Quotes from Frank Viola

In fact, I've met countless believers who have said, "The church is an organism, not an organization." Yet as they formed those very words, they continued to be devout members of churches that were organized along the lines of General Motors and Microsoft.

ORGANIC CHURCH The term organic church does not refer to a particular model of church. (We believe that no perfect model exists.) Instead, we believe that the New Testament vision of church is organic. An organic church is a living, breathing, dynamic, mutually participatory, every-member-functioning, Christ-centered, communal expression of the body of Christ.

What history teaches us is that men have never learned anything from it." —G. W. F. Hegel, nineteenth-century German philosopher

In short, the goal of the gospel is not to get you out of hell and into heaven, but to get God out of heaven and into you so that He may be displayed visibly and glorified in His creation.

It doesn't matter what you've done or how bad you've failed, Jesus Christ is bigger than all your foul-ups, and His mercy and grace loom larger than any sin you've ever committed.

Caution: If you're a person who will one day mentor others, I have a sobering warning. If your ego hasn't been annihilated by the cross of Jesus Christ, you will end up becoming a Saul in the lives of those who are just as (or more) gifted than you are. And when God begins to elevate them in His service, you will go insane.

Organic church life, however, is a wedding of glory and gore.

Sometimes the Lord wants us to wait and rest in Him. Other times, however, He wants us to press into His kingdom and receive what is rightfully ours in Christ.

Church planters deliberately left so that the church could function under the headship of Christ. If a church planter stays in a church, the members naturally look to him to lead. Every-member functioning is hindered. This is still true today. The pattern throughout the entire New Testament is that church planters (apostolic workers) always left the church after they laid the foundation. For more details, see The Normal Christian Church Life by Watchman Nee

Thus the pagan notion of a trained professional speaker who delivers orations for a fee moved straight into the Christian bloodstream. Note that the concept of the "paid teaching specialist" came from Greece, not Judaism. It was the custom of Jewish rabbis to take up a trade so as to not charge a fee for their teaching.

And to know that this eternal, limitless, incarnated, perfect, crucified, resurrected, ascended, enthroned, glorified, triumphant, victorious, matchless, glorious Christ . . . dwells inside of you.

history is God's love story. There is no event in space or time unrelated to the Jesus story, and there is no metaphor in existence unrelated to Jesus. "All

believers are discovering the experience of the body of Christ and what it means to gather under the headship of Jesus.

You will never understand Jesus by looking at the God of the Old Testament. You must first look at Jesus and then you will understand the God of the Old Testament.

It is the depravity of institutions and movements that given in the beginning to express life, they often end in throttling that very life. Therefore, they need constant review, perpetual criticism and continuous bringing back to the original purposes and spirit.

The pew is perhaps the greatest inhibitor of face-to-face fellowship. It is a symbol of lethargy and passivity in the contemporary church and has made corporate worship a spectator sport.

Within the triune God we discover mutual love, mutual fellowship, mutual dependence, mutual honor, mutual submission, mutual dwelling, and authentic community. In the Godhead there exists an eternal, complementary, and reciprocal interchange of divine life, divine love, and divine fellowship.

Hence, the Reformers dramatically failed to put their finger on the nerve of the original problem: a clergy-led worship service attended by a passive laity.[157] It is not surprising, then, that the Reformers viewed themselves as reformed Catholics.

The first-century churches were locatable, identifiable, visitable communities that met regularly in a particular locale.

The church, therefore, should not be confused with an organization, a denomination, a movement, or a leadership structure. The church is the people of God, the very bride of Jesus Christ.

This disjunction between secular and spiritual is highlighted by the fact that the typical church building requires you to "process" in by walking up stairs or moving through a narthex. This adds to the sense that you are moving from everyday life to another life. Thus a transition is required. All of this flunks the Monday test. No matter how good Sunday was, Monday morning still comes to test our worship.229

The moment He set me free is the moment He captured me.

Organic churches, like those in the New Testament, are different. They are not trains, but groups of people out for a walk. These groups move much more slowly than trains—only several miles per hour at the fastest. But they can turn at a moment's notice. More importantly, they can be genuinely attentive to their world, to their Lord, and to each other.

As we survey church history, we discover that A. W. Tozer's piercing observation is most accurate: "All great Christians have been wounded souls.