Going Multi, Part 4

Is Multi Biblical?

John Piper has summed up the theological/ecclesiological arguments in favour of going multi like this:

I think the essence of biblical church community and unity hangs on a unity of eldership, a unity of teaching, and a unity of philosophy of ministry. And then, within the church, it hangs on very significant clusters of relationships that are biblically life-giving and involve all of the "one another" commands of the Bible. And you do these in some kind of smaller gathering, call it "small groups," "cell groups," "fellowship groups," "shepherding groups," "mid-sized Sunday school classes" or whatever. Those are the places where you get to know people and where you get to fulfill the biblical commands of community.


Is this apologetic biblically sound?

What is a church?
Many of us are probably happy with Calvin’s definition of a church being,

Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence.

As implied in Calvin’s ‘some existence’, these things are necessary but not sufficient for the identification of a church. The question for us is whether a church doing multi really is a church, or if going multi actually creates multiple churches rather than one church in several places. (NB I wonder how different our discussions on a whole range of ecclesiastical issues would be if our Bibles followed Luther and Tyndale in translating ekklesia as ‘congregation’ rather than ‘church’?)

As one of the authors of the 9Marks ejournal expresses it:

In one sentence, let me put it like this: (1) the advocates of a multi-site or multi- service model functionally use the word "church" like my wife and I refer to ourselves as one "family"; (2) they biblically justify their functional use of the word in this fashion like one might refer to different branches of a bank as one bank; (3) but what they really are is McDonalds, that is, they are different churches which comprise nothing more than one corporate entity, which they are misnaming a "church," as if we were to begin referring to all McDonalds restaurants collectively as a "restaurant."

To return to the two multi-site proof texts in Acts, I'm happy to say that the church in Jerusalem is still the "church" when they are spread out from house to house, just like I would say a basketball team is still a team even when its members are spending the night in different rooms or cities. But I'm happy to say that for the basketball team because, at some point, they will come together and do that which constitutes a basketball team. Likewise, in Acts 2 you have the church coming together in the temple to do that which constitutes them as a church, and then scattering to break bread and share fellowship in smaller groups. Fine. They're still constituted as a church not by what they do when they're scattered, but by what they do when they're together. Then in Acts 8, you simply have a statement about Paul going from house to house and persecuting the members of the Jerusalem church, just as if you said something like, "The coach went from room to room, alerting the team that basketball game had been postponed." That strikes me as the plainest reading of Acts 8 (and apparently Christians have read it that way for 2000 years). What's strange about the multi-site and multi-service church is that they are happy to do away with "gathering" as one component of what it means to constitute a church, even though there's clear biblical evidence that the Jerusalem church all gathered—yes, all thousands of them (see Acts 2:44; 5:12; 6:1-2)! It sounds as if the multi-site and multi-service advocates point to these passages to say that their "team" (church) is a "team" even though they never gather as a "team" because being a team has nothing to do with getting together. But is that what these two passages teach? Couldn't it be the case that it's whatever the Jerusalem church is doing together that constitutes them as a team?

To help us bore down on this some more, in the next post I will take Piper’s apologetic clause by clause, and make some brief observations/questions.