Happy post-election day!
So a couple of weeks ago I posted concerning house churching, an ancient-future ecclesiological habit that just a decade ago seemed relegated to a listserv backwater*, but is now one of the forefronts of consciousness around the world today. In its North American flavor, the people who have done the most to make this a reality are Tony & Felicity Dale, Neil Cole, and Frank Viola. The latter has been especially visible in publishing and online milieus, and is likely most familiar to emerging church folk. 
(*nothing against HCDL, the oldest and one of the best house church discussion lists. I am a member!)
Pagan Maelstrom
In July and again in September, Viola had some fascinating exchanges with noted New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III. First Ben reviewed Pagan Christianity (which I blog about in Coming out of the Pagan Christianity Closet):
Pagan Christianity Pt. 1
Pagan Christianity Pt. 2
Pagan Christianity Pt. 3
Pagan Christianity Pt. 4
Pagan Christianity Postlude
I can’t possibly summarize these posts – they’re so flippin’ long! – so you’ll have to read ’em if you want. But I will give you a coupla quotes. I think BW3 has a point when he said (in post 2):
While I understand the complaint about things done by rote, it all depends on the spirit in which such things are done. If they are simply done mindlessly, repeating words without thinking about what one is saying or without focusing on God—well that’s not a good thing. But frankly I’ve seen far too many people who find joy in the recitation of the liturgy, and meaning, and are drawn closer to God by doing so. And there is nothing unBiblical about ritual. Try reading the psalms for example, which as Ephes. 5 makes clear Christians recited and sang. Here’s an important point When one rules out pre-set liturgies and orders of worship, that in itself becomes a ritual by default if one does it over and over again that way.
Here here! I agree. With community intent and understanding, fellowships can worship in whatever way they choose. And as the alt.worship movement in the UK shows us (not to mention St. Gregory’s in San Francisco) it’s possibly to have open-source, participatory liturgy. ‘Liturgy’ after all is ‘the work of the people.’ My house church has personally benefited, at times, from utilizing Phyllis Tickle’s magisterial compilation The Divine Hours.
![[ben_frank.jpg]](https://i0.wp.com/3.bp.blogspot.com/_WQFPFNWlR3I/SMruMwor9xI/AAAAAAAAAFk/okbmOUc1MuE/s1600/ben_frank.jpg)
Nonetheless! Dr. Ben loses me utterly when he says “And here we come to an important point- Christ is not the leader of the worship service.” Sorry, I guess I’m just too Quaker or Pentecostal or what have you, but a sense in which the Spirit is directly leading and guiding our activities together is just too precious to relinquish simply because we can (of course) trace some human agency in the process of God’s speaking in our midst.
Overall, Ben Witherington III’s review of Pagan is insightful in that it shows Christians of good will and historical awareness can disagree – it’s not as though there will ever be a cut-and-dried air-tight case for ‘organic’ church meetings based in homes. But I’ve gotta tell ya: Independent scholar Dr. Jon Zens does a devastatingly good (and irenic) job sparring with Dr. Ben’s posts right here. It’s well worth the read.
Reimagining the Dialogue
So they say controversy sells – it certainly does. While BW3’s posts are only the tip of the blogstorm in terms of online response to Pagan, I’ve noticed that Frank’s followup Reimagining Church has received comparatively little online traction. This is really a shame, as Reimagining is the crucial reconstructing to Pagan’s deconstructing, and as such is my favorite of the two. As I said in my inside-cover endorsement of the book:
Reimagining Church is a readable (and livable!) description of organic, New Testament–rooted church life for the twenty-first century. Avoiding the weeds of both wooden fundamentalism and unreflective overcontextualization, Frank Viola paints a winsome and attractive portrait of a gospel people, inhabited by the Holy Spirit with God in Christ as their energetic center. Frank helps us learn from the peculiar genius of Jesus and his earliest followers, planting seeds for authentic, deeply rooted life together.
