Posted: 09/19/2005 at 8:01pm | IP Logged

Jim Rutz Sees Christianity Overtaking the World

By Steve Eastman
TOP NEWS Openheaven.com

        A growing number of Christian men and women have left the defeatist attitudes of the past behind.  They are recognizing the overwhelming extension of the Kingdom of God on planet earth now.  Their terminologies sometimes differ.  Author Jim Rutz prefers the term Megashift and has written a book by that name, chronicling this accelerated flow of the Holy Spirit and its implications for how we do church.  Recently OpenHeaven.com spoke with him about the book and his life.

        Why do you call Christianity the fastest growing faith in the world?  The news media seems to think that honor belongs to Islam.

        What people don’t realize is that there is a growing core of the Christian church that has been growing since 1970 at 8 percent a year.  Back in 1970 I believe it was 71 million people.  Now it’s 707 million people.

        How would you define that core group?

        You really need a computer to define it because it was done on a computer.  It was searching out through the database of The World Christian Encyclopedia, the standard reference work in the field, to isolate groups that have never been looked at as a group before.  It includes about 90 percent Pentecostals and Charismatics, the other 10 percent evangelicals and they’re in networked groups.  We just omitted those that are so disconnected from what’s going on in the rest of the world that they’re not really useful in the world evangelization work.  So we now have a definable group that we know is growing.  It is definitely way ahead of the Muslims.

        What do you call that group?
        
        I call it the core apostolics.

        Why do you suppose CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and even FOX News keep missing the big story about the numerous resurrections from the dead you mention in Megashift?

        Basically the typical newsroom editor is not all that friendly toward Christianity and so if a cub reporter came up and said, “Hey. They’ve got miracles going on in such and such an area,” he’s not going to say, “Oh, wow.  That’s great.  Let’s take two camera teams along and spend a week filming all those.”

        If say, FOX, were to begin chronicling some of the thousands and thousands of miracles that take place every week, it would be jumped all over by its competitors and by critics, even more than it already is.  They would be spending a lot of their time defending themselves. They would just be in another battle, which they already have plenty of.

        Up till now, the majority of the miracles seem to have occurred in Third World countries.  Why are they more common there than in the West?

        We just don’t need God that much.  If somebody gets sick or is injured, what do you do?  Do you call together the church to pray for them or do you just hit 9-1-1 on your telephone?

        Could you tell us a little about your spiritual history?  It sounds like in the past, the bulk of your efforts have been in encouraging cutting-edge traditionally structured churches to change.  How did God shift your focus to where it is now?

        My first experience was being enrolled in the cradle roll of the church in Aruba, where I was born in 1939.  I grew up in a whole series of fundamental churches and some evangelical churches in which, supposedly, miracles don’t happen.  They didn’t have miracles in the church services and the members were not working miracles outside of that, so when someone comes along and starts talking miracles, it’s really a threat to that kind of a thing. 

        I put in about 50 years in the pews.  I did my time and I understand the mind-set thoroughly.  I encourage such people whenever I can, but right now I think the Holy Spirit’s attention is mostly going to be on the growth of the house church.  I’ve made that transition myself.  It was a little rough.  In fact, my first book, The Open Church, was aimed specifically at all my good old friends in the traditional church.  I found that recommending open participation, like we have in I Corinthians 14, is not welcomed there.  That particular effort did not fly.  I was trying to put new wine into old wineskins and, what do you know?  Jesus was right.  It doesn’t work.

        How would you define an open fellowship and what would that include?

        You could call it Starbucks church, or campus church or office church or shop church.  That’s what we’re getting to, is more informal structures, so that we’re completely away from programs.  One of my friends says, “Programs are for people who don’t know how to listen to the Holy Spirit.”  These things can be anywhere.  The main motif is participation.  That is what really sets us apart from a traditional program-driven church.  We get together and you never quite know what’s going to happen first.  You know even less about what is going to happen second or third.  The Holy Spirit is the One who touches each heart and says, “Now it’s the time for your prayer.  Now it’s the time for your song.  Now it’s time for you to teach.”

        Explain your statement that the choice between open or closed church systems is not a matter of taste or personal preference, but a matter of billions of lives and deaths.

        Any decent rate of growth, even a tenth of what we’re seeing in China and India right now, would have resulted in the conversion of the entire world a long time ago.  The traditional, congregational model has failed.  The successes we’ve had have been through the extraordinary effort of millions of highly devoted Christians trying to make an unbiblical church structure work.  So God has, to a great extent, worked around the church structures because the structures themselves have failed.  But the Holy Spirit is adequate and He keeps blessing us and changing us and saving people and doing things despite the structure of the church.

        To what extent is the house church movement in China an open fellowship?  A lot of times we hear about the persecuted pastors.  It sounds like there is still somewhat of a hierarchy there.

        There is more hierarchy that I would like, but on the good side, China probably has about a million church planters, who are active or potentially active at any given time.  It is understood that there is a great amount of ministry to be done by the common people.  That might not translate into a lot of meeting participation, but we’re going to work on that too.  I’m tentatively scheduled to go to China next year and I plan on proposing a lot of these changes to the Chinese church as much as I’m able. 

        I’d like to ask you to explain a remark you made in the book that’s kind of humorous. How is the traditional church a combination of Harvard, Hollywood, IBM and Wal-Mart?

        If you look at the structures and customs and the hundreds of things we do, you’re unfortunately able to trace them all back to pagan sources.  Frank Viola has written a book called Pagan Christianity in which he lovingly details, with tons and tons of footnotes, all the sources of all the things we do in the church.  We’re on a very strange track where things have just been thrown together. 

