Skeleton Church and Unchurching Book Reviews

Skeleton Church by Jeremy Myers

Ezekiel 37 tells the story of God leading the prophet into a valley of dead bones.  God says to him, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”  (Ezekiel 37:1-5.)  The church needs a resurrection.  How did the church become so full of dead structures in the first place?  Every now and then there is a powerful movement of God in the church.  That powerful movement will eventually die and become an institution itself.  One example is the Sunday school movement in the 19th century.  An old Methodist book explains why this started because only a small number of children could read.  The book contains a chart showing how the number of British children who could read increased from the 1830s across every decade of the 19th century.  Eventually the government passed the education act, essentially to stop church schools from brainwashing children.  But Sunday School was powerful and hugely influential in the days when it began.  The 19th century missionary Joseph Townend had a difficult childhood.  He lost the use of an arm due to an accident at the age of 7.  He worked in a cotton mill, only being able to use one hand, until, at the age of 15, he dislocated his shoulder.  One of his happiest childhood memories was winning prizes in the Sunday School.  You get the impression, from his life story, that this is what made life worth living.  Today Sunday school is a fossil of something that was alive long ago.  Today the number of people who go to university is greater than the number of people who could read 200 years ago.  It has become a religion.  

It is the same with the community movement of the 1970s and 1980s.  It grew rapidly in the days when working class people were aspirational.  People who bought houses because they wanted to renovate them and create decent homes, who went to university because they wanted a better job.  Today young people rent houses because it is cheaper to borrow a desposit from your parents, put some money down on an ex-council house and pay a mortgage than it is to rent.  They go to university because they live in a world where it is difficult to get a job at all.  A good education increases their chances of simply finding employment.  Many young people feel they have nothing to give up.  The standard of living in community is no different to the standard of living elsewhere.  We used to talk about living in poverty.  That isn't a Biblical concept.  The people who began the community movement could remember the war.  They were familiar with rationing.  Now they found themselves living in the era of commercial television.  They did not want television so that their children could not see adverts.  This would fuel materialism and waste.  Listening to Noel Stanton talk about families outside a shop queueing for horse meat, as it wasn't rationed, I felt as if he was enjoying every minute of it, hankering for a world of simplicity and relative poverty, remembering with affection the days when his usual childhood snack was bread and salt.  Those who sold their houses and gave their money to the church made a great sacrifice.  It became a religion.  'You will give all your money to the church.  You will live very simply and write down what you spend.  You will share a bedroom.'  These things have no meaning anymore.  Community in the 21st century will have some significance, if nothing else the need for companionship when relocated hundreds of miles away from your family and the place where you grew up.  But it will not be the same and it must not become a religion.  I had a headmaster who used to like saying, when asking someone to complete a task, 'Do it religiously.'  I would like to say, 'Don't do anything religiously.  Do it because you really want to.'

The word Ekklesia means gathering or assembly.  This is a borrowed Hebrew word, sometimes used in the New Testament, and is very difficult to translate.  It is often used, in the Old Testament, to describe the nation of Israel.  Ekklesia means God's people, a gathering of people gathered by God, not necessarily in the same place.  We are spiritually gathered by Christ and are the people of God following Jesus in the world.  We are the family of God.  People can be part of the same family whether together or apart.  Who should lead the church?  Who leads your family?  What should we do when we come together?  What do families do when they come together?  What do we do with our money?  What do your family do with their money?  Christians spend too much time together and going to church meetings.  The church was never meant to stop there.  We are the people of God with a vision to be a blessing to the world, a kingdom and priests to serve God and to bring his kingdom upon the earth.  Jesus will heal and touch and feed the word through the people of God.  Disciples were more like apprentices.  They had on the job training, not simply academic training.  What would Jesus look like if he were on the earth today?  What would Jesus do if he were here today?  We should not stand out from the world except for our love, generosity and kindness.  Some Christians want authority, fame and glory.  Did we think the Jesus Army would be enormously significant?  Did we imagine a national denomination or even some sort of political movement?  Someone in this church wrote a letter to the Prime Minister saying, 'We are praying for a revival in our nation that will change our society.'  Another reason that a movement dies is that leaders have a tendency to think of themselves as being more important than they really are and the people who follow them see them as being even more important than that.  Jesus was humble.  The creator of the universe condemned to die as a common criminal.  He didn't come to be Prime Minister.  Don't be surprised if Christians' attempts to form a significant worldwide movement have sometimes failed.  We were meant to be despised.  You keep asking God to bless your ministry.  You refuse to let it die.  God wants it to die so that he can resurrect it.  You have it on life support.

People believe they have become Christians to get their lives cleaned up.  When God tells us to get dirty again, we don't understand it.  We hear one voice telling us to get dirty and another telling us to go to a church meeting.  We think that it must be God telling us to go to the church meeting.  In John 17 Jesus prays his disciples will be in the world but not of it.  We are meant to live in the world and emulate kingdom values.  Too many Christians abandon all links to the world.  We grow pure and holy but ineffective at bringing God's rule on Earth.  In Luke 4 Jesus stands in the synagogue and Nazereth and reads from the book of Isaiah, 'The Spirit of the Lord is on me,    because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.'  Jesus came to bring healing, liberty, freedom, restoration to the earth.  That was his mission, that is our mission.

