The only bland thing about Wolfgang Simson’s The House Church Book is the title. From the first page he confronts the reader with a passionate and prophetic call for the Church to return to its biblical and first-century roots of form and expression. Whether you agree with him or not (and you’re likely to find yourself shouting “Amen!” on one page and crying foul on the next), Simson offers a compelling vision for how to move the Western Church forward.

Between the preface and the introduction you’ll find Simson’s “15 Theses Toward a Re-Incarnation of Church”, which is as rich and challenging as anything else in the book. Here are three of my favorites:

• Christianity is a way of life, not a series of religious meetings. “The nature of church is not reflected in a constant series of religious meetings led by professional clergy in holy places especially reserved to experience Jesus. Rather, it is mirrored in the prophetic way followers of Christ live their everyday lives in spiritual extended families, as vivid answers to the questions that society asks, and in the place where it counts most—in their homes.” (xiii-xiv)
• Time to change the “cathegogue system.” “The historic Orthodox and Catholic Church—that existed after Constantine in the fourth century—developed and adopted a religious system based on two elements: a Christian version of the Old Testament Temple—the cathedral—and a worship pattern styled after the Jewish synagogue. …Until today nobody has really changed the system. The time to do that has now arrived.” (xiv)
• A church is led by more than a pastor. “A pastor (shepherd) is an important member of the whole team, but he cannot fulfill more than part of the task of equipping the saints for the ministry. He has to be complemented synergistically by the other four ministries [of Ephesians 4:11] in order to function properly.” (xvi)

The two major themes of Simson’s book are: 1) The shift from organized to organic church, and 2) The application of the fivefold ministry (from Ephesians 4:11) to the leadership structure of the local church. These two themes come up again and again as he advocates for a smaller and broader church structure, one that is worked out, not in cathedrals or auditoriums or “sancti-nasiums”, but in living rooms and dining rooms and backyards.

As you have probably deduced from the book’s title, Simson advocates a return to the house church format, one that he believes is biblical and consistent with God’s intended plan for the Church. Shifting from megachurches to house churches is the shift from organized to organic church. Something happens, he says, when a group exceeds twenty people—it becomes an organization. “In many cultures twenty is the maximum number of people in a group that still feels like ‘family.’ Groups of this size and smaller still feel organic and informal, without the need to become formal or organized.” (3) Growing larger than twenty requires an artificial organizational structure be placed around the organism, which “chokes it, conditions it, and ultimately prevents relational and spontaneous fellowship.” (4)

What happens when your group exceeds twenty members? Time to multiply! It is through multiplication that the organic church grows—a model Simson sees working out in creation itself. The growth potential of the organic house church far outpaces that of the current megachurch, much like a rabbit can vastly out-birth an elephant. The numbers are staggering, as Simson estimates that a multiplying house church of 12 people can, by multiplying each church once per year over a period of 20 years with an attrition rate of 25% every 5 years, grow to over 165,000 house churches with nearly 2,000,000 people attending. (59)

The key to this growth is “the fivefold ministry” of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. One person cannot play all five of these roles, but the church desperately needs all five in order to be a healthy, multiplying body. Their task, according to Ephesians 4, is to equip the church to do the actual work of the ministry. “They are to be evangelistic, prophetic, teaching, pastoral, and apostolic trainers—not demonstrators, teachers, or one-man shows. An evangelist’s true fruit is not a convert, but more evangelists.” (62) The problem we have today, he warns, is that “instead of equipping God’s people for the ministry, [these people] are performing it for them.” (62) The solution is to change the leadership model from CEO to parent. “Leadership in the way we are used to seeing it in the business, political, or religious world is not really a biblical concept. But leadership in the form of parenthood is. After all, God is not simply a leader; He is a father.” (63)

Simson is calling for a reformation of structure—what he calls the Third Reformation. Our current models will continue to frustrate God’s plan for the Church. In order for the gospel to get bigger, the Church must get smaller. In order for believers to grow (and therefore their churches to grow), they must be exposed to the spiritual parenting of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. “Many Christians have reached a plateau in their lives because they have never really been exposed to the exciting variety of these ministries and are instead sitting ‘under’ the ministry of a one-size-fits-all ‘pastor,’ who is trying to embody all of the ministries himself. Many such pastors burn out quickly, and many traditional congregations are left wondering why things aren’t moving.” (70)

According to Wolfgang Simson, the way forward for the Church in the twenty-first century is to look back to our brothers and sisters in the first century and find in their congregational models God’s intended plan for his people. As long as we try to grow our congregations large, the individual Christians and the gospel itself will remain small.

