Viral Jesus by Ross Rohde

I serve as an elder at my church, so I occasionally read books on church and church leadership. The title of Viral Jesus caught my eye. It’s hip and catchy. And it raised questions for me right away.

The title made me think of an emergent church approach to evangelism and doing church, low on hierarchy (I was right there) big on cultural relevance (not so much). But as I read, I realized Rohde’s approach was far more familiar to me than I could have guessed.

Rohde’s thesis is that the church has borrowed too heavily from Roman Catholic and early Reformer ecclesiology. As a result, we are hide-bound and traditionalistic, and we hinder rather than cooperate with the movement of God’s Spirit in the world. We’re too cautious, we’re too hesitant to embrace the supernatural, we’re too dependent on organization and technique and not sensitive enough to the leading of God’s Spirit to see the kind of wild-fire (“viral”) growth that the early church saw. Rohde even finds fault with the way the church is growing in Latin America and Korea. (China, he says, is a different story. They’re following the first-century model more closely.)

This is all familiar to me because I grew up in the Assemblies of God, one of the old Pentecostal denominations that traces its roots back to the Azuza Street revivals of the early twentieth century. The AG long resisted any self-identification as a “denomination,” with all those overtones of hierarchy and structure, but the charismatic and Jesus People movements of the 1970s recast the AG in the role of counterbalance. With its decades of organizational experience and its growing scholarly reputation, the AG and other classic Pentecostal denominations provided a stabilizing influence in those heady days.

So Rohde’s themes were familiar to me. Viral Jesus read like a defense of AG doctrine, almost like a YWAM handbook: be open to the supernatural, listen for the leading of God’s Spirit, expect the unexpected. 

And he’s right. We evangelicals are too fond of organizational models (which may be, as our emergent critics say, more due to our affinity for corporate hierarchy than traditional ecclesiology), we are far too cautious (almost certainly the business background there) and we get spooked by the mystical and the supernatural, both of which clearly have their place in God’s work.  

But this AG boy got his seminary training at Dallas Theological Seminary, so I am familiar also with the opposing view. At Dallas I was exposed to the heavy emphasis on the study of Scripture and theology, a cautious if not prohibitive stance on the supernatural in Christian ministry and opposition to women serving in official church leadership over men. 

So there was another part of me that said Rohde had gone too far: he didn’t say much about the study of Scripture, except to cite examples of the model he recommends. (He says Luke 10, where Jesus sends the disciples out, is the paradigm for ministry.) As he would have it, study of Scripture, theology and church history are really not essential for a Christian leader. Really?

Rohde argues that church hierarchy was far simpler in the early church and that over the centuries it became the “old wineskin” that we see today. Again, I think he goes too far. Paul wrote three pastoral letters, and in two of them he discussed at length the kind of organization and structure he wanted to see in the churches. Peter certainly had a hierarchy in mind when he wrote about elders, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews urged readers to submit to those in authority in the church. No, authority and submission were part of the church from the beginning.

I remember a fellow Dallas grad telling me once that he wished the church had the mind of Dallas Seminary and the fire of the charismatic movement. Rohde recommends the fire part. His book is not intended to be a balanced treatment of church-planting ministry philosophy, but it provides a needed voice in the discussion of what evangelism, discipleship and church planting should look like.