I save alot of articles that various people have wrote about in the last 10 years, and I came across one that was 9 years ago. It was a review by Frank Viola, on a article of Michael Spencer’s article named “The coming Evangelical collapse”.
Just the title of the blog, was intriguing to me when I first saw it from Spencer, even before Viola’s review was published. It a very good piece of seeing that things were going to change down the road, for the ‘church’. I too seen it coming maybe thru different lenses, than Spencer noted in his piece but it was that thing were going to change was the main issue that I saw.
One of the four points that Spencer noted that in the changes that were to come was the influx of people to two different groups, one being the house church, and the other being the influx of high church denominations(Catholic,Orthodox,Anglican). This is exactly what has happened in the current state of affairs of the church activity. Without going to deep into the ‘why’ this has happened, it has been a fallout from all the ‘institutional denominations’ trying to ‘please’ the worshiper in any way shape and form. We all know what that means! People have just left those kinds of shows to the more intimate ones of ‘house church’s’, that were more real in the fellowship.
One should just sit and think what this is really telling us about what God’s people are searching for in this intimate bond with God. People are truly looking for and finding a ideal of what it is in being ‘with’ God and He with us. It is not the place that I am talking about tho, it is the concept of God and us walking and talking in the world(garden of Eden) as was defined many centuries ago.
One other point that was brought out in the article was about “Evangelical” itself, and it was said by Viola’s friend- “George Barna and I have tried to challenge evangelical Christians with the idea that one of the systemic problems is the very system of organized Christianity – particularly as it relates to the expression of the local church.”
The ‘local church’ has to be redefined, it’s not by the hundreds of the local church’s but by the out flowing of love from the people of God (God’s image)that is seen by other people!
This was and is still today a focus of banter back and forth between the sides, but it seems to to be changing from the norm to a new maybe old way of doing things as we ‘see’ that things of the first century christians were believing that we they stood for was thru their living the way of the Messiah. As they say, time will tell but I believe that just maybe this could be the start of something big, like maybe the “Kingdom of God”!
The Eternal Purpose 