July 2012
The human-centred church, reimagined
In this post I continue presenting highlights from this very challenging book.
The first major theme of the book is the organic nature of the church versus the institutional model so often adopted in the church today, and I covered this in my previous post. A second theme is about how the church features in God’s eternal plan. Viola introduces this theme by commenting on the Gospel as follows: ‘Our modern gospel is entirely centered on human needs. The plotline of that gospel is one of a benevolent God whose main purpose is blessing and healing a fallen world. Thus our gospel is centered on saving man’s spirit/soul (evangelism) and/or saving his body (healing the sick, delivering the captives, helping the poor, standing with the oppressed, caring for the earth, etc.). In short, the gospel that’s commonly preached today is “human centered.” It’s focused on the needs of humanity, be they spiritual or physical.’ Then he writes, ‘What was God going to do with human beings if they had never fallen?’ The implied question is, is the Good News, the Gospel, purely a divine response to man’s fall into sinful rebellion, or is it more? Viola answers this question in several ways, but the main thrust of the argument is that through the Gospel we are not only saved out of a condition of sinful separation from God and each other, but into a condition of wholeness and unity within a divinely ordained community called The Church. The church of the Lord Jesus Christ is at the centre of the Gospel.
He writes that ‘from the viewpoint of God’s eternal purpose, the church exists to be;
- the incarnation and manifestation of the ultimate passion of God
- the organic expression and physical extension of the Trinitarian Community
- the corporate image-bearer of the Lord Jesus Christ on the earth the family of God
- the divine building whereby every living stone is being transformed, reshaped, and fitted together to form the Lord’s temple
- the colonial outpost of the coming kingdom
- the masterpiece of God
- the spiritual “Bethany” where Jesus of Nazareth is received, obeyed, and adored in the midst of a rejecting world
- the vessel in which the power of Christ’s resurrection life is visibly displayed
- the object of God’s supreme affection and delight
- the willing vehicle for Christ’s manifested presence
- the torchbearer of the testimony of Jesus
- the “one new man”—the new species—the “third race”
- the fiancée of Jesus Christ—His very body, His very bride
- the new humanity marked out in the Son of God before time and brought into existence by His cross
- the Christian’s native habitat
- the spiritual environment where face-to-face encounters between the bride and Bridegroom take place
- the living witness to the fullness and headship of God’s Son
- the colony from heaven that bears the image of its Ruler In short, whenever the church gathers together, its guiding and functioning principle is simply to incarnate Christ (1 Cor. 12:12)’
In my next post I will present some highlights which partially present a third major theme of the book, Viola’s conviction that the modern clergy system is the single biggest impediment to the realisation of God’s plan for the church.
The institutional church, reimagined

Almost all my reading nowadays is by means of my Kindle and when I highlight passages they are uploaded to my account at Amazon and I can review them online. As I was reading through these the other day It occurred to me that you might be interested in some of my highlights from books I have been reading recently, so in this blog series I am reproducing some of these highlights along with brief comments.
I read the first half of Reimagining Church quite some time ago but then I got waylaid with something else and only returned to complete reading it a couple of weeks ago. A lot of the book is focused on showing the shortcomings in what Viola calls the ‘institutional church’. He clarifies what he means by this with the statement that ‘the church of Jesus Christ is a spiritual organism, not an institutional organization’ and that ‘properly conceived, the church is the gathered community that shares God’s life and expresses it in the earth. Put another way, the church is the earthly image of the triune God’.
I highlighted the following because I thought it captured what the author has in mind when he writes of organic rather than institutional church. ‘Because the church is truly a spiritual organism, its DNA never changes. It’s the same biological entity yesterday, today, and tomorrow. As such, the DNA of the church will always reflect these four elements:
- It will always express the headship of Jesus Christ in His church as opposed to the headship of a human being. (I’m using the term “headship” to refer to the idea that Christ is both the authority and the source of the church.)
- It will always allow for and encourage the every-member functioning of the body.
- It will always map to the theology that’s contained in the New Testament, giving it visible expression on the earth.
