Space race?

ONE ASSEMBLY:
Rethinking the Multisite & Multiservice Church
Models
By Jonathan Leeman
Crossway / 9Marks. 174 pages. £13.28
ISBN 978 1 433 559 594

What do you do when your church building is full and overflowing? More people are clamouring to come, but there is no more space. It is a wonderful problem to have.

One pragmatic solution is to move to more services at different times within the same building – the 9.30am service and the 11am service, for example. A second popular solution is to go to a multisite situation in which people gather in different locations and the service from the ‘mother ship’ is relayed somehow to a second or third location.

These models are widely accepted. They are seen as something of ‘rites of passage’ for a thrusting congregation. The mantra may be ‘one church, two congregations’. They are often pursued sincerely. ‘How could we possibly turn people away from hearing the gospel?’

Picking a fight with Jesus

But while such measures are perhaps necessary on a temporary basis, Jonathan Leeman has had the temerity to stand against the tide of seeking such a set-up permanently. It may be business-think and current evangelical group-think, but it is not Bible-think. He says it is actually to ‘pick a fight with Jesus’.

He argues that the essence of church is inextricably tied to the idea of one assembly of God’s people. A church is a congregation which comes together in a single gathering. To override this is to repudiate Christ’s definition of a church, to redefine what a church is and to reshape the church morally. It leads to trouble.

When is a team a team?

We all know that the church is the people, but that on its own falls short of what the Bible intends. A football team is ‘people’, but unless they play together regularly they can hardly be called a team. And if they do play together regularly then, even when they are apart, in their homes or whatever, they can still be legitimately be called ‘the team’. It is like that with the church. Meeting together in the presence of Jesus, Sunday by Sunday, is the kernel of what it means to be the ekklesia, the church. Without that, a dangerous mutation has taken place.

We find ourselves asking, for example, does it matter if people start choosing between the different service options in order to fit in with what is most convenient for their own agenda?

It is where Christians come together in agreement of who Jesus is and what that means for them that Jesus is present (Matt. 18.19,20). Generally evangelicals will say that the church is the people who gather together to serve Christ, but the readiness with which multisite and multiservice are embraced exposes the fact that actually other intuitions hold sway in our minds. If we see church as an event, then why not perform this ‘show’ at as many venues as possible? If you really think that the heartbeat of the church is the leadership or the church’s vision statement then you will not baulk at a ‘church’ which meets in instalments or in pieces.

The kingdom made visible

Leeman’s book has a long introduction which sets out what is at stake, followed by three chapters which investigate the Bible’s teaching.

He argues in the first chapter that a church is a ‘political’ entity, an outcrop of the kingdom or the kingdom made visible. As such the church (not simply the leadership) has authority. The apostles held the keys to bind and loose (Matt.16.19), but so do churches (Matt.18.18). To bind and to loose is to do the work of a judge. We see therefore as a church that ‘this authority is not just over us. It is us’. And the key to all this is agreement. ‘The very heart of church authority is agreement between believers’. We enact that agreement through baptism and the unity of the Lord’s Supper. But the multisite and multiservice models vitiate that agreement and hence the church becomes a mutant church.

Delving into the Greek

The second chapter covers all the uses of the word church (ekklesia) in the NT.

Apart from its use for secular assemblies, all the references can be understood in terms of the assembly of a local church or being members of such an assembly or a reference to the universal church. Apart from one disputed reference (Acts 9.31) there is no occurrence of the idea of a ‘regional’ church consisting of a group of congregations (which would give some basis for multisite). This one reference is dealt with in an appendix by Anne Rabe who, until recently, lectured in Greek and Latin at the University of Kansas. Rabe’s investigation concludes that Luke’s grammatical construction in Acts 9.31 indicates an iterative idea behind the thought of ‘the church throughout Judea…’ and speaks of individual assemblies within the region. This interpretation is congruent with the fact that some NT manuscripts use the plural ‘churches’ in Acts 9.31.

Leeman also takes us on an absorbing tour of the NT churches and how they are spoken of. It turns out that there are a lot of ideas peddled around in order to bolster the multisite model. But these all turn out to be based on assumptions which are not in the text. For example, although it is assumed there were a number of house churches in Corinth, in his letters Paul always talks about them all coming together (1 Cor. 5.4, etc.).

So what are we meant to do when our church is full? This is addressed in the third chapter. Leeman’s answer, giving many practical examples, is that although we may adopt multisite or multiservice very temporarily, what we should be doing is to look to either plant new congregations or, in a catholic (small ‘c’) spirit, to strengthen and revitalise other churches in the area.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room for evangelicalism. There is too much independence and not enough interdependence. Though when we read the NT we have to ‘squint and tilt our head to see multisite, catholicity is crystal clear.’ Yet we shy away from working with others in a brotherly way. Too much church growth is about growing our own little kingdom or church ‘brand’. With this in mind, the author takes to task the way that so many churches use programme-recruitment language in their services: ‘Good morning New Lifers’ or ‘We here at Living Water like to…’ (insert different church names as appropriate). Whatever happened to ‘Good morning, brothers and sisters’?

If our church is overflowing, instead of becoming hoarders of personnel through multisite and multiservice approaches, we should seek to share the blessing. After all Jesus Himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’. The book’s thrust is that we do far better to try to be faithful to Jesus’ vision of the local church than to come up with pragmatic policies which change the very nature of church. It has the potential to be a game changer.