Questions: Is the house church model the God-ordained, biblical model of Church for all places and all times? How do small groups in large churches succeed or fail to live up to the house church model? Is the single-leader, pyramid structure of church leadership an acceptable model for God’s people? Is the fivefold ministry for today? If so, how would it look if it were implemented in your church?

After buying it at a book store that was going out of business, I was very much looking forward to reading Chris Seay’s book, The Gospel According to Jesus. In fact, I almost bought his book The Gospel According to LOST, but I decided against it. I think I’d like to go back and read that one now, too.

The thesis of The Gospel According to Jesus is that Christians have long misunderstood the concept of righteousness, and therefore misunderstood their faith. We have mistakenly categorized righteousness in terms of morality and good behavior, he says, and have grossly mistaken the gospel of Jesus Christ for a set of rules and regulations for life. The impetus for the book seems to have come from a Barna survey in which a majority of Christians (including active churchgoers) confessed to being unfamiliar with the term and concept of righteousness. Of those who had heard of the term, most associated it with holiness or faithfulness.
This deeply troubled Seay, because he believes that a proper understanding of righteousness is essential to Christian faith and practice. Here is his definition of righteousness:

We also know what [God’s] righteousness is not: a morality that can be attained by the works of man. The best, simplest translation of the word righteousness is “restorative justice.” God is stepping into our brokenness and making things right, taking fragments shattered by sin and restoring them to fullness. …Seeking his righteousness is about being an active agent for his restorative justice in all creation.

By this definition, the righteousness of God is the activity of the restoration of creation through the outworking of God’s justice. Jesus said that we are to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness”, that is, God’s restorative justice. Our task, as disciples of Jesus, is to see that God’s restorative justice is enacted on the earth.

That’s all well and good, but is that really what righteousness means? He says it, and he is the president of Ecclesia Bible Society, but is he right? Because he never really proves it. And there are plenty of instances in Scripture where we find the word righteousness, but it certainly doesn’t mean “restorative justice.”

For example, Genesis 15:6. Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness restorative justice.

Or Deuteronomy 6:25. And if we are careful to obey all this law before YHWH our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness restorative justice.

In fact, perhaps the most damning case comes from Matthew 6, the same chapter in which we find the command to “seek first his…righteousness.” Verse 1 reads: Be careful not to practice your righteousness restorative justice in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

Chris Seay was very upset because he believed the church was getting righteousness wrong. But it seems that Chris Seay has also gotten righteousness wrong, or at least defined it too narrowly. I can’t attempt to provide a definition here, but I believe that restorative justice is part of what righteousness means, but by no means all of it.

With that, somewhat major, caveat, I thought this book was excellent, and well worth a read by anybody trying to figure out how to follow Jesus well with others. This is really a book about being disciples of Christ together, and the author even models that by bringing in other voices for conversation at the end of each chapter. The most beneficial chapter is actually the last one: The Ten Commandments of a Shalom Life. In that chapter, Chris draws on his experience as a pastor and church planter to give a good and biblical perspective on how to live well the commands of Jesus together.

All in all, this was an interesting and thought-provoking book that will resonate with younger Christians who feel caught between the pull of conservative fundamentalism and liberal emergent-ism.

I’ve been told that John Owen, the Puritan pastor, is one of the most insightful Christian authors to have put pen to paper. Unfortunately, he is also one of the most difficult to understand. Reading his books is like running through mud. Here is a single sentence which appears in Owen’s book, The Mortification of Sin:

I hope I may own in sincerity, that my heart’s desire unto God, and the chief design of my life in the station wherein the good providence of God hath placed me, are that mortification and universal holiness may be promoted in my own and in the hearts and ways of others, to the glory of God; that so the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ may be adorned in all things: for the compassing of which end, if this little discourse…may in any thing be useful to the least of the saints, it will be looked on as a return of the weak prayers wherewith it is attended by its unworthy author.

