(with Ebenezer V., a fictional me (*n2))
Here we pause our Ebenezer. I’ll get to it below.
As to the other odd ‘E’ word:
‘Ekklesia’ is an anglicized Greek word from which we get the fancy religious word ‘Ecclesiastical’ meaning related to the Church.
The precise meaning of ‘Ekklesia’ has a lot to do with context and the traditions of the people using the word.
It is often used to refer to whole body of believers in Jesus Christ throughout time and space.
It is also used to refer to a specific congregation of Christians that live in community together in the same geographic area.
An Ekklesia regularly assembles to manifest Christ’s presence as His Body, His Bride, His temple of living stones in their corporate activities including regular meetings for prayer, worship, teaching and proclamation.
This side of glory we only ever tangibly meet the ‘Holy Catholic Apostolic Church’ in an assembly event.
We particularly meet the Universal Church in the persistent, consistent local fellowship of a congregation of believers and their children.
Thus, the two ideas of congregation and Universal Church (Holy Catholic Apostolic Church) are related.
However, the second sense of local fellowship is very compelling because it is where we tangibly witness and experience Christ’s corporate body this side of Glory.
(Glory being the full manifestation of Christ’s Kingdom over all on His physical return).
Frank Viola uses ‘Ekklesia’ rather than the word ‘Church’ to refer to a local congregation of Christians.
You can read about it in his book:
Insurgence: Reclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom
or
Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity
Frank Viola himself has moved on from the phrase “organic Christianity” as he feels it has lost its descriptive power due to all kinds of people using the word ‘organic’ for all kinds of things completely unrelated to what he is trying to convey.
If I understand correctly what Frank Viola means by organic Christianity, it is the set of things that that are intrinsic, instinctive, natural to the new species of humanity created directly by God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the coming of the Holy Spirit within and among us, and our death to the world system marked by baptism.
Anything constructed by fallen human culture, such as particular sociological offices around the Biblical words like Apostle, Prophet, Teacher, Pastor, Evangelist, Elder, Deacon, or Bishop (an anglicized word for the Greek meaning overseer.) is not organic to the Church.
What is organic to the Body of Christ is what is built by the Holy Spirit in accordance to the nature of the Body in the Headship of Jesus.
I think the above is an accurate presentation of Frank Viola’s thought, but I am totally open to correction, especially by Frank Viola.
Launching from these ideas that are much better and more simply articulated by Frank Viola, I continue with the following:
Our sociological structures for governance are well intended.
We have freedom to construct them.
Our freedom, propensity and ability to construct them are all part of being made in the image of God.
However, because official sociological bureaucratic (literally governed by office) structures are human artifacts rather than direct creations of God, they are artificial, and not organic to the nature of the Ekklesia (Church).
A thought regarding bureaucracy:
Perhaps the Church, the Ekklesia, only really has one officer, one bureau, one ruler.
He is Jesus our Prophet Priest and King, the Only King and Head of the Church, the LORD and Creator of all that is seen and unseen.
Perhaps he is the only true official ruler.
Perhaps elders are not officers but simply older Christians recognized, perhaps with laying on of hands, for Biblical wisdom exercised over many years in the fellowship of the saints.
Perhaps that, while there is canonical evidence that the laying on of hands can bestow a spiritual gift (1 Timothy 4:14) and commission a ministry function (Acts 13:3)’,
Perhaps the laying on of hands, translated (badly? yes, imho badly!) as, ‘ordination’,
does not mean that scripture teaches that it marks entry into an office or a bureaucratic clerical order structurally or socially distinct from other members of Christ’s body.
Perhaps Christ’s admonishment that “The Kings of the gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you.” (Luke 22:25-26) not only refers to the attitude of leadership but also to the very sociological structure of office.
God being God can and does use official structures despite their intrinsic flaws.
He uses them the same way he uses the principalities and powers of this world:
for the restraint of the evil doers (Romans 13:4)
and to work all things for the good of those who love God ( Romans 8:28) as he relentlessly pursues His eternal purpose for all creation.
I believe that like ancient Roman citizenship these manufactured Christian religious sociological structures are, in part, spiritual mechanics of the principalities and powers of this world.
As artifacts, they are not organic to who we are as the ekklesia, the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, the temple of living stones whom God is building together as the earthly vessel for His Shekinah glory.
In my mind they are like a fabricated exoskeleton, a sort of Iron Man suit, that we intend to enrich and enhance the body.
