The Time Has Come to Restart the Church - Without Her Accumulated Problems!

Meet the New Christianity,

A high-powered blend of the best from many traditions

minus the less Biblical and divisive customs of our medieval past.

Piggybacking on the exploding social networks of the Internet,

it will strive to bring together a billion ordinary believers

plus a billion of their friends into a highly upgraded style

of relational, high-commitment, fellowship life . . . all within two years.

You could call this, Facebook meets the house church.

Riding on the power of Skype and other visual, face-to-face tools, the New Christianity will aim to do the formerly impossible: Draw in and disciple the whole world via Internet friendships . . . even at a distance of 12,000 miles.

Indeed, its greatest challenge Internet anonymity may turn out to be its greatest strength. Its leaderless structure is modeled after such decentralized, egalitarian networks as Wikipedia, Craigslist, Amazon, e-Bay, YouTube, and Alcoholics Anonymous. So it lets people be who they are and everything they can be. They'll be unimpeded by hierarchies and institutional speed bumps like programs, staff, buildings, mortgages, and official pastors. (In point of fact, pastors will be very welcome and respected but never as pastors!)

Obedience Trumps Knowledge

The hallmark of the Western church is its intellectual capital, not its humble obedience and self-sacrificial love.

The New Christianity will try to change this. One of its main concepts is, Jesus didn't say, Teach them what I taught you, but Teach them to obey what I commanded you.

So yes, we are focused on drawing two billion people to Christianity, but a whole different kind of Christianity: one that has love and teeth!

Reboot, Defrag, Set Free

Typical pew-bound believers can accomplish a hundred times more for Christ and the Kingdom when they are set free from being supervised to death. That is key.

This principle springs from one of the central verses of the Bible, where God, in a moment of joy and excitement in 1447 b.c., just two days before giving the Ten Commandments, says to Israel AYou shall be my prized possession, dearer to me than all other peoples! For all the earth is mine, and you shall be for me a kingdom of priests! (Exodus 19:6)

But alas, He never got that great host of priests . . . and the rest of the Bible is a saga of the Lonely Creator trying to develop that army of people who would be His intimate friends.

Whatever hope God had for that got put on ice 407 years later when Israel told Samuel flat out: No! We want a king over us, that we may be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and march in front of us and fight our battles. (I Samuel 8:19-20)

Then much later, before the ink was dry on the New Testament, a similar mega-problem popped up (which Jesus said He hated), a practice called Nicolaitanism. The word comes from the Greek nikos (to conquer or control) and laos (people). In brief, it meant Give us a priest.

In the New Christianity we bear in mind the torn veil in the temple, and everyone is a priest, living as close to the fiery presence of the Lord as he can stand!

Be a hub, too!

As if being a priest and friend of God were not enough, members of the New Christianity are also qualified to invite their Internet friends to join. Thus they become Ahubs which you can think of as rookie-level apostles.

But this is not the old-fashioned, come-to-meetin' kind of invitation like: Come to our church, hear our pastor, raise your hand, go forward, get baptized, take our new members' class . . . and then you can be our friend. (This totally turns off the postmoderns, who want the friendship part first and working out the details later.)

Instead, the invitation may sound like this:

How would you like to have a team of fifteen sharp people who are committed to helping you in every way possible, a team that would stand by you, no matter what, in any kind of trouble? They would all pledge to be there for you at the big turning points of life and help you to reach your highest possible levels of success, solve your toughest personal problems, and become the kind of person everyone admires. If you were in trouble, you could call on them day or night, and they wouldn't rest until you were OK. In return, all they would expect is the same sort of loyalty from you. Would you like to have that kind of group around you?

The offer is so irresistible, many people will laugh and say, Well, who wouldn't?

Over time, we shall develop several other such invitations.

How will this type of invitation play out on Facebook?

The average member of Facebook has a roster of friends that grows almost automatically. The average number, we hear, is about 33 friends.

They can forward our messages to each of them with the click of a computer or cell phone.

