In this
chapter we will direct our attention towards a serious problem within
the house church movement: the constitutional defects of the radical
personality.
House church Christianity is alternative Christianity, and
alternative Christianity attracts alternative Christians. People
who never ask why, who are content with mindless ritual, who are
theological yes-men, are not going to leave the institutional church for
radical home church Christianity. This means that people in our
movement tend to be free spirits. The result is that home churches
are rarely bland: they are usually very, very good, or very, very bad,
in terms of their disposition.
Before we look at the downside of the radical personality, let’s
appreciate what’s good. Radical NT Christians tend to be extremely
devoted to the person of Christ, and very devoted to one another in
brotherly love. They have to be if they are going to survive in a
house church environment. They tend to be seeking individuals,
because they don’t have a priestly caste to teach them how to live
spiritual lives. House church Christians are generally happy with
life. Their families are robust, and they are pleasant people to
be around. So please remember this as some personality problems
are dealt with.
There are essentially six negative personality traits that
threaten to afflict those who are in this movement: cynicism, pessimism,
discontent, perfectionism, weirdness, and hyperintensity.
1)
Cynicism. A house church Christian is, by definition a radical, at
least in terms of twentieth century American Christianity.
(Actually, in one sense, a house church Christian is very conservative –
“radical” comes from the Latin word radix, which means “root.”
This means house church advocates want to go back to the church’s roots:
the way the church was when the church was still young.) Because
the radical NT Christian has examined just about every aspect of modern
conservative Christian life there is, and rejected about ninety percent
of it, he has become used to rejecting things. This can get to be
a habit. Pretty soon, the radical Christian is rejecting things
that shouldn’t be rejected: submission to authority, for example.
Because of the heavy-handed tyranny exercised by so many (not all)
pastor-popes, the radical Christian tends to look at legitimate
authority cynically, judges the authority’s motives, assumes the
authority is a creep, and refuses to listen to him.
It’s hard
not to be cynical when you are radical. You look around, and
pastors are preaching sermons of “faithfulness,” and you know their
budget’s hurting, and you know their primary interest is not your
spiritual well-being. You see preachers all hot and lathered about
God’s latest move, and you know it’s nothing but their flesh at best, or
a con at worst. No matter how bad it is out there, my fellow house
churchers, there is no excuse for cynicism. Cynicism is
self-defeating. After you have finished being cynical about the
institutional church, you’ll then start being cynical about your
brothers and sisters, then yourself. You might even become cynical
about God letting all the nonsense go on.
One of the most radical figures in history was Jesus Christ, and I
see nothing to indicate He was a cynic. His religious system was a
lot worse than ours, but He was focused on a better kingdom. We
want to stay away from sourpuss radical Christianity. There’s
nothing worse.
2) Pessimism. Closely allied with
cynicism is pessimism. You don’t have to be in the
church-in-the-home movement long to get very discouraged. Your
institutional friends humor you, and think you have a “pet doctrine,” or
that you’re going through some kind of stage. You scour your home
town for kindred spirits, and are lucky to find one. Worse, you
constantly run into people who get all excited about house church, but
won’t lift a finger to get involved. Pretty soon, you start
getting sour on the future.
A pessimist is doomed from the start. A house church Puddleglum
will never see the bride in her NT purity. He will spend his whole
life bemoaning the sad state of the institutional church, but he will
resign himself to the awful fact that there will never be anything
better. The church will never be restored with this kind of
thinking. I am more aware than most of the terrible difficulties
involved in getting involved in house church, but I have hope. It
looks impossible, but I have hope. I have to. I’m not going
back to the institutional church.
3) Discontent. Radical Christians are more often than not very
discontent. Many of them are still within the institutional
church, having damaged their integrity and their peace of mind by making
those thousands of excuses that keep them in a situation in which they
have no business being. One wonders who is more to blame: the
institutional church for being so awful, or the radical Christian for
not having the fortitude to leave. These radical brethren will
always be discontent, and there’s no helping them, until they come out.
On the other hand, the radical Christian who has come out is often
just as discontent as his like-minded brother who has stayed in.
He may be naive, and think that doing house church is a simple matter of
getting some brothers and sisters together for meetings in a living
room. As you know, nothing could be further from the truth.
When the new wears off, and the honeymoon is over, and the marriage
begins, many radical Christians are shocked at the hard reality of
learning to have the cross operate in their lives through the agency of
their brethren. These naive Christians will continue to look for
the perfect “meeting,” or for some magical answer to the problem of
their unhappiness. Words like covenant, and community, and
commitment are alien to them. With their minds focused on the
horrors of their past lives in the system, they are unable to focus on
the hard task at hand of establishing the kingdom. And so they
remain discontent.
4) Perfectionism. Closely allied to discontentedness is
perfectionism. Since radical Christians are by their nature
critics of the status quo, it is very easy for them to forget how
difficult it is, in this grubby world, to even maintain an imperfect
status quo. It might do us all some good every now and then to
stop and ponder that even though what we’re doing is a whale of a lot
better than the institutional alternative, that with which we are
replacing the institutional church is far from perfect, and, in fact,
will never even be close. I recently heard of a brother who
slammed the door as he walked out of a house church on his way back to
the system. His beef: the sharing wasn’t mutually edifying enough,
and the elders of the church weren’t chastising people enough for not
edifying one another properly. People like this are hard to
please. Personally, I wouldn’t bother trying.
5) Weirdness. The institutional church thrives on a conformist
mentality. You wear the right clothes, you believe the right
denominational doctrines, you read the right books, you listen to the
right speakers, and you never disagree with the pastor-pope. When
the radical Christian escapes this stultifying nothingness, he is pat to
feel giddy with “freedom.” The next thing you know, he refuses to
go to his kinfolk’s weddings and baptisms, he’s spitting tobacco juice
on the plush carpets of his local Protestant temple, he’s decided to
quit paying taxes (which is alright, because he’s not working anymore to
have any income to pay taxes on, because he’s too busy “seeking God” to
actually work). He begins to exhibit the social graces of a donkey
with B.O. I don’t know what the answer is, except to show a lot of
grace. But hey, how can you criticize anyone for being
weird? After all, you read Toward A House Church Theology!
6) Hyperintensity. This is a besetting fault of all radicals,
not just house church Christians. On one hand, it is easy to
understand the intensity of one who has caught a hold of the radical NT
church vision. It’s so refreshing, so exciting, so different, and
why hasn’t anyone told me about this before? But ideology is never
a substitute for relationships with people. If people aren’t going
to listen to you, Jesus has a free word of advice: “Shut
up.” Didn’t he say to not cast our pearls before swine? You
can tell when people are ready to listen to you: they are so
hungry, they practically beg you to tell them about church. You
don’t need to aggravate those who aren’t interested.
We need to take the time and enjoy the “unbought graces of
life.” The Southern agrarians hated Northern radicals, and one
reason was their propensity to spend all of their lives trying to remake
the world without spending any time trying to enjoy it. House
church radicals need to relax and remember: we can still have fun in
this life, even though the Constantinian abomination we view with
disgust will exist as long as we do. So what. When you find
a Christian still in the system, quit worrying about the sad fact that
he is still in the system, and find something exciting and interesting
about your brother. You’ll be a lot happier, and a whole lot less
frustrated.
