Stevescheller

Hello and welcome

Enjoying our debates on Simple Church. Are you part of such a group? I looked at Agape feast just now, and it needs help, I'm sure you would be well suited to removing the bias. Sounding encyclopaedic is the trick! Hyper3 (talk) 16:31, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes I am part of such a group. Thanks for inviting my participation. I am not sure an encyclopedia is a place to insert personal views; this becomes very editorial. I respect your opinion, as I once held it myself. At the same time, many simple churches do not own the term evangelical. Also, using the word controversial expresses your opinion and I am sure the opinion of many in the institutional church, but it is not a universal opinion by any means and tends to make the article sound more like propaganda.

Your comment on 1 Tim 5:17 is interesting. Without writing a book in response, I would share that the modern sermon and the preaching mentioned in the bible are not necessarily one and the same. The sermon evolved out of the Protestant reformation and was elevated in puritan times to be the center of the worship service. Robert Banks Going To Church in The First Century and Viola's Pagan Christianity shed light on this, as does rabbinical tradition and the book of Acts itself where preaching was very dialogical. Also, Paul commands twice in his writings to recognize elders and otherwise does not command to do this. With brand new believers, almost none would meet the qualification of an elder. The implication is that not all churches had them, and possibly not all churches should have them.

I also found your quote of the Charisma online guy interesting. I think the question is, if Jesus did call Christians to shut all these things down, would they? Because if He is calling this, it is idolatry not too.

I graduated seminary in 2004. I was a missions administrator, and I was also hired to start an institutional church. I was told to spend a year learning about Church Planting before starting one myself. I'll spare you the details, but after I saw what I did, I left my job, my Church planting offer, my income, my mega church, and my reputation. THis was a price to pay-I actually had many good experiences in the organized church. I have paid the price. But Christ is worth it

I would recommend any Christian read Pagan Christianity and The Organic Church by Neil Cole. You may not agree with it, but there are many things we do in the modern church that Paul, and yes Jesus would find very foreign.

Thanks for your dialogue!

Steve

I am a church planter and pastor, doing my PhD in the ecclesiology of church planting. I've met and talked with Robert Banks a few times, and have some of the books you have mentioned.

I think a careful look at the Jewish background to the New Testament shows early church practices growing out of the Sabbath meal and the synagogue. Both the small group in the home, and the larger synagogue forms occur at different places in the Scriptures. (Constantine conflates the two.) Simple church makes a similar but opposite mistake to institutional church of embracing the small without the large... Simple church adherents do much better at addressing the nature of the wine, yet invest much in defining the wineskin in a particular way. My PhD work is about defining the wine, (or virtues of the shared life), and working through how best to express those virtues in practices, by looking at culture, the gifts of the people and the word of God.

In any case, complexity theorists will tell us, using different sizes of container have different strengths and weaknesses. The larger the container, the more resources. The smaller the container, the quicker and more continuous the interactions between system agents. Both are highly valuable ways of working, and that is why I think the Bible suggests a variety of nested containers, from household up to nation, within which can be expressed a shared life of virtue and love.

Therefore any proposal focussed around an ideology of size and technique does need to be seen as an ongoing part of the debate, rather than adequate solution.

I have not written very much of this article, merely tidied it up and tried to change the language so it was more encyclopaedic and neutral. Not much of it is mine, though I have added quite a bit over the last few days... Hyper3 (talk) 22:28, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

THanks for the dialogue. I do not think simple church disgards the large as much as you say. Having been a part of the movement these last 2 years, I greatly look forward to larger meetings (in fact we hosted a large meeting in our home this last weekend). The group I was a part of in MN gathered monthly for events like this. But these are times of celebration and teaching, whereas the meeting is a place for every member functioning. It is sociologically implicit that if a group intends to allow every member to function as described in 1 Cor, that it has to be small for this to happen. In this sense, it is more effective for more small groups to meet than one large group. I am sure in your studies you enountered small group ministry models-Willow Creek even acknowledges that a group of more than 12 is no longer a small group. This is because in groups over a certain size the tendenciy is for the extroverted to dominate and the introverted to clam up.

Paul Kaak is a personal friend, and the movement he and I are part of in 2006 had spread to 22 countries and represented hundreds of churches. WHen the article states "this rarely in fact is the case" without providing facts, this turns once again into biased propaganda.

The definiton of evangelical that you use is not one used by the press or the culture as a whole who tend to deem evangelicals as right-wing, gay-hating, morality imposing, judgmental, church-going, suburbanites. Also within the church it tends to reduce the Gospel to a set of four to five propositions that are either to be accepted or rejected. I beleive the Gospel is so much more than this. I am not evangelical in any of the ways above, and I as well as many others stopped using the term several years ago. I also once might have said I was emergent, but emergent simply describes what is coming up next and this is too diverse a group to lump into a monolithic category.

Frank Viola, Paul Kaak and I would agree that sometimes God makes Churches big. In Acts when God saves 3000 in a day, well the church is large and He did it. But even here we see an emphasis on "They gathered in theri homes and in Solomon's portico." So even a large church has to somehow allow people to experience communal life with every member functioning in the SPirit. Atthe smae time, most local church expressions in the NT were small and had little resemblance to the churches we see today. I am convinced Paul would have been seen as a modern church planting failure if a church planting class would be able to tour his churches. Yet they multip;ied.

One thing Neil Cole and Paul Kakka talk about that you might find valuable in your research is the idea of replication. Elephants replicate much slower than rabbits. One is large and has a long incubation, while one is small and has a short incubation. One species takes two years to produce 1 baby, while the other produces too many to count. I believe the early church, as well as the Christian movement in China, were more like the rabbits mating. Christianity has already spread far this way so it really does not need to be reproven as a new church model. It is in fact very old.