Viola's Reimagining Church, A Review and Critique

Having now finished Frank Viola’s book Reimagining Church, I am both more encouraged and thoroughly confused.  I’m encouraged because Viola brings us several of the arguments and scriptural principles (sometimes in eerily similar language) that I do in my own book, Some Assembly Required.  So, in many ways, Viola and I are seeing the same things and offering the same picture of what he calls organic church

I’m confused because Reimagining Church is as well-written as Finding Organic Church was poorly written, and because the humanistic trends in Finding Organic Church—that I criticize harshly—are ones that Viola also speaks against in Reimagining Church.  That is, his theology of church in Reimagining is much better than his humanistic practical advice in Finding Organic Church.  Such disconnects are always puzzling. 

So, I can agree with most of what Viola is saying in Reimagining Church, and I may even be able to recommend it to interested parties, but with a few major caveats.  These have to do with Viola’s tone (thoughout all his books), his essential divisiveness, his hypocritical blueprint, and his fundamental mischaracterization of the authority issue in the church.

Frank Viola's Tone

Years ago, someone showed me a few pages of Pagan Christianity.  It wasn’t enough for me to form any opinion about Viola’s argument, but I do remember thinking that his tone was unnecessarily biting and un-generous.  That impression has only been strengthened through reading his two “more positive” books, and it comes out most strongly when he paints pictures of church systems that he’s criticizing.  For all of us critics, it’s tempting to paint any other group with the same dark colors—they ALL do this, this ALWAYS happens, this is how such-and-such a group IS.  Viola gives in to that temptation on a regular basis. 

On top of that, his word choice betrays a judgment, and maybe an anger, that is probably not appropriate.  In Reimagining Church, one of his favorite negative words is “ilk,” which not only expresses his disagreement with institutional church leaders but also pronounces judgment on them as fundamentally skewed in their souls.  I trust that these slips of the word processor are unintentional on Viola’s part, but I would challenge him to season his speech with more grace. 

As a side note, this means I want to go back to my writing to see if I have the same slips of the tongue.  My tone is something I’ve worried about from the start. There's nothing like a critique to make one more self-critical.