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Subscribe to the NetworkBook Review: Finding Organic Church
I recently read the book, Finding Organic Church by Frank Viola. The subtitle is: a comprehensive guide to starting and sustaining authentic Christian communities. I read the book because there’s been a fair amount of buzz about it from college-age people nationwide. I have heard of a sort of “rebellion” happening from people in this stage of life after reading this book.
If you’re leading a college ministry, I’d recommend reading it. My guess is this book will gain much more traction, especially with college-age people. I’ll explain more in a minute.
Things I liked: The book had a lot of really good insights into what biblical community can actually look like. And, it was practical for leaders seeking to implement community in their church/ministry. I can say that there were a lot of things I’ve been doing in my ministry for years and agree with. I think any leader can gain some insights for their immediate ministry – regardless of context – from reading this book. I can also say that I think Frank Viola (from what I can tell) loves Jesus, the Church, and is seeking to be faithful. I mean that.
But I’m also very concerned.
My Concerns: To be as blunt as I can here, this book is extremely dangerous. And, I think, it has the potential of causing damage in the body. This is all the more reason you ought to read it!!! Frank Viola’s conclusion is that there should be no long-term leadership or authority in the church. You can probably see why people could grab ahold of this and run, especially the college-age person who has been burned by a leader or has been in a ministry where the leader has abused the authority given. This book, unfortunately, is fuel on that fire. And I believe without biblical grounding.
Frank Viola of course uses a ton of Scripture to back his opinions. He bases his conclusion on a study of the patterns of the apostles – they started a church/community, then left it in the hands of the people there. One problem though: in this book he never addresses passages clearly speaking of spiritual authority in the church. He omits them and this is where the danger comes in. If you take a person who has been “burned” or experienced an abuse of authority in a church context – has a lack of biblical knowledge and only reads this book – they can be lead astray.
This book never addresses Paul’s apostolic instruction to Timothy or Titus to appoint elders in the church (1 Timothy 3:1-7 / Titus 1:5-16) or Peter’s instruction for the elders to “shepherd the flock of God among them” (1 peter 5:2), nor does he mention the role of deacon (1 Timothy 3:8-13). He also doesn’t address passages like Hebrews 13:17 where it speaks of us submitting to and obeying our leaders. What was most surprising to me was he doesn’t mention the apostle’s ongoing leadership in Acts 6 (a book he bases much of his conclusions from). The entire way through I kept waiting for his response to these passages. I was with him on so many things, but was left waiting on these.
There is more and more people feeling like the “American” way of doing church isn’t the biblical way. In some ways, of course, they are correct. We’re not perfect and over the last 45 years we’ve learned a lot. I’d recommend you reading the book so you know how to respond when/if someone in your church reads it.
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“To be as blunt as I can here, this book is extremely dangerous. And, I think, it has the potential of causing damage in the body. This is all the more reason you ought to read it!!! Frank Viola’s conclusion is that there should be no long-term leadership or authority in the church.”
Yes. This is what burned me so much about Pagan Christianity (aside from the fact it was filled with distortions and misunderstandings of both Scripture and history). Frank thought he was pushing people towards his brand of funky house church. I think he was fairly shocked to see that what he was actually doing was justifying the de-churched status of a bunch of leavers. Thus his two-part recent series on Out of Ur titled something like “Uh… we still need Church. I never said we didn’t! Hey everybody… Come back!”
I think Frank loves Jesus and SERIOUSLY misunderstands NT leadership… and that makes his stuff exactly what you called it- dangerous.