Down through the history of the church, there have been radical movements that sought to be church in ways that took the Sermon on the Mount seriously and that had discipleship to Jesus and one another at the centre of their life and witness to the world. Paul Wallis is a lecturer of Hermeneutics and Church History at Unity College, A.C.T
JOACHIM DI FIORE, FRANCIS OF ASSISI,
THE POOR CLARES AND ST DOMINIC
Copyright: Paul Anthony Wallis – Chaplain General of Jesus Generation – a network of household-based churches – a partner of OIKOS Australia
My own journey from a ministry centred on the parish and the congregation to a pattern centred on planting small high-commitment, household-based church began when I discovered an eight-hundred year old prophecy! What happened was that I was reading up on revival movements of history trying to get some insight as to how I could work more fruitfully for the Kingdom of God – particularly in the area of church-planting. Ten years ago, my reading took me to the Europe of the 1100s and to a Cistercian monk called Joachim di Fiore.
Di Fiore believed that in the 1200s the Holy Spirit was going to burst out of the structures of mainstream church, ordaining his own leaders, raising up new communities whose faith would be more like the faith of monks and nuns and whose ministry would be like that of the first Apostles. These new leaders would not be authorised by the existing institutions. Rather the Holy Spirit would empower them to bring the apostolic ministry to a new generation.
These words gripped my attention because for many years I had been sensing that God had something similar up his sleeve for the 2000s. I felt that God was planning to do far more in the fulfilling of that Joel 2 prophecy that declares that ordinary men, women, boys and girls will be raised up by the Holy Spirit himself to live and work as God’s prophetic people. My feeling that with the turn of the new millennium The Holy Spirit would be taking his church into a post-VIP era of truly every-member ministry.
As I read I felt that not absolutely everything Joachim di Fiore wrote was 100% on target from what I could gauge. Yet it was easy to see why this particular prophecy hit home in the way it did.
After all the church of his age was one any godly person would want to break out of!
In the eight centuries since the body of Christian bishops had been co-opted by Rome to become the Imperial Department of Religion, the institution of the church had become progressively more engrossed in material wealth and political power. At times the church hierarchy used its special prerogative to define theology to add further to its secular power. One example was the way it traded on people’s lack of assurance of salvation, such as by allowing parishes to offer masses for the dead (to reduce the dead person’s time in purgatory) in return for money and lands. Consequently with the passing of every generation and the reading of every land-owners last will and testament, the church accrued a little more land.
Through these and other forms of simony, by the mediaeval period the church had become the largest land-owning corporation on Earth – with all the political and judicial powers that went with that. Of course possessions need protecting. Consequently many of the wealthier Bishops adopted a policy of employing their own standing armies and, at times, would even raid each others’ territories, these obedient footmen bringing back the spoils for their ecclesiastical lord.
Of course land-ownership meant perpetual income through ground and property rental and tax. It also meant considerable secular power. The Vatican State had grown fabulously wealthy through its military activity. In the mediaeval period (and this was so right up to the 19th century), Kings and land-barons could buy the right of appointment to parishes (patronage) and would skim the cream off the land rental and offerings, paying a pittance to the curates who looked after the churches. Some acquired numbers of parishes. This was called “pluralism”. One such pluralist – Bogo de Clare – paid each of his curates an annual wage that was less than his own annual budget for ginger to spice his food! One European king had his eleven-year-old son made archbishop of a province so that he, the king, would then receive all the endowments and rental belonging to that province. This kind of corruption was widespread by the beginning of the second millennium.
Church Authorities banned the translation of the Scriptures out of Latin into any language that the common people could understand. This made the common people totally dependent upon church leaders to tell them what Christianity was. This effectively put the activity of church hierarchies beyond any possibility of doubt or criticism from the common people. Naturally life in the church hierarchy had become an attractive career-option for people who were hungry for the kind of wealth and privilege afforded by the mediaeval church. Consequently the church’s knowledge and love of the Gospel were gradually eroded. Some time later a survey was taken of the education of clergy in Britain. The results were inauspicious. Clergy were found who were unable to recall who had authored the Lord’s Prayer. Some suggested that the King of England had written it.
