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Viola's Organic Church Blueprint

In both Reimagining Church and Finding Organic Church, Viola plays language games with his readers regarding the right metaphor for the church, but unfortunately not for laughs.  As a teacher of composition and rhetoric, and as someone who has studied linguistics at the graduate level, I find some of his linguistic distinctions appropriate, some irritating, and some downright appalling.  The one he picks as his central theme—blueprint vs. organic—fits somewhere between irritating and appalling.  Viola says that there’s not a “blueprint” for the function of the church that we can pull from the scriptures and strategically apply, but instead the nature of the church is built into our spiritual/Trinitarian DNA and will come out naturally and “organically” when all the institutional restrictions are removed. 

My problem with this distinction is that it, like many other distinctions in Viola’s writing, is a “false distinction,” otherwise known as an “either/or fallacy.”  One easy way to tell that this is a false distinction is that Viola himself can’t keep the two metaphors apart.  In his chapter on “Reimagining Apostolic Tradition,” Viola tries to explain his position by the following image:

Suppose that you hired a carpenter to build a den as an addition to your home.  You sketched out a diagram specifying how you wanted the den to be built.  You then carefully explained it to the carpenter.  After returning from a weeklong vacation, you are shocked to find that your new den barely resembles the image that you sketched out for him.  You ask the carpenter why he failed to adhere to your plan.  He responds by saying, “I thought my ideas were better than yours.” 
Have we not done the same with the Lord’s house?  (253). 

What is a diagram specifying what a building should look like?  Normally, we call that a blueprint, the very image that Viola speaks against.  However, it’s not just the metaphor that Viola uses inconsistently, it’s the idea itself.  The melding of metaphors is just evidence of his inability to fully separate the concepts of organic life and prescribed life.  That is, he says that ekklesia life will come from within, through the DNA of the Spirit, but he also says that ekklesia life also needs to be taught and given form by the prescribed commands and examples of the biblical apostles and prophets (i.e. a blueprint). Ironically, he's written a couple of books to give a blueprint for what he says should come naturally without a blueprint.  

This melding of categories is a critique of Viola’s writing, but it’s a sign of hope for his theology.  The church is both from within (organic) and from without (tradition), and the process of aligning the two is the daily business of the church.  Where the scriptures tell us that Christians really love one another, but we’re not experiencing that organic life, we cry out to the Lord for the form to become the reality.  Where Christians feel the instinctive need to give of their resources, the blueprint of the scriptures can confirm and help direct (though not dictate) their impulse (see Romans 15). 

So, like most Christians, Viola argues for a wrong distinction with his lips—based on his prior commitment to an organic “tradition”—while embodying a better understanding with the rest of his book (and, hopefully, his life). As J. I. Packard helpfully points out, our real theology is usually better than the doctrine we argue for.  Praise God for that!