However, because as human cultural artifacts they are things of this fallen world they inevitably come under the insurgent influence of the prince of this world and eventually trip us up.
As mentioned, Frankie V. no longer uses the phrase ‘organic Christianity’.
‘Ekklesia’, however, remains a useful and Biblical word.
*n1 Ebenezers
I like to use the weird Anglicized Hebrew Word ‘Ebenezer’ to categorize the cultural constructs we erect around Biblical words with the intent to honour the Triune God (Yahweh; Father, Son & Holy Spirit).
‘Ebenezer’ comes from 1 Samuel 7:12 where the prophet Samuel raises a stone to mark the Help that Jahweh gave to His people.
Yahweh did not command Samuel to do so.
Samuel exercised his freedom to make this artifact to the glory of God.
In doing so Samuel was following traditions of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob that we find in the following passages of the Hebrew Testament:
(Gen 12:7, 13:18 (technically altars not stones)), Isaac (Gen 26:25 (again an altar) , and Jacob (Gen 28:18 a pillar of stone, Gen 31:45, Gen 33:20 Jacob’s first altar (He begins to worship God personally and not from a distance as the God of his fathers.))
Samuel raised the Ebenezer as a cultural act of worship that draws attention to the presence and help of God to accomplish God’s purposes in the midst of His people.
(I wrongly thought Ebenezer means stone of praise.
It actually means stone of Help.
The idea of Ebenezer as a an artifact to praise God still works with the nuance of marking God’s Help for His people.)
So, here’s a ‘new’ definition based on an imaginative extension of Samuel’s historic act recorded in canon : Ebenezer, a cultural artifact intended to glorify God our Helper.
(Yes, arguably, that makes the character Ebenezer Scrooge an Ebenezer.
God bless us everyone.
(Sorry, Scrooge McDuck, you don’t make the cut. (I love me some good beats and a good assonance, because….))
Err yes. Where was I. Not Scrooge. An extension of the original Ebenezer.
Ebenezer as a cultural artifact intended to glorify God our Helper.
In this way of thinking a dedicated church building where an Ekklesia meets is an Ebenezer.
Such a building is a physical artifact that marks the presence and help of God with his people in a particular place and time.
No where in Scripture does God command followers of Jesus to build a church building of any kind.
Occasionally, in the Old Testament God directly commanded pre-ekklesia believers to erect permanent buildings.
God directly commanded at least one of Jacob’s altars (at Bethel, in addition to the pillar that Jacob raised on his own initiative , the tabernacle, and the First Temple.
However, God also destroyed the temple and the earlier itinerate tabernacle that God had built into the fixed temple.
God did this following centuries of His people ignoring His presence and Help;
centuries mixing in the worship of other gods and refusing to come to repentance as a nation.
If the temple that God himself instructed our pre ekklesia spiritual ancestors to build became an idol in need of destruction,
then how much more so can the erected freedoms of our imagination in physical church buildings become idols for an ekklesia or the ekklesia?
God answers prayer with the restoration of the second temple through Ezra and Nehemiah.
Though I don’t recall God’s Shekinah glory ever inhabiting the second temple as He did the first.
The temple was Ichabod since Babylon conquered Judah in 586 BC.
(I’m open to correction on this, and on everything. Show me chapter and verse and I will repent.)
As for ‘Herod’s’ temple, no canonical record of the details of what God was thinking when he allowed it to go forward.
No doubt God used it as hopeful tangible step as a forerunner of the Messiah and as necessary in the formation of young Jesus as an orthodox Jew in full observation of Torah.
No doubt God allowed it in answer to prayer.
Though God also allowed quail in answer to ‘prayer’ (Numbers 11).
And God allowed the destruction of that temple by the Romans in 70 AD and the construction of a rather imperialistically imposed Church building and then a Mosque on the temple mount.
Everything after the tabernacle and the first temple is a form of Ebenezer as was the development of synagogue structures in the Babylonian and Persian exile.
Additionally In this way of thinking a sociological structure of ‘church government’, or ‘polity’ is also an Ebenezer.
Such a body of official administrative law is a social artifact that is intended to mark the presence and help of God with his people in a particular place and time.
And again, outside the ‘pre ekklesia’ Aaronic priesthood and the Levites and the laws of tabernacle and temple worship,
which God allowed to be destroyed after centuries of unrepentant corruption,
God does not ever command us to design a specific form of structured official government for a local congregation or a network of local congregations anywhere in Scripture.
God does not even give a ‘polity’ for synagogue worship in the exile.