I already knew this history when I discovered Joachim di Fiore’s writings, but I hadn’t made the connection and understood how dramatically God had fulfilled those prophetic words. With the turn of the new thirteenth century God moved powerfully and there emerged a massive grassroots movement of young, naïve, evangelistic believers committed to following Christ’s commission to the 12 and 72 as if it had been addressed directly to them. New communities sprang up as well as new leaders who operated without seeking the blessing of ecclesiastical overlords. The movement was a substantially teenage movement – although the leaders tended to be a little older.
As I began to join the dots, I was electrified and felt certain that this revolutionary shift in initiative from the institution to the nobodies was exactly what lay on God’s heart for the churches of the 21st century.
The most famous of those thirteenth-century leaders was Francesco Bernadone – known to the world as Francis of Assisi. Invalided out of the army, following imprisonment, and some kind of breakdown, Francesco heard Christ’s commission of the 12 and the 72 read in church. Being the son of a rich merchant, he had enough Latin to understand the words. He heard them as spoken to him by Christ himself. He also had a vision of Christ speaking to him from the Cross decorating the church of San Damiano in Assisi. The call he received was to “re-build the church of Jesus”. So it was that Francesco decided to live the life of a beggar in order to be free to heal the sick, drive out demons, cleanse lepers and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, believing he was acting under the direct authority of Jesus Christ. He pioneered his autonomous group as an apostle, and though “unordained” he led his community in the Eucharist.
Three centuries later this revolutionary Franciscan attitude of self-starting and of autonomous grouping under the direct authority of Jesus would be labelled as “Anabaptist”. However as far as Francesco was concerned, he was simply obeying the Gospels. He wasn’t out on an ecclesiological campaign. He simply didn’t feel any need to be authorized by some bishop before he could follow his call and obey the words of the Messiah himself. He derived all this from reading texts like the Apostolic commission with a simple heart of obedience. “Jesus said it, therefore I will do it.”
That, however is not how most in the church hierarchy understood Matthew 10.7-10. “Look,” they said, “Jesus gave authority to the apostles to teach. They gave authority to their successors, who gave the same authority to their successors and so on down to the present. We bishops are the inheritors of that authority. Matthew 10 really means that if you want honour Jesus, you must obey us.”
Not everybody agreed. It was not hard to observe the lifestyle of the ecclesiastical magnates, and there were many who doubted that honouring Jesus should have to mean giving such inscrutable power to wealthy, army-toting, tax-raising, Gospel-ignorant overlords. Many throughout the continent of Europe were taking Joachim di Fiore’s words to heart by taking the Gospel into their own hands and finding ways of applying it in their own lives.
Francis, however, was not a total rebel and had a naïve faith in the integrity of the Pope of that time. Nevertheless, he too strongly defended the right to self-start under the Lordship of the Christ of the Gospels. Thus when Francesco later travelled to Rome to seek the Pope’s blessing, what he wanted was not permission to follow Jesus’ command, but to be let alone so that he could continue to do what he was already doing. The dispensation he obtained from Rome was simply a licence to carry on existing without suffering the constant molestation of neighbouring clergy, believing that by hindering Francesco’s brethren they were doing the church’s bidding.
Francis was 27 when he started up his first household. His recruits were taken from among the wealthy and most promising young men of Assisi, all of whom renounced wealth and inheritance in order to live as beggars with Francis. A 19-year old girl heard Francis preach and felt a strong call to live as Francis. After some persuasion by the brothers, Francis met Clare and immediately recognised her as God’s apostle for the sister-movement. Her recruits were taken from nobility and royalty with sometimes more than one joining from a family. They lived together in group houses - the men in men’s households, the women in women’s households, begging for a living in the spirit of Matthew 10. This policy earned them the title of “mendicants” (which simply means “beggar”) along with the contempt of many who saw it as leeching. Their motivation, however, was not laziness, but to be freed up to bring to the lost of their generation what Jesus’ apostles had brought to theirs. The Franciscans and Poor Clares saw themselves as inheritors of the Joel 2 prophecy and fulfillers of di Fiore’s famous utterance.
