I’ve been using the term “organic church” since 1993. In my book Reimagining Church, I point out that T. Austin-Sparks is the man who deserves credit for coining this term. Austin-Sparks ministered in the 1920s until his passing in 1971.

When I began using the term “organic church” over 16 years ago, very few people were using it. (The exception would be those who were familiar with the work of T. Austin-Sparks.)

Today, the phrase has become a fad. It’s become a clay word, molded and shaped to mean very different things by many different people.

Consequently, one must now carefully define what they mean by “organic church” when they use the term. As for me, I pretty much stopped using it. Continue Reading…

Right before 2009 ended, Alex McManus (brother of Erwin McManus) interviewed me on his program. A few live questions came in at the end.

The interview is 27 minutes total. You can listen to it here.

Feel free to pass it along if you find it of help.

Brant Hansen (of radio fame) recently reviewed From Eternity to Here, focusing on Part I of the book: “A Forgotten Woman.”

You can download some new sample chapters from www.FromEternitytoHere.org

Here is Brant’s review:

— Continue Reading…

I just returned from a 5-day trip to Vegas. My coworkers and I spoke at a 4-day Organic Missional Church Life Conference called Threshold.

Great folks and a great time.

Never saw the city before. It’s quite a sight to see, especially at night.

One of the great misconceptions that people have about organic church (fueled mostly by people who have never read Reimagining Church) is that organic churches have no structure and no organization.

This simply isn’t true. It’s a straw-man argument to say that advocates of organic church believe that the church has no structure and no organization. And it’s one that’s easy to knock-down.

Organic churches certainly have structure. Just as much as a physical body does. (I discuss this in an interview I did with Drew Marshall, and I go into detail on it in Reimagining Church, the companion volume to Pagan Christianity.)

The difference is that the structure (or expression) of an organic church emerges from LIFE . . . God’s life. The life of God is the source of the church’s expression (that’s largely what “organic” means . . . that which is derived from life.)

Contrariwise, in an institutional church, the organization emerges from a human system. A hierarchical leadership structure and religious tradition are the sources of the structure.

Take a course in Anatomy and Physiology and you will have a pretty clear understanding of the structure of an organic expression of the church (Paul likens the ekklesia to a physical body in 1 Corinthians 12).

I delineate some of this in my article published in Relevant Magazine’s Neue Journal.

Since it’s a PDF file, you need Adobe Reader to view it (it’s free). And you can adjust the size of the print. Or do what I always do with online articles – print it out and read off-line.

Click here to read the article.

What follows is the afterword in From Eternity to Here. To my mind, it’s one of the most important parts of the book. So I’m publishing it here. It can also be titled “One Man’s Journey into Rediscovering Jesus.”

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. . . the summing up of all things in Christ. (Ephesians 1:10, NASB)

My friends Andrew Jones and Brian McLaren have written about something they call “deep ecclesiology.” This phrase appears to be derived from Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory of deep semantics.” Chomsky said that underlying the “surface structures” of the statements we make is a deeper and simpler structure that’s ingrained in the human capacity for language.

Andrew and Brian have said that in a similar way there lies underneath our varying models of church a basic underlying reality that’s manifested in our historical and social settings. This notion has been coined “deep ecclesiology.”

I resonate wholeheartedly with the concept that there is a reality of the church that is higher and deeper than what typically occurs in many modern church structures. To wit, a “deeper” ecclesiology. Continue Reading…

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve been using the term “organic church” since 1993. In my book Reimagining Church, I point out that T. Austin-Sparks is the man who deserves credit for coining this term. Austin-Sparks ministered in the 1920s until his passing in 1971.

When I began using the term “organic church” some 16 years ago, very few people were using it. (The exception would be those who were familiar with the work of T. Austin-Sparks.)

Today, the phrase has become a fad. It’s become a clay word, molded and shaped to mean very different things by many different people.

Consequently, one must now define what they mean by “organic church” when they use the term.

I’ve often said that an organic expression of the church is one in which the members are learning to live by Divine LIFE together. They are learning how to live by the indwelling Christ. And out of that living emerges a particular expression. That expression, because it’s derived from LIFE, is “organic.” When the church is living true to herself . . . as a spiritual organism . . . her expression is organic.

This past Tuesday, I finished another book for my “ReChurch” series. There are presently 5 books in the series: Continue Reading…

If you have read my books Pagan Christianity, Reimagining Church, and From Eternity to Here, then you are aware of two things:

1. I believe the church that the New Testament envisions and that God has had in His heart and mind from the very beginning is quite different from the typical traditional church of our day (which I have dubbed “the institutional church”).

2. Many “simple churches” and “house churches” (so called) do not embody the church after God’s own heart either.

In light of the above, I’m an advocate of what I call *the organic expression of the church* which I’ve written about extensively, especially in Reimagining Church.

That said, there is what I call “the convenient substitute” on the planet today. It’s postchurch Christianity.

The postchurch “church” is neither an institutional church nor is it an organic church. It’s something else. I call it the “phantom church,” the “ghost church,” the “nebulous church,” and the “amorphous church.”

Click here to read the unedited article I wrote on the postchurch perspective

Atlanta Journal Constitution — Interview with Frank Viola – 7/2009

Editor: I am interviewing members of a 15-year-old So. Baptist Church who have their building up for sale. They want to free themselves from costs/maintenance and have the money avaiable for local and interntional mission. How unusual is it for an established congregation to go wall-less? (It seems to me more of these type of churches start from scratch, no?)

Frank: A decade ago it would have been highly unusual. Today, it’s happening much more often. My coauthor George Barna calls this trend a “revolution.” Many churches are moving from buildings to homes, and many are beginning in homes and other “sacred-less” low-cost spaces from ground zero.

Editor: How quickly is the non-building church movement growing? Ten years ago, was it a blip on the radar? Now, is it a bunch of blips? a blob?

Frank: Ten years ago it was a small blip. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of such “blips” that span the globe. George Barna’s research shows that there are over 11 million adult Christians in the United States who exclusively meet outside the institutional church.

Editor: What is driving the  movement, why is it happening now? And is it largely contained in the evangelical movement? Roman Catholics? Mainliners?

Frank: The bulk of this “revolution” began among evangelicals. However, we’re seeing it move beyond evangelicalism to liturgical traditions as well. It’s happening because people are waking up to the fact that the conventional form of church is in many respects unbiblical and ineffective at transforming lives and impacting society. George Barna and I demonstrate this both biblically and historically in our book, ”Pagan Christianity.” The book is a bestseller. What makes that surprising is that five years ago no publisher in their right mind would have put out a book like that. The paradigm it espouses would have been far too controversial.

Related:

The ReChurch Library

“Discipleship” and “missional.”

These are the two big buzzwords on the Christian landscape today. Of course, there is also “simple church.” But that’s another discussion for another time.

As I speak in conferences throughout the world and meet people who have jumped on the discipleship bandwagon, or the missional bandwagon (or both), I make several observations.

Two Streams of Missional

There seems to be two different streams in the missional world: Continue Reading…

Here’s my one paragraph description of the New Testament experience of “church” (ekklesia).

Organic church life is profoundly simple yet endlessly complicated. It satisfies the deepest longings of the human spirit but frustrates the soul and bids death to the flesh. It’s at the same time rewarding and maddening–it is without a doubt the greatest spiritual experience a mortal can know. Why? Simply because God has chosen the ekklesia in her organic expression to reveal the glories and the riches of His beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and to bring to this earth the fellowship that exists within the Trinity.

Consider the above description as an ADDENDUM to the book Reimagining Church.

For more on organic missional church, click here.