We will supply New Christianity members with a variety of sample invitations and follow-up explanations as desired free of charge, mostly via an autoresponder computer.

All a member will need to do is forward them to their e-friends, which can be done with little more than a single click.

As more friends join, excitement will build, and there will be many phone calls and e-mails taking place. In fact, if it weren't for the individual contact and chat, the network could multiply about six times every two days!

So more realistically, our average member will likely pull in: two friends in the first week, then one more friend in each of the next three weeks. That means a growth rate of six times in each month.

But after that initial rush of activity, I am not counting on anything further. Obviously, the more excited members may continue to bring in a lot more, both online and offline, but if so, it will become daunting to calculate. The theoretical rate would continue at six times a month.

For those of us who are the pioneer, first-level hubs, it could be especially daunting to keep track of the growth because I expect to launch this, in God's timing, with about 300 lists. Each one will probably contain an average of 500 people. (Most lists will have only 50 to 100 names, but a few organizational lists will have 5,000 to 10,000.)

Riding the Whirlwind

If these numbers seem unlikely, let's put them into perspective.

The horse we're riding is Facebook along with a few others to be explored. (If you have any specific suggestions, please let us know.)

As of July, 2009, Facebook had 250 million members. Just 75 days later, it had 300 million.

That's a monthly growth rate of 7.5%. Pretty fast, but not the 600% I'm estimating.

Why the difference?

Because we have the most exciting content (message) in the world! The good news of a fresh, cleaned up gospel loaded with life-changing benefits compares starkly with the typical Facebook/MySpace/Twitter post: Ahi, i'm going down to the corner for a beer. Or, AHey, wassup?

That is so banal it's repulsive! In complete contrast, we have the heart-warming appeal you just saw, offering 15 loyal friends. Or a New Christianity hub might put out a simpler but intriguing message: AYo, Larry. We've fixed the church! It's the New Christianity, and it has all the things you've always loved about the church . . . and none of the things you hated! We'll be holding membership open for another week. If you're interested, bounce back with YES, tell me more!

The Quid Pro Quo

1. Free books. To ensure that our one-to-one e-mails stay at the highest possible level, we will offer members a maximum of two free e-books or articles per calendar month.

We will search for the absolute best in spiritual growth and discipleship works every month and other topics if the Lord so leads, such as house-church-planting helps. The emphasis in our meetings and constant global conversations (e-mail and Skype) will thus be on the positive and cutting-edge events in our lives.

The most common cause of failure of house churches is failing to bring something to feed the flock. Our ideal here is to have so much exciting content that it'll be hard to get a word in edgewise in our meetings.

2. Guidance without governance. As with Wikipedia and e-Bay, accountability and leadership will normally emerge and evolve on their own. Self-policing will develop as people learn to be aware of limits and the need for everyone to act and grow. Leadership is vital, but top-down hierarchy is deadly. What we need is a well-developed lowerarchy consisting of servant leaders.

Consider how different things would have been in Ezekiel's day if God could have found even one man to stand in the gap and prevent the captivity by saying, No, Lord! Don't let this happen to your people!

Iron will sharpen iron both online and offline. This is no longer a curiosity; today, it's the most common evidence of any healthy, leaderless network.

Hiding your faults will come to be seen as very poor form. In fact, that will soon be recognized as cheating yourself of the main benefit of community life supportive, caring correction! Why turn your back on dozens of friends who can make you stronger and wiser than any seminary?

So the quid pro quo is, you give loyalty, you get support.

3. Make disciples or else! It's fun to watch Victor making a big group of church planters memorize the Great Commission. The hard part is figuring out what it is. The other hard part is getting it into their heads! But it's worth the effort because they eventually see that it's all about letting the Lord Jesus build the church while we make the disciples!

So in our New Christianity network, we will probably settle upon some sort of computer program that will quietly drop you if you don't bring in one new member a month. (You could get back in later, of course!)

I'm sure that will take some adjustment in practice. The members may decide that this requirement may be met by having a new member join anywhere in your entire downline group.

