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Best-selling author Frank Viola (author of Pagan Christianity with George Barna, Reimagining Church, From Eternity to Here, Finding Organic Church, and Insurgence) has recently written an incisive piece about rethinking church – a decade after his landmark books came out.
Viola is part of the radical resurgence.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Fast forward to 2018 — a decade later.
Other writers are beginning to tread the path that Barna and I pioneered 10 years ago, echoing the same vision.
This is encouraging, for we no longer have to take the bullets alone.
However, a danger looms. That danger is the temptation to try and reinvent the wheel independently. In every case I’ve seen of this nature (over the last thirty years, mind you), the result has always been the same: the antidote ends up carrying the disease.
The common trend among Christian leaders today is to fly solo and isolate themselves from their peers, especially those from whom they can learn much. By contrast, cross pollination is written in the bloodstream of God’s kingdom. But it requires deep humility and cross-bearing.
My prayer and hope, therefore, is that those who have caught the vision of God’s passion for the ekklesia in recent years will resist the temptation to isolate themselves from those who have plowed the ground before them. For only as we reach out to one another will we see the Insurgence spread and watch the Spirit build it on a foundation that no man can topple.
When it comes to the restoration of the church, God is after much more than glorified Bible studies that meet in living rooms. The ekklesia in the beating heart of God transcends polishing the iron on the Titanic. Cross pollinating with those who have experience (including the scars to prove it) is the remedy. And it’s a hill worth dying on.
Click here to read the entire article and contact Viola.