That evolved through human freedom of believers desiring to glorify God our Helper.
During his time on earth Jesus respected and participated in that synagogue polity and in the reconstructed temple polity but He did not decree it or design it directly.
He allowed the temple and the synagogue structures as corruptible and corrupted human freedoms intended to glorify God our Helper.
He participated in the context of their nature as powers and principalities of this world.
And again if the ‘polity’ or ‘church governance’ around priestly and Levitical offices that God Himself gave to our pre-ekklesia spiritual ancestors
became an idol in need of disruption in order to correct folks to put it in it’s proper context as a historical preparation for Jesus (Galatians 3:24)),
then how much more can our own self-constructed church polities become idols and prisons for an ekklesia or the ekklesia.
The Babylonian Captivity of the Church did not end with a reformulation of Church officials around the sacraments and the relationship between canonical scripture and tradition.
During the Protestant Reformation Doctrine and Dogma may have been humbled by a return to Greek and Hebrew sources with a closer reading of scripture to cut through accumulated unhelpful tradition.
(See Who Needs Theology?: An Invitation to the Study of God by Stanley J. Grenz | Goodreads for helpful discussion of Dogma, Doctrine, & Opinion as buckets of thought that various Christian traditions and individuals use to sort the importance of ideas regarding God, life the universe and everything.)
But how are the post Worms Protestant structures of governance more Biblically sound than the pre or post Trentian Roman?
It is true that no protestant officers so brazenly or openly model themselves on the seemingly defunct Roman emperor as to claim to be the bridge between heaven and earth.
((Supreme Pontiff) apologies brother Francis, you come by that terrible mantle as honestly as any sinner can, but in that area you are under a spell and need a little ex-cathedra Reformation.).
We Protestants, I think rightly (as a former Roman Catholic who left for doctrinal reasons), come to the conclusion that Christ needs no vicar, or bridge, He needs no magisterium or mediator of grace other than Himself.
However, does Christ need or actually directly appoint (rather than patiently permit) any official mediator of ecclesiastical government in the form of church officers like hierarchies of elders’ councils modled on the renaissance republic of Geneva’s civic governance put through Westminster parliamentary procedures?
I think probably not.
Forgive me, I’ve become a very bad Presbyterian. (Though I still love that word, ‘polity’ and I love parliamentary procedure.)
My heart is no longer in that particular Ebenezer or in any project of polity, not even official structural congregationalism.
I still pray for elders, for ‘church courts’: Sessions, Presbyteries and Assemblies General, that they will be responsive to the Holy Spirit in Scripture and I’ll still respect them as ‘sitting in the seat of Moses’.
But that doesn’t go very far.
(Maybe as far as my crucifixion at the hands of an angry Presbyterian mob.)
Jesus Christ our Prophet, Priest and King is the only ruler of the Ekklesia.
We have used our freedom over time to construct various polities, or systems of ecclesiastical government (Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational).
We construct them within the laws of our wider societies as cultural artifacts intended to offer glory to God.
We call them denominations. (or (half) jokingly demonizations …. but that’s another story.)
Even independent non-denominational congregations use polity when they officially structure themselves, incorporate themselves as charitable organizations for tax purposes or otherwise as entities with legal standings in civil and criminal court.
Even various non-clerical, non-hierarchal egalitarian, historically informal manifestations of Christ-centred Quakers, the Society of Friends, do polity to some degree.
(Neither Quakers informal inclinations, nor their formal efforts, have protected against drift away from Jesus, but that’s a whole other story best left for a page or a post rather than a cascade of ‘rabbit trail’ notes. But maybe I won’t post. I’m no expert on Quakers. I know only slightly more than an under nuanced caricature of inner light teaching, Oatmeal, Nantucket, ‘humane’ slave owners (oxymoron alert, o the humanity), Abolitionists, Richard J. Foster, Parker Palmer, and Cadbury’s. PS The Presbyterian Church in Canada’s far more structured approach has not been any protection against drift away from Jesus either.)
Informality and lack of official structure does not protect against chaos and sin.
In fact informality and lack of structure combined with a libertine or a controlling spirit of people who want to be big fishes in small ponds can be abusive and disastrous.
Only Christ can stand against the onslaught.
But thanks be to God in Christ we too may stand.
Though the instant we take our eyes off him, as we all do, we are back in the mess of the world, the flesh (not to be confused with our bodies though our bodies are affected by the flesh.) and the devil. ))
God uses denominations and official congregational structures and offices.
