As promised.  My take on the first of two books that have been on my mind recently.

It doesn’t surprise me that Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna is ridiculed online and elsewhere by some from the Christian community.  After all, when you attempt to kill certain sacred cows, you’ll only reap condemnation and ridicule.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but Mr. Viola doesn’t seem cocky on this subject.  I get the impression he’s excited about what he’s exposed (that Christian practices stem from pagan ones)…because if it’s true, it means that everything we hold near and dear to our hearts when it comes to our practice of religion has nothing to do what the Gospels taught.  How astonishing is that?  And refreshing…because it means there’s a new way.

The book is a quick read, actually–very easy to follow, if you’re interested in more detail than I can give you here.

What follows are excerpts and thoughts from the book.

Barna sets up their premise: “We are…making an outrageous proposal: that the church in its contemporary, institutional form has neither a biblical nor a historical right to function as it does.  This proposal, of course, is our conviction based upon the historical evidence that we shall present in this book.  You must decide if that proposal is valid or not.”

Have any of you felt this way?:  “These are people [revolutionaries, he calls them] who have experienced the initial realities of a genuine connection with God.  They can no longer endure the spiritual teasing offered by churches and other well-intentioned ministries.  God is waiting for them.  They want Him.  No more excuses.”

Barna likens the changes made in churches (over a number of centuries) to a jet that makes its way from L.A. to New York.  The pilot makes many course adjustments during the flight.  Even the tiniest of deviations would cause the plane to land miles elsewhere.  Comparing this to the church, “a little change here, a minor deviation there, a slight alteration of this, a barely perceptible tweaking of that–and before you know it, the whole enterprise has been re-defined!”

Starting with the church building and the efforts to get the atmospheric and architectural “feeling” just right…

“Most contemporary Christians mistakenly view the church building as a necessary part of worship.  Therefore, they never question the need to financially support a building and its maintenance.

“The church edifice demands a vast infusion of money.  In the United States alone, real estate owned by institutional churches today is worth over $230 billion.  Church building debt, service, and maintenance consumes about 18 percent of the $50 to $60 billion tithed to churches annually.  Point: Contemporary Christians are spending an astronomical amount of money on their buildings.

“All the traditional reasons put forth for ‘needing’ a church building collapse under careful scrutiny.  We so easily forget that the early Christians turned the world upside down without them (see Acts 17:6).  They grew rapidly for three hundred years without the help (or hindrance) of church buildings.

“In the business world, overhead kills.  Overhead is what gets added on to the ‘real’ work a business does for its clients.  Overhead pays for the building, the pencils, and the accounting staff.  Furthermore, church buildings (as well as salaried pastors and staff) require very large ongoing expenses rather than onetime outlays.  These budget busters take their cut out of a church’s monetary giving not just today, but next month, next year, and so on.

“Contrast the overhead of a traditional church, which includes salaried staff and church buildings, with the overhead of a house church.  Rather than such overhead siphoning off 50 to 85 percent of the house church’s monetary giving, its operating costs amount to a small percentage of the budget, freeing more than 95 percent of its shared money for delivering real services like ministry, mission, and outreach to the world.”

Pretty clear, don’t you think?  And I’m saying that, having personally, at several points in my life, pledged and given money to church building costs, thinking it’s what I should do when I’m a part of one.  Mulling it over now, I’m horrified at the billions of dollars that could be going to those who really need it.

The authors tackle the order of service…the sermon…the pastor (oh my!)…

More on that last one…

“While the Reformers opposed the pope and his religious hierarchy, they still held to the narrow view of ministry that they inherited.  They believed that ‘ministry’ was an institution that was closeted among the few who were ‘called’ and ‘ordained.’  Thus the Reformers still affirmed the clergy-laity split.  Only in their rhetoric did they state that all believers were priests and ministers.  In their practice they denied it.  So after the smoke cleared from the Reformation, we ended up with the same thing that the Catholics gave us–a selective priesthood!”

If Viola quotes Luther correctly, I think Luther is pretty transparent, all on his own (no commentary needed): “Said Luther, ‘We should not permit our pastor to speak Christ’s words by himself as though he were speaking them for his own person; rather, he is the mouth of all of us and we all speak them with him in our hearts….It is a wonderful thing that the mouth of every pastor is the mouth of Christ, therefore you ought to listen to the pastor not as a man, but as God.’”

This kind of rhetoric has hurt the church, I think.  It’s set up one individual as a know-it-all, an infallible person.  You have your educated few and the trusting who follow.  I’m generalizing, of course, but can you imagine how much more we’d all know, if we were all discussing and presenting various views…and allowed to do so?

“The one-man ministry is entirely foreign to the New Testament, yet we embrace it while it suffocates our functioning.  We are living stones, not dead ones.  However, the pastoral office has transformed us into stones that do not breathe.

“Permit us to get personal.  We believe the pastoral office has stolen your right to function as a full member of Christ’s body.  It has distorted the reality of the body, making the pastor a giant mouth and transforming you into a tiny ear.  It has rendered you a mute spectator who is proficient at taking sermon notes and passing an offering plate.

“But that is not all.  The modern-day pastoral office has overthrown the main thrust of the letter to the Hebrews–the ending of the old priesthood.  It has made ineffectual the teaching of 1 Corinthians 12-14, that every member has both the right and the privilege to minister in a church meeting.  It has voided the message of 1 Peter 2 that every brother and sister is a functioning priest….As one scholar put it, ‘Much Protestant worship, up to the present day, has also been infected by an overwhelming tendency to regard worship as the work of the pastor (and perhaps the choir) with the majority of the laity having very little to do but sing a few hymns and listen in a prayerful and attentive way.’”

Their conclusion on pastors?

“The contemporary pastor is the most unquestioned fixture in twenty-first-century Christianity.  Yet not a strand of Scripture supports the existence of this office.

“Rather, the present-day pastor was born out of the single-bishop rule first spawned by Ignatius and Cyprian.  The bishop evolved into the local presbyter.  In the Middle Ages, the presbyter grew into the Catholic priest.  During the Reformation, he was transformed into the ‘preacher,’ ‘the minister,’ and finally ‘the pastor’–the person upon whom all of Protestantism hangs.  To boil it down to one sentence: The Protestant pastor is nothing more than a slightly reformed Catholic priest.  (Again, we are speaking of the office and not the individual.)”

Hmmm.  Might it better to hear from everyone in the church, academically trained or not?  How that works logistically, I don’t know, but it’s a “thought-provoking” idea.

Viola and Barna move on to dressing up for church, the music in the service, tithing and supporting clergy, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, Christian education, how the New Testament was written (therefore, how it should not be used as a jigsaw puzzle), and the next step we should take as believers.

A brief glimpse of what we should be striving for, according to Viola and Barnes:

1. Christ as the center.
2. No fixed order of worship.
3. Living as a “face-to-face community.”
4. Void of ritual, clergy, and sacred buildings.
5. Decision-making as the responsibility of all the members.
6. “Tithing is not a practice of the New Testament church….They gave according to their ability, not out of guilt, duty, or compulsion.  Pastor/clergy salaries were unheard of.  Every Christian in the church was a priest, a minister, and a functioning member of the body.”
7. “Early Christians did not build Bible schools or seminaries to train young workers….Christian workers were educated and trained by older workers in the context of church life.  They learned “on the job.”
8. No division into denominations.

Do any of these thoughts surprise you?  Do you have other questions to add?

Tomorrow, I’ll share my thoughts on the second book, In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic by Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld.

[Post image: Abandoned Church by Jascha400d at stock.xchng]