But – and don’t read too much into what I’m saying – I think you’d have to ask yourself how “old” your perception of church done rightly is. For instance, you mentioned house churches as something new. Has it occurred to you that perhaps the oldest form of Christian church is the house church? You want old time religion? Go to a house church.

(disclaimer – my church is not a house church. But we do meet for small group bible studies in houses).

Our approach is typically that “this doesn’t work anymore, let’s do something new”. I got “The Spirit of the Disciplines” for Christmas and he makes a good point, similar to the one AW Tozer makes in “The Pursuit of God” – if you want the spiritual life the old saints had, try doing what they did.

I don’t think things change nearly as much as we think they do. Things don’t just stop working. The problem is with _us_.

I?m talking about methodology here, not theology or watering down messages and what-not

I think one’s methodology is very important, and I view the Bible as proscriptive and not merely descriptive in these areas.

Has it occurred to you that perhaps the oldest form of Christian church is the house church?

The first church seems to have met both corporately and in small group settings (Acts 2:46). I don’t think the modern notion of a house church is analogous to the first century church. Certainly if you did have a house church, you ought to follow the Biblical model when it comes to things like organization, leadership, offices, worship service, etc. Those are the essentials, and, from what little I can tell, many house churches take all kinds of liberty with that.

I agree that you have to be careful that you remember “old” is not “200 years”. The first time I heard Christians talk about fasting, I thought “What kind of strange new thing is this?”. Seriously. I’d never heard of Christians actually fasting before. “New” can’t just mean “new to me”.

The Bible is full of themes of looking back, remembering those who’ve gone before you, modelling their lives, things like that. That’s what I’m saying. “Right” is not defined by a thing’s perceived effectiveness. We can’t just abandon the Biblical and historical traditions because we think that we live in such unique times and cultures that we get to remake our religion in our own image. If it was relevant and effective for 2000 years, can I be so arrogant to think that it’s not going to be relevant now? Because I’m just _so_ different from all those other people.

Of course, sometimes there will be necessary changes. Like if Christians are being persecuted, you might have to stop meeting corporately. But aside from really drastic stuff like that, I think we are wise to stick to the old ways.

This is true, of course, in a sense. I mean, maybe the problem with us is that we insist on outdated churchy-ness, things that are spiritually neutral but are currently disadvantageous to sharing the Gospel.

I guess I just know different people than you. Because the strongest Christians I know, the ones committed to the “old” spiritual disciplines — committed to lives of prayer and Bible study and living redemptively — are members of “new” kinds of churches. And the weakest Christians I know, the ones who seem perfectly comfortable with the religious routine and apparently couldn’t care less about lost people, are members of “old” kinds of churches.
I wouldn’t doubt you, though, if you’re experience is the exact opposite.

I think you lump too much in together, equating new methodologies with an abandonment of the classical spiritual disciplines. This is a false dichotomy. If you think seeker churches and what-not are “wrong,” you need to explain from Scripture why. Not just say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” I think lots of people recognize something is broken, and I believe for most of them it is not them in the sense of their spiritual maturity (as you seem to imply).

Jared writes, “I don?t know of anyone who subscribes to any ?new? sort of ecclesiology or methodology who has abandoned the tried and true spiritual disciplines of our faith.”

How about submission and obedience to the Church?

Bill writes, “We do suffer from a lot of what Chesterton called ?Chronological Snobbery?.

CS Lewis is actually the coiner of this phrase..but I get GK and CS mixed up all the time myself!

Robert asks, “If it was relevant and effective for 2000 years, can I be so arrogant to think that it?s not going to be relevant now?”

This is a dangerous line of thought…it is one of the things that lead me to embrace the Orthodox Church.

Thanks, I’ll pass. I believe in submission and obedience to Christ. (Not to mention I don’t recall the “submit to the church” thing in the Bible. But there I go with that sola Scriptura thing . . .)

Btw, while Lewis may have used the exact phrase “chronological snobbery,” I believe he was building off of the ideas of Chesteron in his book Orthodoxy, particularly the chapter “The Flag of the World,” in which Chesteron talks about the nonsense of believing a dogma may have worked for the 12th century but not for the 20th.

Sorry if I sound curt. It’s only 12:45 and it’s already been a long and trying day for me.

The Church is called the Body of Christ (Rom 12; 1 Cor 10, 12; Col 1) and the Bride of Christ (Eph 5; Rev 21). It is likened as well to God’s living Temple (Eph 2; 1 Pet 2) and is called “the pillar and bulwark of Truth” (1 Tim 3:15)

The dichotomy you pose between Christ and the Church is neither Scriptural, historical, or patristic.

Participation in and submission to the Church *IS* submission to Christ because the Church is the Body of Christ Himself.

In re: to Lewis/Chesterton: You are correct of course. But Lewis was the first to actually use the phrase “chronological snobberby”. I was simply pointing out who actually said the phrase–not where the original idea came from.

I hope I have not sounded curt. Long and tiring days are tough.

This wasn’t really about seeker sensitive churches, but what the hey…

The perceived problem is (1) Not enough people are making professions of faith, (2) Not enough lost people attend our church, (3) Not enough lost people think well of our church. Or something along those lines.

I think the right approach is to look at the Biblical and historical model churches have used to carry out the great commission. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Sending missionaries. Church planting. Stuff like that.

One possibility is that we aren’t doing those things. Maybe we have only very dim lights. In that case, the solution is to figure out how to turn our light up through repentance and conformance with the will and word of God. Maybe we lack evangelistic zeal. That’s a problem with us.

But if we are actually following the Biblical and historical model, letting our light shine, and we have a bright light (meaning, genuinely changed lives that conform to the word of God), and we have an evangelistic zeal and are using the old ways, it still might not be “working”.

One approach would be to assume God is still on His throne and may have sovereignly decided that America will not experience a revival now. Maybe Jesus was right about the world hating and rejecting us.

But our approach is not to try to identify and fix the problems that cause us to deviate from the Biblical and historical standard, or (having done that) to accept the results as God’s will. No. We use marketing methods to see what “Saddleback Sam” likes and mimic the world.

You know, we humans are very good at marketing. We can make folks buy and do all kinds of things. I read an article the other day about how De Beers has convinced women to buy “right hand” diamond rings to show their independence. We can talk folks into all kinds of things. Is it any wonder that we can get them into church if we’re willing to change almost everything to specifically attract them?

This is just an example. The same sort of thing could be said about any number of things. I wasn’t primarily thinking about seeker sensitive churches when I wrote it.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of open source software. Essentially, it means yu get a copy of the source code and have full rights to modify it any way you see fit. You can make it meet your needs. Great idea for software; bad idea for Christianity. Christianity is not open source. It’s proprietary and God holds the copyright.

I am not a postmodernist. I believe, in moral and religious matters, that there is a hard and fast right position, and many wrong ones. And I do not believe “does it meet my perceived or actual needs?” is the way to evaluate a position or belief or practice. And particularly not if it just seems to have stopped working in the past few decades or even couple of centuries. We aren’t just SO different from everyone else that the same Christianity that worked for so long just won’t work for me, I’m just so special.

People should conform to the historic Christian church, not the other way around.

Now, about these newfangled electric lights I see everywhere. What’s wrong with good old-fashioned, time-honored torches? Oh, I’m getting a little carried away I think… :-) But next thing you know, Karl will be insisting that the Orthodox church uses the exact same lighting methods as they used in Acts. :-D

And yes we do use electrical lights…we’re not the Amish you know! *wink* ….