The Old Wineskin – Pagan Christianity

Chapter 7

By Dene McGriff

The Church today is broken and can’t be fixed. It is weighted down by meaningless forms, practices, traditions and programs, by a clergy that tries hard to serve the laity but fails miserably. But it is lifeless and irrelevant. It is an old wineskin that must be discarded if Christians are to discover a living relationship with Christ and one another. Not only are the roots pagan but most of the practices we accept today bear no resemblance to the living early church.

A central theme of “The Tribulation Network” is that in the last days, most of the church will fall away but a remnant will become a triumphant testimony to the world around. The church will go through the tribulation period and Christians will be delivered up by other “Christians” thinking they are doing God a favor. (e.g. Matthew 10:18-20) What will separate one group from the other? Why will brother turn on brother and son against father? Why will Christians be so deceived (e.g. Matthew 24:4, 5, 11, 24)? Why will some overcome and avoid the deception and others become a willing part of it?

What I am about to share with you is revolutionary but I will begin with a disclaimer. I am not condemning or judging anyone. We are all told to overcome. As Christians, we all answer to our Maker on Judgment Day. To a certain extent, we walk in the light we have. But we may unwittingly be deceived because we accept things as they are and do not question the church, doctrines and practices we have been brought up with. As we see in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3, there are “overcomers” in each church – no matter what their condition. Today, many see the excesses of the church: the prosperity gospel, the Toronto, Pensacola and Lakeland “revivals”, contemplative prayer (a form of Eastern meditation becoming mainstreamed in the church), the mega and purpose driven churches with their “seeker friendly” approach, etc. But it is practically impossible for the well meaning Christian to see anything wrong with “their” church, with the way things are done.

Although I wrote about this many years ago in my online book “Recognizing Apostasy and Deception,” I have been struggling with another online book titled “In search of the Last Days Church”. But what a confirmation when I read Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna! Frank Viola has long been a leader in the “organic church” movement (rather than calling it the “house church”) and was quoted in “Recognizing Deception”, and George Barna is the head of the Barna Group, a Christian company that has been doing research on various aspects of the church. I would encourage you to go to either website and order five or ten copies, read it and give it to your friends.

Even though I have known for many years there were pagan influences in the early church, I have never seen it so well documented and expressed as in this book. Evangelicals take for granted the fact the Roman Catholic Church has a lot of unbiblical practices, but they can not possibly imagine that they have carried over many of the same practices! Pagan Christianity not only leaves no doubt but it completely exposes the historical roots of our own accepted “Christian” practices. How far did the reformation go? What is the effect of the clergy/laity system, and all the sermonizing? It will surprise you greatly that many of our practices go back to Imperial Rome, Plato and Aristotle rather than to Judaism. But please, don’t take my word for it. Order the book and see for yourself.

In the Old Testament, the people of Israel struggle throughout against the prevailing culture and religion. Israel was to be a people set apart for God and they were not to mingle with the nations around them, lest they be led astray. We have this from Exodus 34:

12 Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you are going, lest it be a snare in your midst. 13 But you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images 14 (for you shall worship no other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God), 15 lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they play the harlot with their gods and make sacrifice to their gods, and one of them invites you and you eat of his sacrifice, 16 and you take of his daughters for your sons, and his daughters play the harlot with their gods and make your sons play the harlot with their gods.

Time and again the nation of Israel gets mixed up with the peoples around them, intermarries and their hearts are drawn away from the one true God. They make idols and worship foreign gods. They go through some heavy trials, repent and come back to God, only to fall again. It is difficult for anyone to stand against the prevailing culture, including Christians today. Culture has a way of intruding on our lives and molding us in the image of the world around.

Religious Form or Reality?

The center of the Jewish religion was the temple, the priesthood and the sacrifice. The temple was considered to be where God dwelt on the earth. His presence was in the holy of holies. The tribe of the Levites was the priesthood who carried out the sacrifices on behalf of the nation of Israel. These were types of what Jesus Christ accomplished for us. He was the sacrifice for our sins. He abolished the temple and the priesthood. We became the temple of God and a kingdom of priests. The priesthood, the physical temple and the sacrifices were abolished once and for all – at least they should have been. Jesus did away with the professionals, the buildings and the rituals. However, it didn’t take long before our human concepts of religion began to creep back into the church and we left reality and built another religion!

Viola does a fantastic job pointing out that Christianity was the first and only religion that didn’t have any of the accruements of organized religion. There was no temple, no class of priests and no sacrifices. Christians indwelt by the Holy Spirit were the temple and every Christian was a priest and had equal access to God. The early Christian meetings were informal gatherings where everyone shared, prayed, sang and ate together. It was a community of equal believers – a body of people with different gifts and functions. There was no hierarchy, “house of worship” or ritual. There were no sermons as we know them, no “order of worship”, no professional clergy, no temples and no Sunday School, seminary or Bible Schools. But it wasn’t long before these things began to creep into the early church – not long at all. The church slowly began to succumb to the surrounding pagan culture and after the emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire, it was thoroughly mixed with Greek thought, Roman organization and Pagan religion.

