Where Is The Church Headed?

Where Is The Church Headed? An Interview With Frank Viola
By Jarrid Wilson

1. Where do you see The Church heading in the next 10-20 years?

Frank Viola: When you say “The Church,” I assume you mean all the Christians in the world, a la, the global Body of Christ.

If so, “The Church” isn’t a monolith. So all the movements and denominations that exist today (over 33,000 of them) will continue to exist. The in-fighting that’s happening will continue to happen. And the good things that Christians are doing in the world will continue to happen.

However, specifically, I see three things coming:

1. The Fundamentalist segment of the Christian world will continue to dwindle until there’s virtually nothing left. Christians will continue to grow so sick of fellow Christians who attack their fellow brethren, who judge one another’s motives, and who treat each other so horribly that the number of those who are part of these groups will be exceedingly small. We’re already seeing this happen in our time, but in 10-20 years, the hemorrhaging will be dramatic.

I’ve dealt with this issue in some detail in Warning: The World is Watching How We Christians Treat One Another.

2. As I’ve often said, the key to the Christian life is learning how to live by the life of Christ which indwells us. This is a very different paradigm from “try harder and be a good Christian” that’s preached everywhere today. Living by Christ is making what Paul said a practical reality, “Not I, but Christ lives in me.”

Discipleship courses and teachings like my new Living by the Indwelling Life of Christ course will be far more common in the future then they are now.



3. The institutional forms of church will still exist, but as George Barna pointed out in 2005, they will continue to decline. Simpler expressions of the church that have a laser-focused mission to make Jesus Christ central and supreme and that are marked by face-to-face community will be more common than they are now. The points that Leonard Sweet and I hammered away at in Jesus Manifesto will more familiar to Christians in their experience.

2. What’s your favorite part of “The Church?

Frank Viola: Again, I’m assuming you mean all Christians by the term “The Church.” On that point, I’ve discussed the use of the term ” church” in my article Why I Left the Institutional Church & Sought the Ekklesia and how we need to define it every time we use it because it means so many different things to so many different people today.

When I was in my early 20s, I had been part of 13 different denominations, several different Christian movements, and many different parachurch organizations. They all helped me for a time, but I quickly moved on because I knew deep down inside that there had to be more—more to the Christian faith, to Jesus Christ, and to the church than what I was seeing and experiencing.

That led me on an odyssey to really know Jesus and to experience what the church was and meant to the early Christians.

I can tell you today—some 20 years later—that Jesus Christ is beyond what most of us have ever imagined. He’s more exciting, more amazing, and more electrifying than what most preachers have told us.

And so is his bride, the ekklesia, when she functions the way God made her to function.

When I say things like that, some people don’t know what I’m talking about. So I encourage them to listen to a talk I gave at a conference a few years ago called Epic Jesus: The Christ You Never Knew. I receive emails from Christians in their 20s regularly telling me that this talk brought them to their knees (and to tears). It’s been a game-changer for many.

I am humbled by such comments because what I say in that message is what changed my own life as a young man:

“Jesus Christ is ALL, everything else is commentary.”

“Everything wears out except for Jesus Christ.”

So my favorite part of the Body of Christ is whenever I meet Christians in their 20s and 30s who were like me when I was a young believer, hungry and thirsty to know the deeper things of God.



3. Does America worship enough?

Frank Viola: Well, there are over 300 million Americans so that’s hard to answer. I guess some don’t and some do. In the New Testament, “worship” is a life-style of submitting to God. It’s not defined by something that a person does in a religious service or in their home when listening to Christian music.

Here is how the New Testament defines worship:

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” (Romans 12:1)

If one thinks of “worship” in terms of “going to church,” one million Christians leave the institutional form of church every year in America and why 1,500 to 2,000 pastors leave the clergy system each month.

In our book Pagan Christianity, George Barna and I explained how the free-wheeling, Christ-saturated, life-giving, face-to-face, community-driven, every-member-functioning, barn-burning, caring-for-one-another, first-century church devolved into a predictable “show” led by a pastor and a worship team for two hours every Sunday morning where God’s people are mostly passive spectators and hardly anyone in the congregations knows one another.

This isn’t the case for some institutional churches, but it’s commonplace for many—if not most—of them.

That’s not to say that attending a Sunday-morning church service is wrong or bad. It’s just not what the New Testament means by “church.”

I often tell people, “You haven’t lived until you’ve been in a New Testament–styled, open-participatory church meeting that’s led by Jesus Christ through his every-member functioning body.” When I experienced such a meeting for the first time at age 23, it blew my circuitry and wrecked me for life.

4. What’s your definition of a true Christ-follower?

Frank Viola: Great question. You’re really asking what is the definition of a disciple. Your timing is great because I just outlined my answer in a free eBook called DISCPLESHIP IN CRISIS.

It goes into what the New Testament means when it uses the word “disciple.” In short, following Jesus means learning how to let Him live in and through us. It’s learning how to walk in such a way that it’s “not I, but Christ who lives in and through me.”

This is what the entire New Testament is about. Jesus said in John, “As the Father has sent me and I live by the Father, so he who partakes of me shall live by me.”

So Jesus lived by His Father’s life. That’s how Jesus followed His Father. Thus following Jesus means living by His life.

That’s what being a Christian is all about. A disciple of Jesus is someone in whom Jesus Christ dwells and someone who is learning to let Christ live in and through them.

The marks of a person who is living by Christ is that they will learn how to treat others the same way they want to be treated (Matthew 7:12) and they will learn how to pick up their cross, die to themselves and lose (Luke 9:23-24).

That’s the Christian life in a nutshell.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below.

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