In Matthew 5 Jesus talks about the church being salt and light.  Many Christians treat salt as being a preservative.  We must campaign against gay rights and abortion.  We must stop our society rotting.  We must preserve the life of the unborn.  We must preserve conventional marriage.  Salt adds flavour.  We only need a small amount of it to add flavour to a meal.  Salt should not be overwhelming.  Too much salt is a bad thing.  Salt is noticed more by its absence - it's obvious if you cook rice and forget to include any salt.  The light of a lamp on a stand is not blinding.  I have an alarm clock radio in my room.  I leave the light on at night so I can see where I am going.  I turn the radio around so it is not so bright that it disturbs my sleep.  God might lead you to work with prostitutes and homeless people in the city but minister to them gently.  We are not there simply to fix people.

Once worn out traditions and misconceptions about the nature of the church are removed then the church will grow from the power of God within it.  How the church looks will be very different in every generation, every culture, every age, every country.  I have tried not to get too involved with the questions quoted in chapter 6 about where the church should meet and whether the leader should be a man or a woman.  I think Jeremy Myers gives a much better answer to this in Chapter 3 (on the church being a family) and I have included this answer there.  The structure of a collapsed star will happen.  Scientists can explain it but no one has to control it.  It is decided by the laws of physics.  In the same way, I have no need to worry about the structure of this declining church.  It will form whatever structure it forms.  New meetings will be organised, new leaders will be found, new activities will be found fruitful, it will all happen quite naturally.  The exact parameters of the new church are not very important.  It is not a new structure that the church needs, simply a new freedom to move into it, not holding on to any old wine skins that would actually spill the new wine.

Unchurching by Richard Jacobson

Many people are leaving churches.  This is not necessarily because they are losing their faith.  It may actually be that the institutional church is not satisfying their longing for community.  Richard Jacobson grew up among the Jesus Movement in America.  Wherever people gathered, they brought guitars and Bibles and they sang and prayed together.  People became Christians.  Miracles were expected.  Then, when he was a teenager, Richard started 'going to church.'  Before this, he hadn't thought of church as somewhere you could go to.  'What family do you go to?'

There was no hierarchy in the early church.  Every believer was a priest.  They all had direct access to God.  Every member had their own ministry.  Ephesians 4:11 - 13 is about equipping people to use their spiritual gifts.  "So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ."  The people listed here are intended to input others and enable them to use their gifts.  Each member of the church must be taught to use their own spiritual gifts.  The aim is for them to become mature.  "Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work."  The majority of Christians do not reach spiritual maturity.  They never learn to develop their spiritual gifts and remain babies.  Such Christians are easy prey for false teachers and cults have many ex-Christians among them.  1Corinthians 14:26-28 gives simple instructions for a church service.  "What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.  If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret.  If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and to God."

Many of the words that are usually translated as pastor or bishop actually mean overseer, shepherd or elder.  The older more experienced person who is in charge.  Reliable, mature members who agree to responsibilites.  Senior but not superior.  Overseers are spiritual parents who see other Christians as their children.  Churches gathered daily around a dinner table, ate and worshipped together.  The early church had no policies, programs or procedures.  They were extended spiritual families.  The Romans replaced individual participation with preachers and replaced small church groups with big churches like lecture theatres.  Jesus spent time with his disciples.  Although he had hundreds of followers many deserted him.  In John 6:66-70, 'From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” He poured out his life into the very small group of the disciples.  The church became a corporation and was run like a business.  It had to expand, it had to be successful.  Names are more important than numbers.  On the day of judgement God will be less concerned about how many people you led to Christ, he will be more concerned about the named people that he gave you.

Modern people lack social capital.  People don't naturally live close together.  Christians are told to bear one another's burdens.  At one time, the whole of our society were far better placed to do this than they are now.  Modern cities are divided into separate zones for housing, shopping, and industrial areas.  We all have to travel a long way.  We are good consumers but poor neighbours.  The Jesus Movement moved lots of people into the same apartment block or they all moved to the same place and worked for the same company.  It might have been easier to do this in America in the 70s and 80s when the economy was reasonably good.  Doing this in Britian in the 21st century is effected by economic problems.  Would the apartments in the apartment block be affordable to people who had low wages or limited housing benefit?  The kind of apartments that some people in the Jesus Fellowship were talking about, in a recent consultation, sounded fantastic.  You really want a bedroom, a kitchen and a meeting room?  Many people out there in the world live in studio flats.  Our church members were talking about a big one bedroom apartment, £600 a month in Sheffield or Leeds, £1200 a month in London or Brighton.  There might also be problems getting a company to give jobs to all the people who wanted to be part of the project.   Jobs are no longer as easy to find.  While there are practical difficulties, it still might be possible for some people to relocate into one particular area. Coventry congregation is trying to create a large group of people close to eachother in the city centre.  If I decide to join this group (I have sometimes considered it) I would be prepared to accept something less than an ideal flat.  As I have my own business, my premises could be relocated.  Moving to another area is going to be difficult for some people in an age when house prices are hugely inflated and jobs are difficult to get.  We must accept that not everyone could easily move to a distant location.