Better Than Hippies, Pt 1

A new look at the House Church Movement of the future
By Wolfgang Simson

Editor’s Note: Wolfgang has been involved in the house church movement for years.  He is a scholar and visionary who manages to be both brief and substantive.  This is not fluff.  This content came from one of his recent articles.  For the sake of the casual reader, I have divided it up into smaller, more digestable chunks.  I’ve also added some bold sections and SECTION TITLES to make it easier to process.

The African Tribalism

Tribalism, argues “Herald Tribune” writer Jonathan Power, is both the glue and gunpowder of Africa. Tribalism – that self-imposed division of the black African population into roughly 800 tribes and their territories – is as old as Africa itself. Tribalism has served as a means of clan-based security and identity – us versus them – but more often than not, it has been the dynamite blowing apart the life’s of weaker tribes at the hands of stronger ones.

In an age were political and trade unions are been pursued everywhere, anyone familiar with Africa has asked himself: why can’t the black tribes unite?! Why have their tribes, for ages, been fighting each other, pursuing age-old vendettas? And why have the founding stories of the various tribes almost always been fueling hatred, mistrust and discord towards other tribes? The story of “Christian” Hutus and Tutsis killing each other in Rwanda a short while ago by the millions was, for many, simply another blip on the radar of a long history of violent, irreconcilable tribal clashes. It is clear that the “Christianity” claimed by both Hutus and Tutsis simply cannot be the Christianity that Jesus Christ had in mind when he started his Kingdom movement.

Historically, only three things have ever been able to draw together the black populations in Africa in a significant way and enabled them to function as a trans-tribal entity for some time:

1. Larger-than life leaders like the ferocious Zulu-king Chaka Zulu
2. An overwhelming enemy from outside
3. Political ideologies like communism

The Fractured Church

Why am I writing about this? Because historically, Christianity and its 40,000 denominations – plus the myriads of Christian folks that believe they are independent even of the independents – has been split and re-split into “spiritual tribes”, celebrating the legacy of a human founder, the chief of a spiritual chiefdom, his strengths blunted and weaknesses magnified through the ages.

Classical Christianity, seen from a distance, is today not much more than tiny fragments of a whole mirror originally intended to reflect the overwhelming beauty of Jesus Christ.

No wonder is a fractured society in general, the fiercely competitive and “branded” secular world plus everyone still steeped into tribalism little impressed by what they see in today’s Church. And so Christianity-as-we-know-it has only seen peaks and extraordinary times either under a strong king-like leader, a spiritual version of King Chaka Zulu, or in the face of an outside threat like disaster, war or persecution, or when Christianity was co-opted and made to back up and sanction political ideologies of any kind. But each of these historic peaks was short-lived: once one of the factors (human kings, outside danger, ideologies and the political opportunists that come with it) was gone, the movement usually went flat.

The Good News

However, I have good news. I have excellent reasons to believe that Jesus is in the process of orchestrating a master stroke of genius in our days to achieve the seemingly impossible: the emergence of the smashingly attractive bride of Christ in a way that will stun not only her lover, but all those who look on. This is a time were a Kingdom movement is born that will ultimately achieve the purposes for which it has been called into being in the first place. But before we get to this, lets look at one more historical development that contains an interesting and maybe even sobering message to us today.

So how can we expect a movement that simply becomes “better than the hippies”, more united than tribalistic Africa, and more powerful, prophetic and therefore significant to an ailing society than a few thousand “spiritual VW-Busses” (organic, mobile communities) of modern religious hippies having a good time?

CONTINUED…