Further, I’ve reviewed the book here for TheOOZE. But enough of what I think. While Reimagining hasn’t found as much of a blog traction as I would have liked, BW3 has been a faithful engager. Here’s his (even longer!) series on this one:
Reimagining Church Part One
Reimagining Church Part Two
Reimagining Church Part Three
Reimagining Church Part Four
On these Ben invited Frank to reply directly. So he did:
A Frank Response Part One
A Frank Response Part Two
(And Frank also edited his responses together in one handy-dandy PDF document, right here.)
Whew! Their exchange is friendly, and in Frank’s case fairly witty. Ben lets his guard down a little (especially in his Part Three), but in some ways makes Frank’s case for him. When BW3 talks about subordination in the Godhead, or how we might be ‘ontologically’ united with Christ but kinda not really, he comes across as…well, a cautious scholar to Frank’s animated prophet. Which I suppose is all well and good in the grand scheme of things, but makes me feel more clearly that Frank ‘wins’ this round if winning means venturing out and exploring fresh terrain.
There are some other posts in this latter mix that are worth reading:
Bill Heroman Part I II & III (I spent a good 4-5 years with Bill in a house church community)
Neil Carter: (Whom I also spent 4-5 slightly-different-but-overlapping years with in the same community.)
Reimagining Church
Reimagining the Trinity
Out on a Limb
With blogs, books, and – oh yes – more and more house churches being planted – it would seem that ‘house church’ has indeed reached prime time. My friends and my family continue to talk, with helpful interjections by scholar-teachers. We will all be the better for the exchange.
Coming in Some Subsequent Post (I cannot guarantee you when): The Future of ‘House Church’ – Where It’s Going (at least for me). In the meantime, enjoy the first chapter of Reimagining Church.
zoecarnate 
“Nonetheless! Dr. Ben loses me utterly when he says “And here we come to an important point- Christ is not the leader of the worship service.” Sorry, I guess I’m just too Quaker or Pentecostal or what have you, but a sense in which the Spirit is directly leading and guiding our activities together is just too precious to relinquish simply because we can (of course) trace some human agency in the process of God’s speaking in our midst.”
Is there now no distinction at all between Christ & the Spirit? Maybe I’m just old fashioned but I like what Augustine said about it:
“All the Catholic interpreters of the divine books of the Old and New Testaments whom I have been able to read, who wrote before me about the Trinity, which is God, intended to teach in accord with the Scriptures that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one and the same substance constituting a divine unity with an inseparable equality; and therefore there are not three gods but one God, although the Father begot the Son, and therefore he who is the Son is not the Father; and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son but only the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, himself, too, coequal to the Father and to the Son and belonging to the unity of the Trinity.”
If Augustine is right (which I think he is) we would have to ask the question of which person of the Trinity is the “leader” of the worship gathering. I, personally, think it’s probably a bad idea to say that only one of the divine persons is the “leader” in worship. That, I think, would be modalism. All of God “leads” in worship but not without human cooperation. It would seem to me, then, that both Ben (who would, it seems, relinquish Christ’s leadership) and others who speak only of the Spirit are mistaken. It is God – wholly and Holy – which “leads” and enlivens in worship and to speak of a division of the “duties” of God is, to me, a terrible narrowing of our vision of what God is doing and has done with God’s people when we worship.
But maybe I’m just nitpicking…
Oops! Yeah, I wasn’t tryin’ to be modalist or anything… 😉
I guess I’m saying that Christ is the head of our gatherings, the Spirit leads them, and the Father guides them…or something like that.
BW3 in the full quote wasn’t trying to distinguish between persons of the Trinity. He seemed to be saying that any talk of God having direct bearing on our gatherings was nonsensical.
Thanks for bringing all of this for our consideration, Mike. That is a lot of reading, but I have enjoyed it in my spare time. (Eons of it, apparently.)
just put the book down to write a blog tonite and swung by yours to see you already posted this lengthy piece. i’m enjoying reimagining so far and am excited to finish it and shoot Frank some questions. by the way, did you ever see this brief interview i did with him about social justice and the church? http://www.neueministry.com/2008/08/qa-with-frank-viola-does-the-church-care-about-the-poor/
I’d encourage you to check out this link for Neil Cole and CMAResources > http://www.cmaresources.org That’s a better place to track what he’s doing and how the organic church is spreading.
Press on,
Mike