Thank God Kris Lundgaard has taken Owen’s thoughts and distilled them into an eminently readable book, The Enemy Within. The book deals with the question: “If God has redeemed me from sin, and given me his Holy Spirit to sanctify me and give me strength against sin, why do I go on sinning?” This is a crucial question, one that plagues every serious Christian at some point in their lives.

The reason we continue to sin, says Lundgaard via Owen, is because our flesh–our sinful nature–continues to live in us (Romans 7). He writes in chapter 4,

The flesh is more than God’s enemy: it is the enmity, the hostility, the pure hatred [of God] itself.
The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. (Romans 8:7, NKJV)

Two enemies, no matter how deep the river of their bitterness runs, can make peace–but only if the hostility between them is destroyed. It is impossible to make peace with hostility itself.

The solution is, as John Owen wrote, is the mortification of sin. Our flesh, the sinful nature, must die. The sin inside each one of us will never accept a cease-fire peace treaty with God because sin is not the enemy, it is the hostility. In order for the believer to be free from the power of sin, it must die.

The good news is that our sinful natures were crucified with Christ.

“For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin–because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.” (Romans 6:6-7)

The crucifixion of our sinful natures is what God is working out, what he is actualizing in our lives through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. The mortification of sin in us is the process of sanctification. The sinful nature dies every day, and every day the image of Christ lives more and more in and through us. Through this process, we, who were once enemies of God, become his friends as the hostility between us (our sinful natures) is destroyed.

I’ve not read John Owen, and probably never will. But Kris Lundgaard seems to have done an excellent job writing a book that distills Owen’s meticulous thoughts on sin and sanctification into a readable form.

The Blue Parakeet was one of those books that, as soon as I heard the title and what it was about it, I immediately wanted to read it. After all, what do blue parakeets have to do with reading the Bible? It piqued my curiosity.

Scot McKnight’s book does not disappointment, and will be a recommended resource, right alongside How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth and Grasping God’s Word, every time I teach exegesis and hermeneutics. He has caused me to reconsider how I read the Bible, and how I should teach others to read it. I’ll comment on just two elements of the book, and leave the rest for you to discover on your own.

One of Dr. McKnight’s best insights is to see the whole Bible as a narrative—a Story. While I have believed this for a while myself, I don’t think I had connected the dots the same way that he had. I had always understood the Bible to be a collection of different genres of literature that, together, form the story of God’s process to redeem and restore creation. In the Blue Parakeet, Dr. McKnight shows that the Bible is, in fact, a single narrative (from a genre/literary type perspective) that contains other genres of literature as sub-genres. That is to say, the Bible is a story that uses poetry, proverbs, prophecies, laws, and apocalypses to move the plot forward. This is a subtle but important difference in the way we see the Bible as a unified whole.

The second comment I’d like to make is the way Dr. McKnight pulls back the curtain on the way that we (evangelicals or whomever) select which passages of Scripture to obey and those to which we say, “That was then, this is now.” He calls this process “discernment”. Though many of us claim to obey Scripture (or attempt to) fully, in reality we all make discernments about how and what to obey. After all, how many of us make certain to wear clothing woven of only one material?

His point is not to call us all disobedient idolaters, but rather to demonstrate that, intentionally or unintentionally, we all translate the Bible “in our day in our way.” We all say about something in the Bible, “that was then but this is now,” so let’s be honest about it and think more critically about how and with what we do this. It’s not a bad thing, he says, because even the characters of the Bible did this (e.g., Paul and Torah).

All in all, The Blue Parakeet was an eye-opening book on how we approach the Scriptures. I commend it to you as an excellent resource for anyone who wants to read the Bible better.

What’s so unique about the Bible? After all, there are plenty of other ancient texts that claim to describe the creation of the world, the role that humans play in it, and the nature of the gods. And we know, of course, that these writings are nothing more than myths. Isn’t the Bible just like these ancient myths—ahistorical religious fiction, albeit with a monotheistic rather than polytheistic bent? Just how similar or different is the Bible to its ancient counterparts? And, the question that really lies behind it all, can we trust that the Bible is telling us the truth about the world?

These are the questions that John Oswalt, research professor of Old Testament at Wesley Biblical Seminary, sets out to answer in his book, The Bible Among the Myths. More specifically, Oswalt is dealing only with the Old Testament and its counterparts from the ancient Near East, including Egyptian, Babylonian, and Canaanite cultures. The book itself is divided into two parts: Part one, the more illuminating and thought-provoking half, is called “The Bible and Myth”, and part two is called “The Bible and History”.

