The Organic Church | How Paul Planted Churches Without a New Testament

Now, here’s the astonishing thing. You have four churches on the brink of total destruction, and he doesn’t mention the elders he ordained. He goes straight to the people, and he talks to them, and he has a great deal to say to them and tells them what to do…without referring to elders.

And now, I was a 29-year-old man when I went to the New Testament to learn some of these things. I took a year off as an evangelist, by the way. That was a long, long time ago. We were driving 1955 or 1958 cars; if you’ve seen one, you’ll get some idea of just how long ago that was. Now, I said to myself, “Can anybody do this? Can you walk into a situation where no one knows—everyone knows nothing, no one knows anything—and a church be raised up?” Now, is that a New Testament church or an organic church? It is New Testament in that it happened in the New Testament era, and that it was recorded later in what we do call the New Testament, and the record is there, but it was long before we had a New Testament. And I’m telling you that the Holy Spirit in them allowed them to survive. And I could not help but wonder, now Gene, if you ever did that, Gene, you wouldn’t be able to say, Get in the Bible, get in the Word, get in the Word, get in the Word, get in the Scripture, get into the New Testament; there wouldn’t be any for them. And I kept asking myself, “How could it be done?” And I went back to Galatians again and again, and there was one thing that I was convinced of, and that is: the church is a spiritual being.

Now, do you ever ask me if I tried it? Yes, I’ve tried it 20 or 25 times. It may be that I’m the only person on this earth who ever did try it. I had an incredible burden, and that burden was that God’s people function, and that we do not sit in pews week after week and listen to sermons preached that really go from hither to thither and yon, all the way from A to Z, and from this planet to five others. We never know what’s coming next when we go into a church building to hear.

People functioning of Christ and caring for one another. It comes down to what you’ll read or have read in this book (the Bible), that God has a DNA. The church has a DNA. Leave her alone, and she will be church. She will be ekklesia. She will be the body of Christ. She will be building of God. She will be the bride of Christ. She will be assembling, gathering. She will be what she instinctively is, just like if you will feed and clean a baby, and that child is bound to grow up to be a human being, an adult, who becomes their own man or their own woman. You can imagine how excited Christians are when they find out they’re going to be left, and it’s going to be up to them.

I think I need to say something to you about elders right about here, because there’s an elder teaching, and it’s just like having a pastor; the elders take over everything, and once more, you’re sitting and listening and you’re being taught the Bible. And everything is short-circuited right there, right at that very moment. Those churches, all four, had a time when they didn’t have elders. Now, today, there is a teaching of eldership, and I’m going to sit right here and tell you that I challenge the right concept of today’s eldership teaching; that’s because it’s authoritarian, it’s supervisory, it’s like a big hand hanging over a group of people. I don’t really think they’re elders.

First of all, the greatest single lacking is that they were not chosen by someone outside that city. Elders we have today, especially among non-institutional Christians, started by a man, gets a group together, starts teaching all sorts of things, including submission and authority and head covering, etc.—well, that sure does make his life easy. And then later he ordains the elders, and then he announces that he’s one of them. And where’s the outsider? Where is this genius of God – the man who comes, builds, and leaves – that the church learns and finds her own natural, organic DNA expression? And the elders are chosen by the Holy Spirit and the outside worker.

Now I’m an old man. And it’s true I’m an old man, and I’ve never seen the righteous bake bread. But I’ll tell you something else: I’ve never seen eldership that was honest, the way it is being taught today, because eventually it becomes a controlling factor and a terrifying experience. And that’s not all. Because I’m going to give you our own experience with elders. You ordain a man an elder and call him an elder – he’ll sell his soul to be an elder, whereas he might have walked out and left. He might have left the Lord. Who knows what he might have left, but he’ll keep it all for the title Elder. My experience? Elders usually don’t last very long. Interesting and beautifully, some of them don’t want the job very long; they want to just get out of the incredible responsibilities that sometimes fall on them. Others disqualify themselves. About every three years, in a secret ballot, we ask, Who are the ones that you want to lead the church? And I think invariably one gets dropped off, and one or two get added. Someone who just didn’t quite come up to it.

I’ll guarantee you, if we had ordained that man, laying on the hands in a ceremony, put his name on him, and he was Reverend or Mr. Elder, he’d have still been there. It is good to desire to be an elder. Not in our day, it’s not, because those elders are there forever. You won’t get to replace elders and become one that you desire to be until one of them dies off. I’m saying to you: the church is fluid. I’m telling you: she’s a woman. I’m telling you: she’s free. I’m telling you: she’s beautiful, and more than anything else, she is so unbelievably creative that it boggles my mind.

Gene, there ought to be a New Testament. Then let us talk about that for a moment, and I am going to lose you. Some things you should know about your New Testament. One of them is that… by the way, I’ve just written a book on this subject, I haven’t published it yet. A history of the study of the New Testament. Just when we were beginning to get a New Testament – handwritten and volumes of, say, one or two or three or four per province, one or two per big city – the influence of the Roman Catholic Church came in and said that all Bibles should be handwritten, and that’s what they had to be—in Latin. And so, for the next thousand years, people literally forgot the original was Greek, and it was forbidden that anybody translate the New Testament into any language but Latin. And by 700 A.D., Latin was a totally dead language. So, we got about nearly a thousand years, even after that, when all manuscripts were in Latin, which very few people could read. God’s people never had access to the Scripture.

Ah, Gene, and what about the Reformation? Well, wonderful. You could own the New Testament if you were rich. The printing press made it possible for some, but mostly the studying of the New Testament came from public reading, because even then, even though it was ten times cheaper than a handwritten one, it was still expensive. Whoever printed had to print one sheet at a time, let it dry, turn it over, print the other side, and then keep that up until they’d put out a thousand pages—and then figure out a way to collate all that, and then put it in a book. Extremely expensive. I can tell you exactly the year when it became easy for an ordinary person, owning a typical job, to actually buy a New Testament and afford it. 1840; that’s in modern times. You could actually sell a New Testament – buy one, for what you could afford.

Someone figured out what it would have cost to have the Wycliffe—handwritten, of course. In 1383, an average person’s income – he would have had to save up his entire income: no eating, no home, no blanket, no food, no shelter – and had to save up for 30 years to buy a New Testament. 30 years. And everything was written on vellum. It took 3,000 sheepskins to produce enough vellum or parchment in order to put out one New Testament. And then the New Testament did get printed, and the price dropped—but did not drop far enough for a peasant, not for an ordinary person. 1840.

You know, back around that time, that’s when we began saying, We’ve got to be New Testament, got to be New Testament, got to be New Testament, get in the Word, get in the Word. We’ve got to be New Testament. And they began a movement called the Berean Movement, in which everything they did was based on the Scripture. And I’ve driven by a lot of churches with a little sign that said New Testament Church. There’s the building, there’s the steeple, open the door, there are the pews, and there’s the silent people. A pastor standing up there preaching.