In Western society it’s difficult to do life together, but it does happen, it can be sustained and it can be life-changing. I pray these stories encourage you to keep meeting, keep searching and start gathering. This story is told by Leo Castillo in Silang, Philippines.
I am Leo Castillo, married to my wife Nina. I grew up in a Roman Catholic family, studied in a Catholic school and ended up taking a civil engineering degree in a state university here in the Philippines. It was in that school where I got to know Jesus personally and where I was involved in a Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC, now Cru) movement.
It was also at CCC where I was introduced to small groups and where I learned how to disciple others. My spiritual growth during that time was influenced to a large degree by my relationships with fellow believing students. We became involved in each other’s lives and many of them became my lifelong friends.
At the same time, we were encouraged to become part of a “local church” besides our involvement with the campus movement. Being a submissive young Christian I complied, choosing to join friends from CCC who went to a small church near our campus. Church life for me, however, was something I found strangely wanting. Sitting passively during worship services was something I had to endure more than relish. There has got to be something more to church and the Christian life than worship services, I thought.
When I entered the corporate world after graduation, I also became involved with a CCC ministry among working adults in the workplace. And like the ministry at campus, the CCC professional ministry had at its core the same small discipleship groups. At the same time, I had been hopping from church to church, still searching but never settling down in one.
But even before I started working, I had begun a house fellowship at a depressed area near my hometown. (This was back in the early 1980s.) I was sent to this place by my former church even though I was no longer part of the said church. This house fellowship involved two families and would constitute what people today would call a house church. After two years, this same group began to reach out to their relatives in a remote town in the province of Cavite. I had equipped them in sharing the gospel and discipling others – something we were trained to do in CCC – and they were able to subsequently start 5 house groups in that town.
Back then, I did not know any better and wrote the Assemblies of God, asking them to take over these house groups. They were somewhat taken aback by this, remarking that it was the first time they had been offered a church that others had started. One of the guys I was discipling subsequently became a pastor of the traditional church that was formed in that town composed of believers from the house groups.
After working for about 6 years, I quit my job to join Campus Crusade as a staff member. I was initially assigned to the professional ministry in Metro Manila. It was here that I met Nina and we got married in 1995. We eventually got involved in helping CCC ministries in other countries start ministries among working adults in their cities. Afterwards we got assigned to CCC’s Southeast Asia Area of Affairs. Our involvement in these ministries exposed us to various expressions of Christianity – in communist countries and countries with predominantly Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist populations. More than anything else, this exposure helped us to become more principle-centered in our approach to Christian life and ministry.
During our last 5 years with CCC our teams began talking about house churches. Christianity in many of the countries we were helping had taken an underground approach and believers there were meeting in small groups and often in houses. This would have a profound impact on us. But we had also began to look beyond the forms organic/simple/house churches have taken to realize that in effect we had been doing “church” all these years when we disciple people and meet them in small groups. Even if these groups were all outside the institutional church.
We eventually left CCC 18 years ago. We felt the Lord was calling us to focus on simple, organic churches and working with the poor in our country. One of the first house groups we started was composed of people who have been believers for several years and have been disillusioned with the institutional church. Inevitably, our meetings at home always turned into discussions on what was wrong with the traditional church. We would sometimes talk about our struggles but, somehow, we never related to each other in a deeper way. Inevitably we went our separate ways.
At the same time, Nina and I reached out to poor communities in my hometown. We started by offering scholarships to young people who wanted to go to college but were unable to afford it. We later expanded this to helping people start small businesses but this did not work out well. We concentrated on education for young people in these communities, expanding our help to providing school supplies for elementary and high school students as well as extra-curricular help for them through educational workshops and visits to museums in the city.
From these outreaches we were able to form several house churches in my hometown and in another town north of Metro Manila. Most of these were organically formed. We never required the families whose children we were helping to join these gatherings. Even though we were still following the format of our discipleship groups in CCC – such as using bible study materials and training them in evangelism – we began to see that we needed to focus more on how believers in these house gatherings related to each other.
It wasn’t always easy especially when conflict arose between some of the people in these small groups. But these believers were already a community even before we met them and the only change needed was in their hearts as they learned to trust God and to love one another. Conflict was an inevitable part of community life and were glad when we saw them handle such conflicts in a Spirit-filled way over time. We also noticed that poor people tend to relate to each other more authentically than those in the corporate world and this had a profound impact on us.
The longest time we stayed in any one group was probably 5-6 years. We would move on to another community whenever we felt we had done enough. At one point we were meeting as many as 3 small groups in the course of the week. Our biggest problem was getting them to meet on their own. There were some groups that have stopped meeting once we left, even though we tried to prepare them to meet on their own. Meetings are important as Hebrews 10:25 says but we also feel that organic church or ekklesia goes beyond meetings to the kind of relationships within the ekklesia and how they relate to people around them.
The Covid pandemic and my near-death experience due to Covid have scaled back our efforts in reaching more communities for Christ. (It was the Lord’s miracle that I survived after nearly 4 months in the hospital.) We also moved outside the city 2 years ago and had to start from scratch in our ministry. Nina is also dealing with what many people would consider a life-threatening health issue. But we continue to reach out to people in our subdivision and have started a small group here. We are learning to be much more interactive in our gatherings, how to listen to God together and to be more deeply involved in each other’s lives – the same way we have done discipleship in campus and in the workplace decades ago. Most of all we are learning how to center our community life on Jesus and faith in Him over and above all else.
Perhaps our biggest takeaway from years of “doing church” is to start with non-believers as much as we can. Believers who have grown disillusioned with the institutional church and who want to form small groups, simple, organic or house churches, still unconsciously take the institutional church culture with them. We have struggled in the past trying to wean them off from this orientation. We might meet them from time to time – which is what we’re doing more often these days with friends who have been involved in the same ministries in the past. These are times for reflection and mutual encouragement which at this point in our lives become fulfilling and fruitful times. But our focus is on reaching non-believers and forming small communities of God’s Kingdom with them. Our approach is to go to them, to enter their existing communities and create Kingdom communities from within rather than asking them to come to us.
You can contact Leo by email at engrjpleo@yahoo.com and check out his blog at https://shoestringjourneys.wordpress.com/
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