They are part of the cultural context of the Ekklesia.
These structures have a certainly worldly authority that even Jesus respects as he respected the authority of Rome, the synagogue, and the degenerate ‘restored’ temple structures during the time he physically walked this earth.
However, they are not organic to the nature of the Body of Christ.
Denominations rise and fall, even big persistent adaptable global ones like the Roman Church.
(The Roman Church doesn’t like to be called a denomination, but o well. If the cap fits….)
However, not even the gates of death shall prevail against the Ekklesia of Christ.(Matthew 16:18).
If the ‘polity’ or ‘governance’ of networks of congregations (aka denominations) were organic or intrinsic or natural to the Body of Christ then they would not change and they would not perish the way all sinful human institutions perish due to the fall of the principalities and powers and the collusion of our original human progenitor, the first Adam (Genesis 3), with the prince of this world (John 12:31, John 14:30, John 16:11, Ephesians 2:2, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Revelation 12:9) .
Although individual communities of believers ebb and flow and disperse for various reasons the Body of Christ continues to live on through all challenges wherever two or three gather in the name of Jesus (Matthew 18:20).
Warning the following book recommendation is not for those who are even somewhat satisfied with any form of Protestant formal, official, sociological governance of the ‘Ekklesia’ let alone any Roman, ‘Eastern’ Orthodox, or hybrid Anglican practices.
If you like tweaking polity, see some form of bureaucracy (however limited) as necessary, and need to define officers or officials of some sort to protect and correct against the work of ‘evil doers’ you will not appreciate, or even necessarily understand the wavelength of the following book, also by Frank Viola, this time in collaboration with George Barna:
Second warning. The book I mention by George Barna and Frank Viola is incomplete and it is inseparable from its constructive sequel mentioned above, and other constructive works by Frank Viola including:
From Eternity to Here: Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God by Frank Viola.
Fair warning having been given, check out the following historical and scriptural deconstruction of our ecclesiastical sensibilities in the Christian world.
(But if it outrages you, don’t paint devil horns and beards on the authors.)
You have been warned.
It may smell like anarchy to your officially sensitized nose but what it is the clearing away of the grime of centuries to rediscover the radical moment by moment rule of Christ the Only Head and King over his people the ekklesia.
And yes, it’s impossible.
That’s part of the point of Ekklesia.
If it were really possible to govern and manage by sinful human techniques and structured offices then God would not get the glory and we would not be the peculiar witness and foretaste of God’s restored Kingdom that we are.
Thankfully God can keep the embers of Ekklesia alive even in the belly of the official infrastructures of the religious principalities and powers of this world.
Thank you, Jesus, because I’m still technically, in very limited and contingent terms of this world anyway, an official Presbyterian teaching elder and a citizen of Canada.
There’s hope for me yet.
And so with more adieu, the Link to Barna and Viola’s book is revealed:
It occurs to me that the canon of scripture is a human cultural artifact.
But it is one with a difference.
Parallel to the nature of Christ as fully human and fully divine, Scripture is fully of human culture and fully of the work of the Holy Spirit in history.
Thus Scripture is not what I call an ebenezer or a flawed authority structure of any kind.
This argument will not convince, despite the balance of evidence attesting to the uniqueness of the canon as historical documentation goes.
It takes the inner conviction of God’s Spirit to attest to the reality of canon. And of course, this can easily be dismissed if people so choose.
The Holy Spirit isn’t into forcing himself on reluctant people who would rather be left alone by the Creator.
It takes a certain amount of desperation and humiliation of the ego to receive the things of God.
It takes death on the cross. Christ’s death followed by the death of our egos as we follow Him.
*note 2 Ebenezer V. This is another lame joke. Let me flog it and dissect it so it remains completely bad and unlaughable.
Ebenezer because I go on about Ebenezers.
V. because I am in danger of being a Frank Viola, aka Frankie V., fanboy.
I’ve only met Frank in passing in a corridor to nod to him at a conference he hosted.
The reason I appear to be such a fan boy is that he responds to Jesus and expounds so consistently, clearly, and prolifically that I am in awe of our wonderful Saviour at work in JOC FV. Thus, I steal the initial of his surname. Forgive me, brother, my sense of humour is enough to make you or anyone suck a lemon, I know.
Fictional me because, I am not actually Ebenezer v
And because “Ebenezer V, Fictional me” is good beats, it rhymes and its got some good assonance.
I love me some good assonance because I can be a jack ass.