Reimagining Church – Ruvan Weerasinghe

The Covid pandemic has exposed the fragile nature of life and laid bare many of the assumptions under which we unconsciously operate. While this has affected all of our life activities, nowhere has it been more stark as in our church life. Most congregations of believers have had to ask themselves the deeper questions relating to their very purpose of existence. In some of our cases, it has sharpened the focus on what was already clear before: the institutionalized church appeared to have lost its way, having adopted more practices from tradition than from the scriptures.

Thought experiment: suppose an alien lands on earth after reading a copy of the New Testament floating in space as part of space debris – would they recognize your regular Sunday gathering as the embodiment of the community described in Acts? Of course, much has changed in the world we find ourselves, and yet, in which intrinsic ways is the church in Sri Lanka and our local fellowship, like that of the early church. In which ways has it strayed away from what God intended?

Confession: a couple of years ago, my angst with the way our local church operated – starting with the Rev, leaders and some of the ‘messier members’ came to ahead. Should I just quit and join another church or stay on and seek change? Speaking about it with a few other members made me realize that several of them shared my frustration, but were going along with the way things were, mostly as they were too busy with life to make a decision even to quit! We soon realized that feeling this way is not something bad in itself. In fact, it was better than not feeling it at all – implying that we were either spiritually dead, or were actually ‘surviving’ in a broken ‘system’!

Much of reform in history has happened when people were angry about the way things were. Such anger however, often results in bitterness and eventually avoiding the situation – in the case of the local fellowship, this being to leave the church for another. The healthier way to leverage such anger is to firstly be clear about what it is directed at, and then to seek to change the situation or experience. This requires looking above and beyond the immediate problem of a weak preacher, bad pastor, poor leaders or difficult members, to what really should make one angry with the current status quo.

So, what are we really angry about? At least in some of our cases, it is about the unconscious way in which we have drifted away from the core characteristics of the church as God intended, and Jesus inaugurated [1]. From a living community of saved sinners meeting in small congregations and sharing in each other’s needs, to a largely impersonal ‘audience’ with a single individual (or small team) ‘doing everything’ from leading gatherings and ‘breaking bread’ to visiting members of the ‘audience’ from time to time. But how can we change to rediscover the church as God intended?

The futurist Alvin Toffler says in his book Future Shock, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”. While most of us are often reminded in our own disciplines and work contexts that this kind of unlearning and relearning is important in the spheres we’re involved in, we rarely apply this in our church settings. We are however reminded by Albert Einstein that “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. In other words, change is hard from within the system that created the problems we face. History however is dotted with exactly such situations where individuals and groups have started and sustained systemic change over time in order that we have a better world than could have been! A common feature in such movements however is that they span more than a single generation. As such, one of the crucial factors we need to face is the need to get involved in change, knowing that it’d mostly likely take longer than our own individual lifetime. This is hard in the current global context of increasingly faster ways of ‘getting things done’.

So, how do we get back to basics and dissect our current practice of church to rediscover which parts of it are scriptural, and which parts pure tradition? This is not to trash all of tradition either, but only when and where it diverts from the Biblical mandate.

Some aspects of the institutionalized church that would be unrecognizable to our visitor from outer space includes, but is not limited to: a majority of members being a passive ‘audience’, one or a few ‘performers’ doing all the work, the sense of belonging being indistinguishable from any secular club, the vast disparity in the economic status of members, homes and possessions of members being very private (and not to be questioned), the infrequent meeting together for fellowship and meals, the sheer physical space needed for expanding and the megachurch phenomenon as a benchmark for success.

Alternate models of church do exist, especially in countries where it has been underground. These groups are mostly small and linked to each other in loose networks. It is not coincidence that the Internet was designed, originally by the US military, as a communication infrastructure in which there would be no single point of failure. The church networks in an underground church are similarly more resilient to attack and so are geared to growing even in times of adversity.

Nodes in such a networked model of church, are small house churches in which twenty to twenty-five meet together, so that there are no ‘passengers’. They tend to be tightly knit and accountable to each other. Growth in such a model is by spawning new nodes and not by expanding the space needed to meet. There would typically be one or two lay pastors ministering to each such fellowship. Apart from each member being discipled, these house churches also provide opportunities for each to also disciple others. Since the nodes are geographically related, in the current context, they would provide for non-denominational cells in local contexts, rather than brining in denominational members from far flung geographies, as is the case presently.

While the above is by no means the only alternate model of church that could recover some of the main characteristics of the New Testament church, it is one that would help us return to a more authentic organic body of Christ in modern times. It would also be more scalable in terms of resource requirements, especially if our mission is not just to maintain numbers or increase by a small percentage, but to reach, say, 10% of the population in our local town or suburb!

This article is only meant to jog our minds to reimagine church and not to prescribe a perfect model of it. Lots of issues such as the leadership structure of such a network and how each church relates to the other need to be addressed in such a model. The purpose of the article is to be aware how far we’ve strayed from the God-intended model, and spur a new generation of believers to rethink church for the modern world using the creative skills they so readily use in their secular life.

[1] Two books which helped me personally in this were both written by former megachurch pastors Francis Chan and David Platt.

[2] A book that may help in this task is Reimagining Church by Frank Viola.

The views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or position of FOCUS, Sri Lanka.