed in the past, till I began to realize that those who use it seem to mostly think loving Jesus means dissing doctrine concerning the biblical church. Do we have to forever perpetuate this silly and false dichotomy that loving Jesus personally and loving the truths that Jesus died to establish are somehow mutually exclusive?
I have perfect sympathy with those who are trying to correct the sterile intellectualism that so often characterizes those who are concerned with doctrine. I perfectly realize that you can spell out a doctrine of the biblical church, but never experience the life of Jesus. I realize that the biblical house church is but a means to the end of experiencing Jesus. But I would be a whole lot more comfortable in proclaiming that if, by doing so, I could avoid putting myself in the company of those who call people who try to conform to the Scriptures as "legalists," and "believing Pharisees." It is an ignorant and inexcusable error to label someone who is trying to follow the Scripture as a "legalist," even if that person turns out to be wrong in his interpretation of Scripture. Those who go after dead doctrinalists need to practice a little moderation. The following quotation from Watchman Nee's The Church and the Work (excerpts from pp. 4-9, Vol. 2, Rethinking the Work) illustrates the perfect balance.
"We are not aiming at mere technical correctness. It is spiritual reality we are after... It is wearisome to me, if not actually repulsive, to talk with folk who aim at perfect outward correctness, whilst they care little for that which is vital and spiritual.. It is death to have a wineskin without wine." [Here Nee takes care of the dead doctrinalists. Next, he takes on the goo-goo-eyed mystics.] "...it is loss to have wine without a wine-skin. ...with those to whom life and reality are a matter of supreme importance, the temptation is to throw away THE DIVINE PATTERN OF THINGS, thinking it legal and technical. They feel that they have the greater and can therefore well dispense with the lesser. As a result, the more spiritual a man is, the freer he is to do as he thinks fit. He considers that he himself has authority to decide on outward matters, and rather fancies that to ignore God's commands regarding them is an indication that he has been delivered from legality and is walking in the liberty of the Spirit... God prizes the inner reality, but he does not ignore its outward expression... God has revealed His Will, not only by giving orders, but by having certain things done in His Church, so that in ages to come others might simply look at the PATTERN and know his will..." (emphases mine)
What is a guru? A guru is one who claims the ability to connect you with God, and without whom you are absolutely paralyzed spiritually. It is remarkable to me that those in house church circles would have to beware of gurus, given that we spend so much of our time bemoaning "pastor popes," "one-man shows," etc. But it is deep within the soul of man for some to LEAD and for others to FOLLOW. The biblical church portrays an ekklesia in which decision-making is done by ALL the brethren, not just by the leaders, and where leadership is plural, not singular, and where leadership is by example, not by control, and where the leadership is egalitarian, and not hierarchical. The priesthood in the biblical church was exercised by ALL believers, not the leadership alone. The New Testament evinces a Christianity without clergy. In short, the New Testament church has nothing good to say about gurus.
[the guru] asks me if he could come stay with me at my house so he could start discipling me. Perhaps the snarl at the corner of my lips dissuaded him...
A
t a house church conference one time, an aspiring guru came to me, and after fifteen minutes of deep, intimate, relationship, he asks me if he could come stay with me at my house so he could start discipling me. Perhaps the snarl at the corner of my lips dissuaded him, but he never followed up on his generous offer. This was my one major experience of guruism. But I have heard of another type of guru, whom I shall call the "Apostle Guru." He operates like this. He starts out by denigrating (quite accurately and easily enough) other attempts to rediscover the purity of Jesus' church. The implication is obvious: his attempts to rebuild the fallen church is the best thing going out there. The next thing the Apostle Guru does is this. He establishes a (quite unscriptural) doctrine that a church can't be a church unless there is an apostle who starts it. Then, the Apostle Guru sets the qualifications for an apostle so high, that no one in the world can meet it. Except him, of course. So, if the less-gifted believers being "helped" by this Apostle Guru don't take him, they can leave their church behind, because you have to have a church planter to get the church started, and there are no church planters in the world, except of course the Apostle Guru. Beware the Apostle Guru. Your church will likely be the next in a long line of church bust-ups engineered by him, and you will personally be another in a long line of broken hearts left behind by him. If you ever run into an Apostle Guru, please quote him Rom 15:14, the best anti-guru Scripture in the Bible: "I myself an convinced, my brothers, that YOU YOURSELVES are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another..."O
n an evaluation form after a Southern House Church Conference I once observed a comment: "Don't invite charismatics." This genial comment was balanced by another evaluation form, which stated: "Don't invite non-charismatics." It was refreshing to see such ecumenism, especially after I had read on another form, that we shouldn't have invited so many "FOREIGNERS!!!" I thought this might have been a statistical fluke, but I don't think so any more. I saw a HC website in Eastern Europe that quoted Mat 7:22-23 ("Many will say to me on that day..."), and then proclaimed that the author would never do church with charismatics because they weren't saved, because Jesus said "he never knew them"! He went on to say that a Calvinist is "not my brother in Christ." I also experienced the dissatisfication of several Southern House Church Conference conferees who stated that they would never come back to another conference, because we had Gene Edwards speak, and Gene Edwards was, and I quote, "the Antichrist"! Can you believe that there are people out there who think somebody from Texas is the Antichrist?All of this is illustrative of the pinheaded parochialism that will absolutely kill the house church movement before it gets off the ground, unless we exert a great effort to shun it. We have just got to learn that in order to do biblical church we MUST learn to live with those of differing theologies and temperaments.
DIRTY DIAPER SEVENThe house church movement is mentioned on Phil Johnson's Bad Theology Web Site ("Serving up Roadkill from the Information Superhighway since 1995"). I would give you the website address, but you would go there, get engrossed, and not come back here for me to tell you what I need to tell you. Here is Mr. Johnson's quote: "[The house church movement is] for those who want to play "church" but despise authority [notice the quotation marks. A neat trick. I have used it myself several times to describe Phil Johnson's institutional "church."]. The house church movement embraces an unbiblical egalitarianism that subverts the role of Scripture assigns to elders and overseers of the flock of God..." There's a fine distinction to be made here, a distinction that our critics don't often understand, and a distinction that house churchers often don't make. The distinction is this. We need to rebel against dictatorial, hierarchical, high-handed, pastor-popes who are so often found in the institutional church ruining people's Christian lives. But here are the following things we should never, ever rebel against: (1) godly leaders who give of their lives to show others the way to Christ, and (2) the Bible, which does clearly show the biblical church has elders. If more house churchers would heed this advice, there would be less ammunition around for people like Phil Johnson to shoot at us. We need to remember: we are not trying to REVOLT against the mercantile church. We are not even trying to REFORM the commercial church. We are trying to SECEDE from it. SECEDE from it, and start over, biblically.
A
house church rebel is typically cynical as well as rebellious. Yech. Let me give you a good quote from a good website (New Reformation Review). Yeah, I know I'm quoting myself, but hey! this is good: "I don't care how bad it is out there, my fellow house churchers, there ain't no excuse for cynicism. Cynicism is self-defeating. After you have finished being cynical about the institutional church, you'll then start being cynical about your brothers and sisters, then yourself. You might even become cynical about God letting all the nonsense go on. One of the most radical figures in history was Jesus Christ, and I see nothing to indicate He was a cynic. His religious system was a lot worse than ours, but he was focused on a better kingdom."-By Dan Trotter