One of the books I have recently read is Frank Viola’s Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity which, as you can imagine, is a reimagining of – you guessed it – church. Frank Viola is an iconoclast. He has a mission (which he would likely call ministry or calling) to shatter the age-old traditional image of the church as we know it. That solid (but crumbling) edifice that is a focus of so much of what Christianity has become. Noble ideas all – no one likes a reformers or a prophet…but it remains to be seen if Viola is either or if he is simply an angry man. Reading this book was an exercise in frustration and refreshment all rolled into one messy ball.
The book begins a little like one would expect an infomercial to begin – with customer testimonials…letters from happy organic church visitors/clients. The testimonials are designed to show how the organic church experience is far more genuine and closer to the heart of God than what our traditional churches have become. Really though it is not difficult for anyone to find a few client testimonials to prop up pretty much any organization. Frankly I am sure that Al Qaida, the Ku Klux Klan and even Jonestown before the tragedy could do the same.
Sadly immediately after the testimonials the next section is titled "I Have A Dream" which worked well when Martin Luther King Jr. used it but should never be used again by anyone else because it just sounds like a bit of a rip-off and cliched. Of course all of the criticisms I have levelled so far focus primarily on the packaging of the content (which is ironic given how critical Viola is of the packaging AND content of the current institutional church). The saving grace for Viola is that his content is really not bad. He has very good ideas as far as church is concerned but I think he tends toward an extreme and I am always wary of extremists no matter who they are.
The language of Viola in his "I Have A Dream" section sounds a lot like a version of theological Marxism (which I realize is an anacronism) as he rails against the human power structures that have corrupted church leadership and led to an oppression of the laity and dreams of a day when God will demolish the human infrastructures that have "ursurped His authority" with something truly Godly and remove the shackles of cleargy oppression from the masses. Wheww. There is so much to critique I am not sure where to begin.
Really there is nothing wrong with Viola’s dream. I mean I dream for the same things. Unfortunately his dream denies the existance of human nature (as did Marxism and it’s little brother communism…BTW…don’t go around telling people I called Viola a marxist-communist…I am simply saying he use similar logic and language). Viola’s dream is a dream of the church as it would look remade by Christ and this is not going to fully occur until heaven and earth are united and recreated…you cannot simply look at the "human" aspects of the church in disgust and wish it away – this smacks of platonism and gnosticism.
As long as there is brokeness in the world there will be human infrastructures and heirarchy and God has ordained that, for the time-being, it should be so. Why? Because while the kingdom has come, it is still coming and still yet to come. Things are not yet complete. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12 "For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."
I think Viola’s biggest mistake with the book is the assumption that the practicing institutional church believes it is the full expression of the body of Christ in the world. While the world may see the body of Christ as the institutional church I can tell you that we (clergy) are quite aware that our one hour on Sunday morning constitutes a fraction of the reality that is the body of Christ in the world and so in light of this Viola gives us far too much credit…in some ways he speaks of and is angry at a church that only exists in places like Westboro Baptist or the middle ages.
On many occassions Viola swings his axe against "empty religious ritual". While we agree that ritual is what it is…symbolic…it is not simply a human institution but rather a way of remembering the acts of God within human hitory. Ritual, however empty Viola believes it to be, is critical to our state of being as humans. One need only read Leviticus to see that God has been involved in the establishment of ritual. One need only read the words of Christ at Passover to understand the importance of repeated human action as established by God.
Of course the danger of ritual is that it becomes the thing one is trying to remember rather then a symbol of it but this does not mean one abolishes all ritual, all human institution and all forms of authority because what is left is anarchy. Those that go out and start their organic churches will find to their shock and disappointment that people still end up abusing authority, that heirarchies will still develop, that rituals, symbols and a clergy/laity divide will still somehow form. I fear that people who buy in to the idealistic vision that Viola presents, when confronted with such human failure, will see it rather as a proof of the impotence of God rather than the impotence of humanity because they were taught that the organic church was the true, real and Godly, Spirit-led way of becoming church.
Viola’s vision of church is not wrong but it is out of time. His vision of the church is Christ’s as well, but it is the church of the new Heaven and the new Earth empowered by the eternal imminant presence of the triune God when the brokeness of the world has been healed once and for all. Viola makes the mistake of so many brilliant thinkers before him (like Luther, Calvin, Arminius,Freud, etc) and surely those to come after – he reads too much of his own context, experience and pain into the lives of everyone else and into scripture and his response becomes a system to be applied outside of his context and into the broader contexts of "the rest of us".
Another concern is that there are many leaps of logic that permeate throughout the text to the degree that it significantly undermines the whole premise of what Viola is trying to say. Too many to go into in-depth one example comes from the end of chapter one that tells the story of the girl Genie, who having grown up in a highly deprived environment eventually loses the capacity for behaviours we believe are hardwired into us – Viola says "Some scientists concluded that her normal DNA was altered because she was deprived of proper nutrition and stimulation." Ok – if anything screams FOOTNOTE this statement does. Unfortunately there are no footnotes anywhere in the book. There are endnotes but they are sporadic and rather incomplete. Viola goes on to apply this story to the church and suggests that humanity has in some way done the same thing to the church that was done to Genie and the church’s natural, organic development was interupted and what we have now is a corrupt and twisted version of what was intended.
So what do we do with Viola? Well for starters he has brilliant ideas on how to structure the life of the church. I appreciate his focus on the trinity and that our ecclessiology needs to be trinitarian in nature. I also appreciate his desire to flatten heirarchies and consider venues outside of the insitituional church edifice and common business practices to develop new church experiences. I do not think denominations need to be abolished but rather their theological oversight needs to become administrative oversight and there is no doubt that a large collection of affiliated churches can better maximize their impact on the global scene for the gospel than individual and separate church’s can (although there are always exceptions to the rule).
If one strips away the ideological statements (and there are a lot of them) and tempers the practical ideas (i.e. rather than eradicate the instituional church as we know it perhaps help it transform into a local affiliation of house churches) then one is left with a remarkable collection of insights and ideas. Viola offers many fantastic ideas on reimagining the church meeting, the Lord’s Supper, the gathering place, leadership, oversight, decision making, authority and submission etc.
Read the book (it really isn’t bad) but read it carefully and learn to separate out the ideology and iconoclasm from the practical ideas offered (as one would separate wheat and chaff).