Oswalt claims that there has been a shift in scholarly opinion from understanding the Bible historically, in contrast to the texts of Israel’s neighbors, to viewing it as myth, quite akin to those texts. This has happened, he says, because scholars have come to view the similarities between the Bible and, for example, the Enuma Elish as essential and the differences as accidental. (13) In other words, the Bible is best defined by the ways in which it is the same as other ancient texts, not by the ways in which it is different.

That, Oswalt argues, is ridiculous. While the Bible may be similar to other ancient texts in some ways (primarily in matters of convention, and mostly superficial), it presents a fundamentally new way of looking at the world, and therefore it cannot fit into the category of myth.

Myth, and particularly the myths of the ancient cultures surrounding Israel, is centrally characterized by Continuity. “Continuity is a philosophical principle that asserts that all things are continuous with each other. Thus I am one with the tree, not merely symbolically or spiritually, but actually. …This means that the divine is materially as well as spiritually identical with the psycho-socio-physical universe that we know.” (43) In the mythology that undergirds the religion (and therefore the entire life) of ancient cultures, there is no distinction between humanity, the natural world, and the divine realm. Nor is there a distinction between symbol and reality: “The symbol is the reality. …All things that exist are physically and spiritually part of one another.” (49)

The implications of this way of looking at the world are: 1) Reality only relates to the present; 2) Actualization of timeless reality; 3) Blurring of source and manifestation; 4) Importance of nature symbolism; 5) Significance of magic; 6) Obsession with fertility and potency; and 7) Denial of boundaries. (50-56) The most interesting way in which these implications manifest themselves (and what was likely the most tempting aspect of Canaanite religion to Israel) is in ritual prostitution. “Plant and animal life are the result of divine copulation, for all things in this world that we know have their origins in sexual behavior. Therefore, the thing to do [to make it rain] is to get the god [of heaven] and goddess [of earth] to have sexual relations. …How do we do that? …We do it for them through ritual enactment. As the worshiper and the priestess have sex together under the appropriate ritual circumstances, the god and goddess do so as well and the rhythms of nature are maintained.” (51) Because everything is continuous, the sexual act committed at the temple is the sexual act committed between the god of heaven and the goddess of the earth. Clearly, this is not the biblical worldview.

What makes the Bible different from these myths? Oswalt claims that the Bible is consistently characterized by the following concepts: 1) Monotheism; 2) Iconoclasm; 3) First principle is Spirit; 4) Absence of conflict in the creation process; 5) A high view of humanity; 6) The reliability of God; 7) God is supra-sexual; 8) Sex is desacralized; 9) Prohibition of magic; 10) Ethical obedience as a religious response; and 11) The importance of human-historical activity. (64-80) Each of these is consistently prescribed in the Bible as the standard of Israelite experience, and each of them lie in stark contrast to the prescriptions of myth. In other words, the religion of the Bible could not be any more different from the religions of the myths.

The reason for this is that the Bible does not present a worldview of Continuity, but rather of Transcendence. “For the Bible, God is not the cosmos, and the cosmos is not God. God is radically other than his creation. This thought undergirds everything the Bible says about reality.” (81) God is not a part of creation, nor are there any other gods alongside him in some mythical pantheon. Therefore, he cannot be manipulated or coerced to act through any ritual practice, and specifically through ritual prostitution.

Continuity is the starting point of myth, but Transcendence is the foundation of Biblical thought. While the Bible may share some superficial similarities with the myths, it is distinctive in that it offers a completely new way of looking at the world and relating to its creator.

The Bible Among the Myths is an excellent resource for anyone interested in exploring ancient literature and how the Old Testament relates to the world in which it was written. Oswalt offers a clear, thoughtful picture of how the Bible is distinct from the myths of Israel’s neighbors. While this book is certainly useful for exegesis and biblical studies, I also think it has great value in the arena of apologetics because it shows how remarkable the Scriptures truly are.

Questions: How do you see the worldview of Continuity making a comeback today? Is there any way that the church has mixed Continuity into its teachings or practices? What are the implications of Transcendence, specifically in relation to the Incarnation?