Have you read Finding Organic Church by Frank Viola yet?  I recommend it – he has steadily grown on me over his last several works, and this is his most practical and reasonable book on the world of starting and sustaining authentic Christian communities.

Viola devotes a whole section of his book to “Practical Steps for Beginning.”  His first chapter in that section, “Five Unmovable Principles” is what I want to mention briefly in this post.

These are 5 values, or goals that each person in a house church MUST strive for as they are starting a new community together.  Otherwise, it is certainly doomed to become another pet project, run by men and not by God.  Viola says that embracing these principles however, will help a community avoid the major pitfalls and disappointments that so many house churches are hammered with in their first year.

…I would say that after years of helping plant house churches, seeing some fail and some thrive, that his list dead on.

They are:

1. Become like little children.

You may have been a spiritual guru in your last church or at seminary, but now you’re called to drop your agenda, gifts, ambitions and simply be a humble sibling in the Lord.   Unlearn as much as you can at the start.  Lean on Christ alone.

2. Your feelings will get hurt.

People will let you down, and you will disappoint others – no getting around it.  You will not get your own way.  Strangely you will be most offended by the vices in others that most reflect your own.  When someone hurts your feelings, that is the moment to see exactly what kind of person you are and want to become in Jesus.

3. Be patient with the progress of the group.

This may be “simple church” but its not simplistic, and its not a microwave!  It took 9 months for you to be born, its similar with an organic church.  All the unlearning and rebuilding going on in hearts of your church family takes time.  Certainly everyone’s clock is not the same as yours, but never fear – there is progress – visible or not.

4. People will leave your group.

Be honest, working towards a house church with no regular sermon, large-group worship, children’s classes, etc is a tough shift for many Christians to make – even non-Christians have certain expectations for what “church” is in America.  WHEN (not if) people “check you out” and then “shop elsewhere” do your best not to wish them anything but the best, do not judge their motives, and do not pressure them to stay.  Maintain instead a liberal atmosphere of freedom and a presence of God’s Spirit.

5. People will experience exciting spiritual growth and healing!

Don’t forget that it is in this context that people were designed to grow.  It is their natural habitat to flourish – socially, and spiritually.  It is in intimate, small groups that transformation occurs – and it is in these committed families of love that hold the seeds to upend the world and transform it for GOOD.  Watch with expectancy as lives are changed and healed, and as ideas for local mission and service are hatched!

I’m still learning what it means to find freedom in discipline.  There is discipline that can evoke freedom, and then there is just strict, dry discipline.  There is discipline on one side, and spontaneity on the other.   I don’t think I’ll ever get a good balance of freedom through discipline this side of heaven, but I know that the continual training in godliness is the goal, not perfection.  Much like a violin player that disciplines herself for years will eventually be able to have the freedom to play incredibly complex works with ease – almost as a form of meditation.

The other day I heard a great quote – that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”  — Simone Weil.  It takes focus and discipline to stay centered on a single action or thought in our world today.  Millions are diagnosed (and misdiagnosed) with Attention Deficit Disorder each year – and now they are proving that for every hour a toddler spends in front of a television set his chances of developing symptoms of ADD increase 10%.  No surprise there!

Truly look around at your world.  Think about the hundreds of items grasping for your attention – even as you read this.  Advertisements on web pages, TV, radio, clocks, phones, in-boxes, billboards…Twitter, email, Facebook…events coming up, Christmas cards to respond to, projects to plan, light bulbs to change out…on and on it goes.

So what is prayer in this lifestyle?  Could it be that your earliest experiences in prayer might be of some practical help here?  Closing your eyes and holding your palms together fingers extended is the way most Christian children are taught to pray.  In fact, Buddhists and other faiths meditate in similar form.  Recent research has discovered that we focus and meditate best when our most sensitive nerve endings are a “closed circuit.”  Your finger tips for example are filled with some of the most sensitive nerve endings on your body – its your fingers that allow you to engage your world in the most tactile way.  So holding your palms and fingertips together is sort of your way of saying to the world’s distractions, “I’m taking a break,” and begin training your mind and soul to dive deeply into God’s presence.

“So when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray…”  (Matthew 6:6)

Jesus was pretty clear that God is not held behind locked doors or in special places for special people.  Yet in his teaching on prayer, he specifically states that some places and positions are better for pray at than others.  I think that the human body is affected by the posture in which we pray.  The brain is active in different places when we smile and lift our open hands up to the sky than when we are crouched in the fetal position over a cup of coffee and a computer screen. The earliest Christians often prayed facing East (orient), because they wanted to “orient” themselves toward where they knew Jesus was going to return from.  Try bowing in your prayers.  Try facing east.  Try lifting up your hands.  Try prayer-walking.  Let your whole body in on what your mind thought it could keep to itself with regards to your prayers.  See your prayers transform.

If you are looking for “unmixed attention” when you pray, maybe it has less to do with your ADD diagnosis, and more to do with the simple fact that we are being bombarded with things seeking our attention – and yet God is not in those things – he is in the still small voice that so often gets crowded out by the whirlwind of our lives.  Listen.  Close your eyes.  And close your circuits off from the outside world.  Meditate and see where God shows up.