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Harvard--or any university is set up with a professor at the lectern giving lectures.  Eventually the students get degrees.  They may even be able to stand at the lectern themselves.  The rip-off we’ve done with that system results in a pastor standing in a pulpit, giving sermons instead of lectures, but the students never graduate.  They’re never allowed to move up and take on additional responsibilities, even if they’ve done 20, 30 or 40 years in the church.  They never get that diploma.  They never get qualified to do anything other than sit and listen. 

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Hollywood--there’s that influence too, with all the choirs and the lights, the performances.  Especially in a very large church, where things are very polished, you have the feeling you’re watching a show.  In fact, that’s what Luther said at one point, in great disgust, that it’s a show put on for the masses.  He actually feebly proposed a different way of doing church, but he said that he couldn’t find the people that were eager to do it, so he eventually dropped the idea of house church.

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IBM--(in) any large corporation you’ll somewhere have a board of directors sitting around, plotting how they’re going to take market-share away from the competition.   It’s very much a top-down kind of thing, very concerned about positioning in the community market-place and their appeal to the people in the community. 

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Wal-Mart--refers to a huge choice of options.  I’ve visited Willow Creek (Community Church) in Illinois a few years ago and was amazed to discover as I walked down the hallway into the service there were little food booths here and there.  You could have your choice of Chinese or Mexican or what not.  It’s just like walking through a mall.  Tommy Barnett has done such a wonderful job in Phoenix.  His huge church, at last count, had I believe, 104 programs, simply because sitting in one of his pews is not an outreach thing.  It’s a compensatory mechanism.  That does tend to give people an outlet for their talents and their desire to serve the Lord.     

        You have Harvard, Hollywood, IBM and Wal-Mart, but what Jesus wants is a family.  It’s true that the family sometimes functions as a hospital, a school or an army, recycling out of those phases in our house churches.  At least we’re not institutional and we’re free to keep moving and morphing as the Holy Spirit prompts us.

        Your look at how the early church veered from the practices of the first generation is well-documented with quotes from the “church fathers” who engineered these shifts.  How have scholars managed to lose tract of these facts?  I’ve been looking for these references for years and had no idea they were so accessible.

        Scholars have not lost track of them at all.  It is simply not on their agenda to talk about them.

        Your book mentions unnamed mega-churches actually giving birth to house churches, instead of cell churches. This is hard to believe because we normally think of a house church as not part of a larger congregation and as being under the direct leadership of the Holy Spirit.  On the other hand, we think of a cell church as an extension of a larger congregation and under the direct authority of a human leader.  Could you give a specific example of a mega-church giving birth to a house church?

        The classic example is Rick Warren, of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.  He’s the one who made the purpose-driven life famous.  They have about 20 thousand people in his structured, church on a Sunday morning.  I believe they have a slight bit more than that in their house church networks.  In fact, they recently added to their staff a house church expert, one of the best in the field.

        And those aren’t cell churches?  They’re real house churches?

        I’ve asked that same question twice just to make sure they weren’t kidding me because cells do having striking differences from a house church.  And they have assured me, yes, it is a house church program they are working on.  They are furthermore going to be training other churches that are on their mailing list.  They are going to be training other pastors on how to do this.  It is going to be a shocking change.

        What is the significance of the resurrection being the forgotten part of the Gospel?

        When you treat the resurrection as an added-on, little extra bonus to the cross, then you’ve lost the bigger picture.  The crucifixion and the resurrection are two sides of the same coin.  Typically in traditional churches, the pastor or an evangelist is able to stand in front, preach the cross and get people to come and accept forgiveness of sins and jump over the line from unsaved to saved.  But the resurrection is all about new life and that is what the house church is all aboutnew life, new things, receiving strength from God, seeing yourself change and changing the world around you.  The original church back in the first century and even in the second century was very much emphasizing the resurrection.  Most of the religions of that time had some sort of system of sacrifice.  What they didn’t have was a living savior who came back from the dead.  That’s what got the early Christians excited about Christianity.

        You mention the need for a monthly meeting of local house churches and related fellowships.  Why is that important and what do we need to watch out for?

        If you’ve learned to sing, pray, teach or prophesy, you need a “flow-through” church where you can flow into wider ministry.  You can’t really do that if you’re with the same group of 5, 10 or 20 people.

        In too many cases, a house church will decide to have one of these quarterly or bi-monthly meetings and they immediately snap back into a traditional mode and say, “Oh, Joe Smith is going to be in town.  He’s a great guy.  Let’s have him do the talk and we’ll get a special music team in.”  It winds up looking just like what you’re trying to get away from.

        How can music best be used and how can it be abused.

        The singing needs to be participatory and it always works best if it’s spontaneous.  That means that what you’re singing has a relationship, very often, to what’s going on.  If someone confesses to a sin, you can immediately break out into a verse of Amazing Grace.  Typically in a programmed church, you have a set of songs to start off with, and then you have some announcements and perhaps a collection.  You may have a few more songs and maybe an anthem by the choir and then you have a sermon and one or two ending songs.  It’s all a great program, done in advance, with no reference to whatever it is that the Holy Spirit may want you to do on that particular day. 


        What’s next in the research activities of Jim Rutz?

        The next book is going to be called The Meaning of Life.  It should be out by the end of the year.  It’s a very ambitious thing, as you can tell from the title, going into cosmology, the history of planet Earth, human history, Heaven and Hell, the church and a little bit about the future.  It’s kind of a pre-evangelistic book for people who might be interested in Christianity, but have a lot of problems.  They think that the world evolved.  They think that Heaven, and Hell particularly, is ridiculous.  I’m going to be straightening out a lot of things that have become all messed up.

Read Steve Eastmen's Review of Jim Rutz' book Megashift. 

www.megashift.org