Blueprint Church & Bad Photocopies!

I live, plant, promote and desire simpler church! This reminds me of how we try to "Design Church", in our image. Worth reading!

"Imagine a young boy unwrapping a new puzzle and immediately trying to put the pieces together. Out of the puzzle box he pulls a picture of a red race car, (He loves red race cars!) Excited, he tries to assemble the pieces according to the picture. But somehow the pieces do not seem to fit as they should. He tries to make them fit better by bending them or tearing off an edge here and there, but something is still not right. Finally his father comes to the rescue. Dad takes the picture of the red race car and turns it over. Lo and behold, on the other side is a picture of a beautiful tree, the “original” picture depicted in the puzzle. The race car is only an advertisement for another puzzle made by the same company! The boy sighs with relief and starts to put the pieces together according to the new original; within minutes it is done. What was wrong before? He had all the right pieces, but the wrong original. He had unquestionable and honest motives, but quite simply the wrong blueprint.

Is this the situation of a large part of Christendom today? We have all the right pieces: the Word of God, people, houses, prayer, motivation, money. But could it be that we are putting them all together according to a wrong original—our very own beloved red race car? Has the unthinkable happened? Has someone cunningly slipped us an impractical blueprint? Do we stand transfixed in front of our spiritual photocopiers (Bible colleges, publishing houses, seminaries, or leadership programs), continuing to hit that green button in an effort to make copies of what we are convinced is a biblical, canonized, unquestionable, firsthand original? I can imagine that Satan, the enemy of the church, has no problem with even the most fervent evangelistic mission activities or programs, as long as they are all about making copies of red race cars—our traditional pattern of church that makes no serious threat to his claims on humankind.

Maybe the time has come for us to stop bending pieces and tearing them apart in an effort to make them match our picture of what the church should be and instead allow God to recreate church in all of us. It might start with us reexamining our blueprints and turning over our originals."

(The House Church Book. Wolfgang Simson. Barna, 2009, pg 1-2)