*Below are some notes I took while reading through part of Kenneth Boa’s Conformed to His Image. Some lines are direct quotes, others are my own thoughts – my college professors would hate to see them all mixed up like this – but consider yourself warned.

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God created us as relational beings; and because of this we thrive best in community. Community is the hotbed of spiritual growth and renewal, yet it is a fragile and vulnerable space for the Evil One to invade and undermine.

In the Western world, we are seeing an attack on community (not just spiritual community) on just about every level.  There is a fierce pursuit of autonomy, self-actualization, privatization, avoidance of accountability, and a nuanced form of narcissism called “self-esteem.”  Read up on this in the foundational book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.  In addition, we as Americans have a heritage of distrusting institutions, traditions and especially authority.

This blog post is not about wishing for days gone by, but about recapturing the biblical vision of covenantal community.

Certain Christians groups emphasize either the individual, or the corporate.  Evangelicals really push their attention to the individual’s justification of self before God.  Other groups accent social justice and relevance in culture.  The dangers of irrelevant privatization on one side or mere social ethics on the other are the pits on both sides of the path.  Scripture seems to find a balance by affirming the good news of kingdom living in the present tense.  The spiritual life is both personal and social; both dependent on God and active in the world.

God IS Community

Scripture clearly shows God as a relational being. Even before the creation of the world God is in a pure, loving community of three (Father, Word, Spirit).  Since God made us in his likeness, we have been created for community with him and with one another.  As we make the choice to enter into that original divine relationship, we become members of a new community that is called to reflect the Godhead in its corporate unity. [youversion]John 17:22-26[/youversion] In essence, our Lord tells us, “If you love me, you will love the people I love.”

The private/corporate polarities mentioned above are reflected on well in one of my favorite books on the topic, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together:

“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. He will only do harm to himself and the community…You cannot escape from yourself; for God has singled you out.  Let him who is not in community beware of being alone. Into community you were called, the call was not meant for you alone; You are never alone, even in death…If you scorn the fellowship of the brethren, you reject the call of Jesus, and thus your solitude can only be hurtful to you.”

[youversion]Luke 6:12-19[/youversion] is an excellent text on moving from Solitude to Community to Ministry.  Jesus spent the night in solitude with God, in the morning he formed a community by inviting his disciples to follow him, then in the afternoon Jesus ministered with his disciples to the physical and spiritual needs of the crowds.  This is a path we can follow too.  Community is the bridge that connects solitude (intimacy with God) with ministry to the world.

True community is not a collection of lonely or isolated individuals but a dynamic interaction of people who know they are accepted in Christ.  God does not call us to be” Christians at large” or “a colony of hermits” but a vital organism of others-centered people of which Christ is the head.  True solitude and true community enrich each other through their creative interplay where the horizontal meets the vertical.

The corporate life of the body of Christ is not optional.  Its never easy, but we are impoverished without it.  Among other things, it provides:

• relational enrichment and commitment
• trust, love, and acceptance
• mutual submission out of reverence for Christ
• physical, psychological and spiritual healing
• nourishment from the common work of listening to God’s voice together in Scripture, prayer, and life.

Challenges to Community

The Church has always had its manipulators, controllers, and faction builders.  Even worse, few of these people even realize the the corporate damage they inflict, and usually paint a veneer of concern for the best interests of the group.  Just look at the church in Corinth.

In [youversion]Phil 2:3,4[/youversion], Paul recommends “Do nothing out of selfish or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.”  Learning to please only Christ, the irony is that we can then find the right position to truly meet the needs of others.

The fundamental threat to community is self-centeredness, the vital builder of community is others-centeredness rooted in Christ-centeredness.

Hell is self-centered and isolational; heaven is others-centered and relational.  Having a corporate spirituality is costly because it asks us to go against the grain of our fallen instincts for privatization and personal control.  But Scripture reminds us that joy is only experienced in full when it is shared, and atrophies when it is hoarded.  Thomas Merton has said plainly, “We are not at peace with each other because we are not at peace with ourselves.  And we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.”

The Key to Creating Community

Surrender and self-denial in Christ is the KEY to biblical community. It is in this context we can read Augustine’s profound prayer, “Lord, your best servants are those who wish to shape their life on your answers rather than shape your answers on their wishes.”

The Church does not exist for the individual – it is inappropriate to leave a church when it no longer “feeds you.”  Maybe its a calling from God to bring some of your own spiritual food to the potluck!

You cannot wait for the perfect group of people to arrive to “start your church” – you must surrender your ideal of community to allow the one before you to thrive.

So you think you really want a taste of this divine community?

True community in Christ is not created by attempts to “make it happen;” instead, it is a by-product of others-centeredness – which comes from losing our life to seek Jesus. [youversion]Matt 16:25[/youversion] Death is the only way to resurrection.  Conversion to Christ and to the cross should in turn lead to conversion to community.  Everything you do alone in the Lord is useless without it. [youversion]1 Cor 13:1[/youversion]