I'm reviewing the book 'Pagan Christianity' by Frank Viola and George Barna.
The entire premise of the book is this: The 21st century Church doesn't look anything like the 1st century Church, we should stop "doing church" this way and should reconfigure our worship style (whatever that means) to the 1st century model. This is the macro. I won't tip my hand just yet and tell you what I think about it. I will tell you that I think that the authors did a lot of homework to prepare to write the book. Every chapter has at least 50 footnotes to back up their claims--so if you get jazzed about footnotes, you're in for a treat.
Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for why church as we know it isn't what God intended it to be. Chapters 2 and 3 imply that owning property could be a waste of God's money, and that the activity of planning worship for corporate gatherings that worship pastors/teams work on each week is not only wasteful, but it robs the people (congregation) of their responsibility to bring their own songs to the group that week.
Since this is a review of the book, I'm just going to skim through what I think. If you want to know specific details, you'll have to read the book yourself. It IS interesting...very historical and fact laden, but interesting.
Here's what I'd like to get back from you:
The entire premise of the book is this: The 21st century Church doesn't look anything like the 1st century Church, we should stop "doing church" this way and should reconfigure our worship style (whatever that means) to the 1st century model. This is the macro. I won't tip my hand just yet and tell you what I think about it. I will tell you that I think that the authors did a lot of homework to prepare to write the book. Every chapter has at least 50 footnotes to back up their claims--so if you get jazzed about footnotes, you're in for a treat.
Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for why church as we know it isn't what God intended it to be. Chapters 2 and 3 imply that owning property could be a waste of God's money, and that the activity of planning worship for corporate gatherings that worship pastors/teams work on each week is not only wasteful, but it robs the people (congregation) of their responsibility to bring their own songs to the group that week.
Since this is a review of the book, I'm just going to skim through what I think. If you want to know specific details, you'll have to read the book yourself. It IS interesting...very historical and fact laden, but interesting.
Here's what I'd like to get back from you:
- Do you feel that we are supposed to do whatever it takes to follow the example of the 1st century church organization (not the spiritual stuff, the organizational stuff)?
- Do you think that churches who spend money (sometimes LOTS of money) on buildings/property, would do better to dump the once a week building, and use the money instead for something else? If so, what else?
- How valuable are 'worship' pastors? Do we need paid worship pastors, or is getting together on Sunday and doing a few requests enough?
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