- It will always be grounded in the fellowship of the triune God. The Trinity is the paradigm informing us on how the church should function. It shows us that the church is a loving, egalitarian, reciprocal, cooperative, nonhierarchical community’. He continues a little further on with, ‘The DNA of the church produces certain identifiable features. Some of them are the experience of authentic community, a familial love and devotion of its members to one another, the centrality of Jesus Christ, the native instinct to gather together without static ritual, the innate desire to form deep-seated relationships that are centered on Christ, the internal drive for open-participatory gatherings, and the loving impulse to display Jesus to a fallen world’.
In my next post I will continue with highlights that reflect a second major theme of the book.
Why Hell?
The Mystery of the church
In Ephesians Paul uses the word ‘mystery’ four times. He writes of ‘the mystery made known to me by revelation’, his ‘insight into the mystery of Christ’, and how God has appointed him to ‘make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery’. In verse six he states the mystery in plain terms; ‘This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus’.
To us modern day multi-cultural Christians this hardly seems a mystery at all, but to the Jews of Paul’s day it must have been a shocking revelation. The Jews were the chosen few and the Gentiles were the lost many, and now Paul was saying that these blasphemous goyem were included through Christ Jesus in the people of God! What an outrageously radical idea!
Paul’s mysterious revelation goes even deeper. He was a student of ancient Jewish mysticism and would have been familiar with the concept the Rabbis’ called the Adam Kadmon, the Heavenly Man, or what later became known as the Cosmic Christ. This mystical being was believed to be the final revelation of God, representing the fusion of the divine with the human. His head was in the heavens and his body was on the earth and as such he filled the entire cosmos. Paul uses ‘Cosmic Christ’ type language extensively in Ephesians and is suggesting to those in the know that the church, the mysterious body made up of all types of people, is the Adam Kadmon. That’s why he writes that God’s intent was that ‘now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Ephesians 3:10-12). Jesus is the head in heaven and the church is the body on earth!
Now, it may not be particularly relevant, or mysterious, to us today to accept that Jews and Gentiles alike make up the Body of Christ, but it is certainly relevant to know that the church is in some sense part of the mystical co-joining of divinity and humanity. Now we can understand why Paul wrote that ‘God placed all things under his (Jesus’) feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way’ (Ephesians 1:22-23).
So the Gentiles as well as Jews are part of the church, and the church is the Body of the Cosmic Christ. But there is more, there is a third level of mystery that Paul is revealing in Ephesians. He writes of the riches of God’s ‘glorious inheritance in the saints’ (1:18) and he ends his wonderful prayer in chapter three with ‘to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus’. The blessings of Israel are now the blessings of the church. Ephesians 3:6 states that ‘through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.’ They are therefore the blessings of each of us who are part of the church. But here’s the thing; the promises and blessings that Paul prays for are for us, not in isolation, but as members of the church. The blessings set out in Ephesians, and elsewhere, are corporate! He writes that we (plural) ‘may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God’ (3:19), and in chapter four verse thirteen he continues, ‘until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.’ Do you know of any single person apart from Jesus himself who has attained to this? No, because the promise applies to us corporately as part of the church, and not to us as independent individuals.
This idea of our corporate identity is as shocking to many of us today as the revelation of Gentiles being included in the church was to the people of Paul’s time. Why do I say this? I believe this because for centuries now Christians have been taught that Christianity is all about ME; what I can have, my health, wealth and happiness, my eternal destiny, and my personal relationship with God. Yet this idea is utterly alien to Jesus’ message because He said that it’s all about others, giving, and community.
Now, if I believe the ‘I lie’, then what is the church to me? Well, it’s a supplier of services of course. It’s there to supply me with life principles, friendships, music, community projects, and so on. The church is a supplier and I am a religious consumer. No wonder church leaders moan about the fact that only 20% of their church members are active, committed, and growing spiritually. No wonder Christians move from one local church to the next when they feel that their needs are no longer being met. Why not, because if one supermarket no longer stocks the brands I like, or raises the prices, then I move to another supermarket without a thought – so why not with church?
What a tragic misunderstanding! We miss God’s purpose for us almost entirely, and we miss so much of His blessings, when we fail to see that we are saved into the body of Christ, the church, not into a self-centred consumerist individuality. This is indeed a mystery, but a glorious and blessed mystery!