Secret Church by Maurice Smith is sobering, well written and important. Is the Church ready to face the darkness when the moral and spiritual lights go out? How does the Church prepare itself? I recommend this book and I look forward to reading other works by Maurice. The excerpt below is about getting started. Check out his website risingrivermedia.org.
“And day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:46-47).
When the Church was born in the Book of Acts, beginning at Pentecost, those early disciples had no idea how to “do” Church. Like you, they had NEVER “done” Secret Church, or any other kind of Church gathering. But by Acts Chapter 7, after a span of only a few weeks, those early disciples had recognized gifted leaders, assigned responsibilities according to gifts, callings and needs and organized thousands of new converts into a network of organic house churches, spread out all over Jerusalem. These “Secret Churches” met regularly from house-to-house, shared meals together and shared resources to help those in need (read the first seven chapters of Acts to get the whole picture). What is truly amazing, by modern “church growth” standards, is that they did it all without a budget, a building, a professionally trained staff, any “how to” manuals, any church planting or church growth workshops, and no worship team. And they did it all while enduring persecution, first from institutional Judaism and later from Rome itself. It was Simple Church. It was Organic Church. It was Secret Church. It later became an Underground Church. But most importantly, it was Effective Church, effective for the times in which they lived. How effective? So effective that they were accused of turning the Mediterranean world upside down (see Acts 17:6).
There’s an important point here. Secret Church isn’t about a program. Secret Church is a lifestyle; a lifestyle of being a disciple of the Kingdom, lived out in community with other disciples of the Kingdom. That was true of Secret Church in the 1st Century, and it is true of Secret Church today. It is somewhat ironic that as our civilization collapses and devolves into that same moral and spiritual paganism which characterized ancient Rome, God is calling His Church back to being the counter-cultural witness of 1st Century Secret Church. Your journey into Secret Church truly begins when you and I embrace the biblical truth that we don’t “go” to Church. We “are” the Church, a small manifestation of the Kingdom of God where ever we happen to be, starting in our homes.
American Christians seem to have a built-in “default” button. Press it and the average American Christian will show up at a building on Sunday morning at 11 AM looking for a bulletin and a program, ready to sit for an hour-or-so while “others” (paid professional staff) “do” Church. That isn’t church, not in the biblical sense. As A.W. Tozer described it a generation ago, and little has changed since.
“When we compare our present carefully programmed meetings with the New Testament we are reminded of the remark of a famous literary critic after he had read Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey: ‘It is a beautiful poem, but it is not Homer.’ So the fast-paced, highly spiced, entertaining service of today may be a beautiful example of masterful programming – but it is not a Christian service. The two are leagues apart in almost every essential. About the only thing they have in common is the presence of a number of persons in one room. There the similarity ends and glaring dissimilarities begin.”
Secret Church doesn’t have a default button. If it did, when pushed, the result would be a potluck in someone’s home, worship together, ministry to each other based upon individual spiritual gifts and needs, and maybe even a discipleship study. The focus would be on building community, worshiping together, making disciples and finding ways to sow the seed of the Kingdom by serving those in need. Making the mental transition to Secret Church will take both time and intentional effort. And we may quickly discover that we have less time than we think. The urgency to move forward may well be determined by events which are beyond our control.
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