Where Everybody's Crazy

This weekend I've been at the first Japanese House Church Conference. It was quite an amazing and enjoyable event; I felt spiritually refreshed and privileged to be there. It was great to hear many stories from people around Japan who are seeing God do fantastic things through the house churches, to hear the problems they're facing and what they're doing about it.

The first night was a very laid-back introduction time, with a great getting-to-know-people game that I will file away and pull out sometime! Then we spent a long time listening to God, something I always think is a great idea and hardly ever do. We got into groups and shared our expectations for the conference, and after that we couldn't stop talking until bedtime! The next day started with some good presentations and case studies from different churches. Then we had a keynote speaker, who was, to be honest, abraisive and a bit offensive. Which was fantastic, because instead of sitting there lapping it up, I found myself poking holes in what he was saying - in other words, actively engaging with it. It gave me something to chew over as I went back, and last night I put a few of my thoughts into order.

I'm interested in what the house church movement is about because right now it's a young and energetic movement and it's seeing fantastic results. But to be honest I don't see it anything more than the latest mission paradigm. As it happened, the Friday morning before the conference I sat down with my pastor as we studied Bosch's "Transforming Mission" together; TM is my favourite missiological book, and its main thesis is that certain ways of doing mission arise from a particular social situation, last for a while, and then are replaced by something else.

The problem is that all these paradigms start with vigour and conviction, and eventually because of the strength of their own conviction, they all delude themselves into thinking that they are the One True Way. Their way of reading the Bible will back up their claim to be the only Biblical model. The latest is clearly the best, if not what it was always meant to be all along. In short, they eternalise the temporary and provisional. I call this the problem of the now.

All young movements end up systematizing themselves. They all end up losing their energy and focus. They all end up dying, and being replaced by another model. This is particularly obvious these days now that the pace of communication and change is so high. The current fad - I mean paradigm - is "Church Planting Movements." I bet that in fifty years time, nobody will be talking about Church Planting Movements.

I don't know what will replace it, but something will. Bosch was a genius, and he was able to look ahead of his current situation and identify the elements that would make up, from his time of writing, the next paradigm of mission. And what he identified sounds very much like the house church. But Bosch is dead, and we're fresh out of geniuses, because I don't know anyone who's looking ahead and saying what the next paradigm is going to be. Pragmatically, the house church paradigm is great for now. But anyone who thinks that it is the one true final paradigm - and there are such people - are either ignorant of history or deluding themselves.

A great example of the problem of the now can be found in the Scofield Reference notes. This was a commentary on the Bible, famous for its interpretation of Revelation. The letters to the churches in Revelation, we are told, are actually "disclosing seven phases of the spiritual history of the church from, say, A.D. 96 to the end... Sardis is the Protestant Reformation, whose works were not 'fulfilled.' Philadelphia is whatever bears clear testimony to the Word and the Name in the time of self-satisfied profession represented by Laodicea." It's always terribly convenient how the correct interpretation of a passage of Scripture interprets carefully all the events up to the writers' point of view but no further, as if Scripture was written just for me, right now this instant. It wasn't.

A similar example I heard this weekend. We were told that Revelation 21:24 - "The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it" - means that the Emperor of Japan will confess Jesus before he dies. The problem is that if that interpretation was true now, it would also have been true sixty years ago. The Emperor of Japan then did not confess Jesus before he died. But hey, since it was said now and about now, nobody can really contradict it. That is the problem of the now, and people suffering from the problem of the now cannot see the internal contradictions inherent in their position. And it's my view that the house church is suffering from the problem of the now.

For instance, they claim that their disciplemaking is contextualised. They also claim that it is just what Jesus did with his disciples, two thousand years ago in the Jewish Middle East. Well, you can't have both.

They claim that they are against the systematisation of theology, but they already have their Four Essential Doctrines and their Three Necessary Elements. (This leads to another blog post about whether we can be simple without being reductionist, but like I said, that's for another time.) You can't have both.

They want their influence to "flow upward" and transform mayors and civil authorities leading to the "discipling of countries", without having to accept that, historically, every single time since Constantine the church has associated itself with the trappings of state it has both hopelessly compromised its message and acted out of civil strength instead of divine weakness. You can't have both.

They seek to denigrate theological study, and paint theological understanding not just as unnecessary, which I could accept, but actually as a hindrance and a waste of time. But they seek to do this based on exegetical understandings gained through theological study. And yet, despite denigrating theological activity, they expect someone to sit down and write up their theology so that other churches can learn from it. You can't have both.

They will argue forcefully from the Bible, even pursuing the theological nuclear option, that the only possible way of interpreting the Bible is a postmodern, pluralist hermeneutic. They will authoritatively say that you should reject the authority of others. You can't have both.