There was another great leader of that era who also laid claim to that inheritance. Dominic Guzman was a brilliant 37-year old Roman Catholic evangelist who had been tasked with reversing a massive decline of church-attendance in Toulouse in France. With the turn of the 1200s there had been an enormous shift of people exiting the parish churches and forming new self-started gospel-based communities. Naturally without the benefit of church-controlled education they didn’t always get their theology quite right. Rome’s concern was simply to win Toulouse back from the heretics.
Dominic quickly saw that there was no way a wealthy, powerful parish-based ministry could compete for credibility with these new nobodies whose motivation was so transparently gospel-based and who proved it by working for nothing and living poor, in community. He therefore concluded that his own network of communities must learn to live the apostolic life as authentically as the “heretics.”
Dominic’s recruits copied the “heretics’” poverty, their preaching outside of church, their way of praying in the vernacular and their rejection of the conventional patterns of worship – which Dominic saw as corporate displacement activity in the face of a disciple-making commission from Christ. Dominic’s households were places of prayer and study. Their chief spiritual exercise, however, was the preaching of the gospel and it was to do that, rather than to meet their own needs, that Dominic’s recruits joined him.
However, the unfolding of Dominic’s version of Joel 2 life stands as a warning to those not quite ready to pay what it sometimes costs, for his attempt to combine the radical apostolic life with strict submission to the authorities of the mainstream church quickly undermined the integrity of his movement. In fact within a generation Dominican brothers were being used by the mainstream to eradicate “heretics” not simply by means of theology, but through threats and violence.
Dominic and Frances once met in Rome and the former suggested to Francesco a uniting of their two networks. Francis tactfully declined. History has vindicated Francis’ quiet decision. His movement has done rather better at keeping the apostolic anointing and resisting the temptation to re-assimilate to the mainstream and there are many Franciscan houses which survive to this day in a form not too far from the original vision.
Together the Franciscans and Dominicans were known as the Mendicant Orders and they took the western world by storm. The fact that from a world population that was perhaps one sixth of the current figures, Francis, Clare and Dominic were able to pledge up literally thousands of members for their movements gives a hint of the massive disaffection that young people were feeling towards the mainstream church at that time. It’s even more startling when you remember that there were a great many other networks and households at that time whose leaders suffered excommunication and violence at the hands of the church’s armies, and whose names history has not recalled. Even these many centuries later it is clear that God was with them powerfully, restoring the joy and simplicity of the Gospel to his church, shaming the fruitlessness of the conventional church, and bringing salvation to the lost of their generation.
Today, we may not suffer the kind of nominal Christianity that so disengaged genuine believers from the mainstream churches of the 1200s, but it is hard to miss the stirrings of something similarly seismic in the church our own day. Methodism in the 18th century, Salvationism in the 19th century and Pentecostalism in the 20th century, respectively the great harvesting movements of their age; none of them were initiated and fuelled by the leaders of the existing churches and none of them were staffed by people who felt the mainstream was functioning just fine. All of them were set in motion by people willing to self-start and not wait around for some ecclesiastical big cheese to give them the go ahead. How many church-planters have let themselves be held back for years because they waited for the institution to permit them to break out of the conventions and do something new?
I believe if we want God sovereignly to act as he did in the 1200s and then we need to act with the same confidence and self-starting autonomy that the mendicants had. You should feel free, brothers and sisters, because after all no-one has a God-given authority for church-planting – not even the church institutional. Why not? Because such a commission does not exist in the Bible! Christ’s commission is to make disciples, baptising them and teaching them. That commission belongs to all of us doesn’t it? We do not need any man’s permission to obey the words of Jesus do we? Making disciples is the commission. Church is the result.
In the years since I discovered this pivotal moment in church history I have learned that to self-start in this way has certain economic implications for the christian worker who so acts. But God is such a rich provider that nine centuries on, the mendicants are still with us. I believe that one of the keys to dealing with those “implications” lies in the brotherhood and sisterhood of community. It is so exciting hearing of Bessie’s ongoing encounters with like-minded groups and communities the length and breadth of our country – all with amazing stories charting their pilgrimage into new expressions of church. Without going into the details of my own story, let me just say that I have seen finances and beginnings modestly multiply as I have learned to shift from a hesitant seeking of permission-givers to a more confident finding of brothers and sisters in the vision. I can vouch that just as Psalm 133 says, that’s the environment where God’s radical blessing finds a home.