The Last Fling of Modernity in the Church

[/IMG]The SMH reports today that Brian Houston will be expanding the Hillsong empire into Brisbane, and thence to other cities. Apparently an existing Australian Christian Churches (AOG) church will be rebranded as "Hillsong Brisbane" and Brian and wife Bobbie will be installed as Senior Pastors. A previous pastor was thrown out because the church wanted a CEO style of pastor rather than a pastoral pastor, and more to the point the church was not growing and the previous pastor had had a nervous breakdown.

There is so much that is wrong with this story, if the facts even vaguely line up with the reality.

Let me say that I have a great regard for Brian Houston and what he has achieved with Hillsong. The Hillsong church has done a lot to inspire churches and pastors to get out of the old paradigms and comfort zones- establishing new ones which need to be challenged again.

So there's a large church in Brisbane which is struggling because it's failing to grow numerically. In fine Pentecostal tradition they blame the pastor- as John Maxwell says "everything rises and falls with the leader." They chuck him out with little regard for their responsibility to him- not as an employer but as a christian body.

They lust for the "success" that the Houston name seems to bring so they install Brian and Bobbie as Senior Pastor.

Here are my issues:

1. Brisbane is not Sydney- so why do they think that the Hillsong model should be right for Brisbane?

2. What is meant by a CEO pastor? This is an oxymoron, a contradiction. The roles of CEO and pastor are very different. The imagining of the Body of Christ as a corporate business operation is a total distortion of everything that Jesus died for.

3. Is growth an end in itself? The mega-church phenomenon has always been about attracting a crowd through great entertainment and spectacular "inspiring" preaching. There is far less concern about disciple making and no concern about whether the growth is from genuine conversion or from merely sucking in christians from other churches.

4. It is simply not possible for someone in Sydney to pastor a church in Brisbane. You cannot pastor a community that you are not a part of.

5. The worship of the man, the cult of the leader, has been the biggest weakness in pentecostal churches. The strength has been the freedom of pastors to lead and preach with the authority of their gifting. But this has been twisted over the last couple of decades to become a cult of personality around the charismatic leaders. This is not unique to pentecostal churches- I read a report a few years ago about declining Uniting Church congregations in one region of Sydney where there was a common hope that if they could get the "right minister" everything would be O.K.

We need to understand that the ministry of the church is the responsibility of the whole body, and not just the Senior Pastor or other "staff" members. Getting The Man is not what we should be about.

Pastors are not super-stars- except in their own fantasies. Ephesians 5 clearly paints the 5-fold ministry gifts as being about encouraging the whole body to grow to maturity. If we see the ministry as about one man brining salvation and significance to the congregation (I'm not talking about Jesus!) then we are worshipping the wrong Messiah.

6. Preaching and teaching come from the shared life of a community of faith. Preaching, even in a large crowd, is an interaction, a shared event. What will happen in this arrangement is that eventually (if not immediately) when Brian is in Sydney, the message will be beamed in by internet or satellite so that the satellite congregation can get the best teaching/ performance every week. This already happens in the U.S. as the mega-churches franchise out their operations to other cities or other campuses in the same city.

Think about this: would you rather get a relevant word shaped by our context together or a well presented but generic message from somewhere else? An extreme example of this is that while much of Australia is undergoing an economic recession, Narrabri is undergoing good economic times because we had quite good rural production last year. Does Brian preach a word for the good times or a word for the tough times when we get his message beamed in?

7. This is the last extension of modernity in the church. Modernity, in the cultural use of the term, relates to the way our technological culture with its emphasis on efficiency, achievement and "success" has changed the way that we think of ourselves. Post-modernism is a reaction to that with an emphasis on relationship and expression rather than production. The baby boomers were the ultimate products of modernism where even the church became just another corporation selling a branded product. The post-baby boom generations are seeking authentic relationships and community (not corporate) values. The growth of cell church and house church movements, the resurgence of incarnational and missional movements (the church has to take Jesus to the heart of our cities and towns and not just expect people to turn up at an event), the growth of christian arts communities- all of these things are pointing to a new way of doing things.

The Willow Creek movement has discovered huge failings in the way they did church. Their problem was that church services were focussed on "seekers" (i.e. people) and not on the transcendent God. Hillsong and many pentecostal churches do something similar in that everything focusses on a sharp, efficient presentation with no room in the programme for the Holy Spirit.

8. I really believe that Brian Houston's ministry gift is apostle not pastor. He has tremendous influence way past the local congregation. But he is straying from the New Testament model by installing himself as a pastor in these various offshoot churches. He should abandon the title of pastor altogether and take on board his real calling. This would require him to cut his formal ties with the various Hillsong churches. They could still pay him a salary or a tithe or whatever, but not as a pastor. He could travel from church to church and speak to them as a visiting apostle and with greater authority. I believe that the local church must be led by a local pastor who is in a father-son relationship with an apostle. But the apostle must allow the pastor to lead his own flock and not seek to control the pastor or the congregation.

I find myself very disturbed, though strangely unsurprised by this development. I think that there will be severe problems in the long term, and it may sound the death knell of the Australian Christian Churches as a denomination- in the same way that ordaining homosexual ministers was the death knell of the Uniting Church.

In the place of these institutional juggernauts we will see, over the next 50 years or so the rise of genuine relational apostolic networks and the complete reformation of the church.