This all leads to my first question for the house church: What will replace you? If you think you are the one final paradigm, then you are either ignorant of history or deluding yourself.

My second question goes back to the hermeneutics of the inductive Bible study. I went round and round in my head about hermeneutics for years, and ended up coming to the completely arbitrary position - because I think that's the only kind of position you can come to in hermeneutics - that an authentic hermeneutic must be community-based. It can't just be one guy sitting down trying to interpret the Bible; there has to be accountability and correction. So was initially interested in inductive Bible study, and have been doing it in my church.

Now I see two problems. The first is that there is neither accountability or correction. Everyone gives their interpretation, and... well, that's it, basically. In fact, nobody is permitted to say that "this is actually what it means". It's the whole postmodern "this is what the truth is to me" thing. This won't get you to the truth of Scripture, which was what my whole hermeneutic crisis was about.

The second is also related to the problem of the now. To sit around without commentaries, without "theology", and simply talk about "what the Spirit is saying" is certainly doing hermeneutics in a community, sure, but it's an isolated one. Indeed, to do this is to be deliberately ignorant of what the Spirit has already been saying to the church over the course of the past two thousand years. Doing this seems to me to be dishonouring to the Spirit, and I think Jesus had some pretty horrible words for people who did that.

So my question about Bible study is how will Bible study turn up the truth of Scripture, instead of just "my truth" of Scripture?

My third question actually didn't come from me. I sent someone my notes I took at a previous house church training event, and they said "Interesting, but it looks a bit legalistic." I didn't understand what they meant until this conference, when I realised that there was a tendency to interpret the spiritual maturity of a believer in terms of their ability to lead churches, to multiply cell groups, to witness to their friends and so on. I like to make things extreme in order to make a point, so my question is: How does this understanding of spiritual maturity differ from that of the Jehovah's Witnesses?

The fourth question comes from understanding that the house church movement is basically Campus Crusade Meets The Church Growth Movement, and my views on the Church Growth Movement are well known. The idea is that God wants all men to be saved (I have yet another blog post brewing about what that actually means), and he has a plan to achieve this (so far so good) and that that plan requires massive amounts of activity right now. There's a world of difference between "God is strategic" and "God is efficient", particularly if efficiency is measured in, let's face it, American commercial terms.

This "efficient" God, when man sinned, spend four thousand years working with one single tiny insignificant nation, including spending forty years to get them to move 450 kilometers, so that eventually the Saviour would appear. That's a lot of unnecessarily dead people in the meantime. But that's what God decided would happen before Jesus appeared. And when he did finally appear, four thousand years later, he appeared in a small Middle Eastern fishing village, found basically twelve people he could rely on to pass the message on, and still two thousand years later there are many people who don't know about it. That was God's plan for the salvation of the world. You still think God is efficient?

This is another unconscious fallacy in the house church movement. It claims to be all about relationships, but it also claims to be all about doing the fastest and most efficient thing. You can't have both. Relationships take time. (Tell me, have you tried doing relationships in a Middle Eastern context? It takes more time than you think, and then still more time than that.) Time that an "efficient" person would believe is wasted.

But praise God I believe that I am not wasting my time doing what I am doing; I am not rushing away for the most pragmatic and "efficient" thing, because I believe that God puts a high value on relationships. The people I meet, the churches I serve, they are worth the time. I still want to learn from the house church, and from the relationships I have developed from people working within it; I hope they will also want to learn from me.

Update: I hesitated about adding this bit, but finally I decided to add it. The book of James is a book written to Christians, as a circular letter. In James 2:2-3, it describes seating arrangements in a Christian "meeting" (NIV translation) or "assembly". (KJV, NET translation) Both translations are wrong; the literal word is "synagogue", and it means a synagogue; let me quote the JNT commentary:

The word in Greek is “sunagôgê”; it appears 57 times in the New Testament. Fifty-six times it refers to a Jewish place of congregational assembly and is translated “synagogue” in virtually all English versions. Yet in the present verse KJV and the Revised Standard Version render it “assembly,” and other versions translate it by “church,” “meeting,” “place of worship” and other avoidances of the word “synagogue.”

This is an instruction about how to arrange seating in a Messianic synagogue, a building designed (or borrowed) for corporate church meeting; so this is not about Jewish synagogues, since Christians would not have control over the seating arrangements of Jewish synagogues. This, written around the early 60s AD, is a letter to Christians meeting in churches. So when people tell you that house church is a Biblical model, yes, yes it is. But when people tell you that house church is the only Biblical model, no, no it is not.