“Pagan Christianity” thoroughly documents when and how all of the practices we accept today as “Christian” came into the church. The footnotes are as interesting as the text. It is thoroughly researched. We know the priesthood, temple and sacrifice were a full blown part of the Roman Catholic Church, but most of us “evangelicals” just assume we threw all that away and went back to the New Testament pattern. Again, Viola does a brilliant job showing how things were changed by the Reformers, the Puritans, the Methodists, the frontier preachers coming up to the present day church but many of the essential errors of the Catholic Church were continued. The reformers didn’t reform that much.

The Challenge

What does this mean to us today? It means that the church as we know it is far more compromised than any of us ever imagined. You have no idea until you see it systematically all laid out for you. That is why I urge you to order “Pagan Christianity”. I have never met or talked to either author. This is no ploy to sell books and you know that we don’t accept donations or sell anything. We are a true non-profit because have never charged for anything. But I challenge you to buy and read this book. It will blow your mind and change you forever. You will never be the same! I could never have done the research and put it as well as these two authors do.

After more than 50 years as a Christian in various expressions of the church – from traditional Baptist, to the Jesus movement, to Calvary Chapels, and Vineyards, I can say that the church in its present institutional form will never produce a mature, cohesive triumphant testimony – NEVER! Although there may be many dear saints within the church, the institution will only serve itself and perpetuate its errors. If you want to be free of the deception inherent in the “church”, what can you do? There are only two paths available to the evangelical or even the post modern or emergent Christian today – be a part-time or a full-time Christian (whether in a church or parachurch ministry). And if you decide to be a “full-time” Christian, you won’t get very far unless you go to Bible College or a Seminary where you will be further brain washed to pass along the same error to other well meaning “Christians.” All the preaching in the world has never accomplished the stated goal of “equipping the saints.”

As long as we relate to one another in the context of buildings, programs and Sunday sermons, God will never have a “triumphant testimony.” The average Christian will never grow by sitting quietly and listening to countless sermons. We will never produce Christians secure in their own relationship with the Lord, in their own ability to minister with the gifts God has given them, to minister along side other Christians as equals complimenting one another. We will never have an authentic organic Christian community that attracts unbelievers. If you read Viola and Barna’s book, you will see how absolutely broken the institutional church is. Yes, the people in it are believers, but they are sorely deceived – not just by the practices of their “church” but by their teachings and end times view which in all likelihood is an escapist (pre-trib rapture) and lukewarm Laodicean message. We must abandon the old wineskin and go to Him outside the camp. (Hebrews 13:13)

I receive emails from people all the time saying that their church is either dead, has no vision for the last days or is stifling and killing them. What do they do? Do I know of any churches or meetings they can go to? You can look up house churches on the internet and see if there is a suitable one near you. Or you can order the sequel to Pagan Christianity called Reimaging the Church for practical suggestions. Get extra copies. Share them with your friends. Open up your house an evening a week or Sunday afternoon to begin to experience an open, sharing, body-life type meeting. For some practical suggestions see some of the later chapters in my book online.

I can say from experience, that the traditional church where people come in and sit and listen to sermons week after week will never “equip the saints.” It will just perpetuate the clergy and their position and hold the saints hostage until the day they die. People learn by doing. They grow by doing and I don’t mean by ushering, rearranging chairs or passing the plate. The life of the church should flow out of the living relationship each person has with the Lord and the meeting should be a corporate expression of each individual’s experience. You have no idea how deceived you are until you begin to delve into this yourself. Don’t take my word for it, but please take the time to look into it for yourself. The old wineskin has been patched and patched again over the past two thousand years. It is time to abandon it.

In the last days, Christians will either be a part of the problem or a part of the solution. They will be a part of the deception and persecution, or a part of the testimony (and the use of the world “testimony” and “martyr” are synonymous in the New Testament). During the Reformation, the Anabaptists promoted an open meeting where all saints were free to share. Martin Luther labeled it a heresy and laws were passed against such a practice with the penalty of death. This is not to say that we would be persecuted for having home meetings, but we could be persecuted for not being patriotic as the institutional church and state become more aligned.

Part of what we write about here is what is happening politically and economically. Having the advantage of reading the end of the Book, we know the whole economic system will end badly with the “mark of the beast” (Revelation 13:17) and not being able to buy or sell without it. Revelation 17 talks about the unholy alliance the harlot church makes with the beast. The only thing that will get us through this period of trials is the church with the little “c” – relationships with other saints that are based on Christ’s transforming life in us – not sitting in a building together listening to lectures/sermons. The cry of the post-modern emerging “Christian” is for authenticity and relevance which isn’t found in the institution but is found in the simple corporate life of the organic church.

Just as Israel became entangled in the tribes and nations around them, the Church has become entangled in the world, the traditions of men, Greek philosophy, Roman organization, worldly hierarchy, purpose driven modern management, entertainment and marketing, New Age spirituality and the “good life” – material wealth beyond the imagination of 99.99 percent of all of the people who have ever lived. As Barna’s research points out, the church is so compromised as to be indistinguishable from the society around it. The dynamic, spontaneous, living expression of the church has been stifled by the dead forms, programs, traditions and teachings of the moribund institution we call the Church. With that, I challenge you one last time to get and read Pagan Christianity and you will flee and never defend that old wineskin again.

Dene McGriff, Sacramento

July 1, 2008