But please notice that this is not the usual project that tolerates lukewarmness and dead wood and a slow death.

4. Stewardship may be part of the package of benefits.

The Western church is in danger of raising a whole generation of stingy disciples, people who seldom give much to any Kingdom enterprise. That's just not the spirit of Christ, who gave everything he had.

I'm not sure how this will play out in reality, but we'll be toying with the idea of an honor system where members will affirm each month that they've given something to some cause that is not themselves.

5. The virtual will become the real.

Online groups will be faster to launch than face-to-face house churches, but house churches allow for much closer ties and friendships. Experience and time will tell us how fast the Spirit wants us to transpose from virtual contacts and start building real home groups.

White Unto Harvest

A survey of 10,000 Brits found that they have an average of 33 friends on the Internet, but only a fifth of them are close friends.

But ironically, they spend more time with their social friends than their close friends. In fact, women tend to see their social friends every three or four days, but see their close friends only six times a year!

Two-thirds of these Brits call this attrition of friends one of their biggest regrets in life.

Did you hear that? Most folks are majorly sad because life doesn't give them any solid ways and common ground to maintain their ties with their most precious friends. So they just drift away into a morass of convenient contacts that they bump into all the time.

Those friends are just sitting there, white unto harvest, all neatly arranged in strings on computers or cell phones, ready to hear anything that can liven up their meaningless conversations and bring life into their dying friendships.

Missions will never be the same. No passports, no visas, no shots, no language training school. If you know even one bilingual online guy in the bush or in the mountains, you can invite him into your circle, and he can take the easy-to-spread message in his native language. And bingo, the Kingdom has broken into another people group!

None of our forefathers ever had a tool like this.

Luther Never Had It So Good

Is this cheating? Is it short-circuiting a long, painful process that God wants to be slow and difficult so our apostles can have many years of experience before we toss them out into the world?

Granted, there's a lot to be said for years of hands-on experience.

But there's also something to be said for the 13-year-old Indian girl who attended one of Victor's seminars for five days . . . and went home and led 56 people to the Lord and baptized them all in one month! Would you have stopped her for the sake of doing all things decently and in order?

Yes, it would be nice to have the names and addresses of all 300,000 of those that took a ritual bath on Pentecost Day, but I'll take all of those new brothers and sisters I can get!

Likewise, let us not be rigid or proud of our standard ways as we consider the four or five billion people who have Internet access. Martin Luther himself had only a hammer and a big sheet of paper. But Caxton and Gutenberg had preceded him, and enterprising printers took his brave message everywhere without paying him a cent in royalties!

By grabbing the ready-made mantle of the Internet, we can perhaps follow in Luther's footsteps.

It's a Fresh Start

We've walked away from the basic malpractice or Aheresy that Jesus said he hated, the problem that had crippled Israel and the church for 3,120 years. Freed from this burden, we are able to enjoy the presence of Christ in our gatherings as a band of priests.

By supplanting the clergy, we are blowing the trumpet like Nehemiah and calling the entire church to build the Kingdom borders together.

The burden is shifting from the 1% to the 99%. The mantle is shifting from overworked, burned-out professional church pastors to Kingdom apostles, prophets, church planters, elders, and serious intercessors. And this has been confirmed in visitations by angels and by the Lord Jesus himself.

God has certainly not abandoned the institutional phase of his ekklesia, but the Spirit's focus is now on the house churches and similar groups. The angels are waiting on us.

Christ himself will do this new but old work. His Kingdom is the rock that was cut out of the mountain, but not by human hands. His is the altar that was not to be touched by human tools. And he will build his church . . . if we just bring him the building blocks, the billions of would-be disciples whose hearts are crying out for the presence of Him for whom they were made.

As two poets recently said,

So if this is not a place where my questions can be asked,

then where shall I go to seek?

And if this is not a place where my heart cry can be heard,

then where shall I go to speak?...

And if this is not a place where tears are understood,

then where shall I go to cry?

And if this is not a place where my spirit can take wing,

tell me, where shall I go to fly?

14:45