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Books / Videos

House Church

House Church: Embracing Authentic Community by Vanessa Hensel. I really enjoyed reading this short and sweet (like the cover photo) book. Below is an excerpt from this book.

Over time, I realized that my perspective had been not just slightly, but majorly misaligned. My concerns were centered on myself, my perceived failures, and worries, when, in reality, they were inconsequential. In a thriving house church community, Jesus should be the focus. He is the reason we come together, and the logistics and execution are left in His capable hands. Since this revelation, hosting has become a joyful and adventurous endeavor, significantly liberating my walk with Jesus. Whenever I find myself magnifying trivial concerns into insurmountable obstacles, the Holy Spirit promptly reminds me of that transformational week, and His peace reestablishes itself in my heart. His continual presence is a paramount blessing and an absolute necessity.

As mentioned earlier, the weekly gathering isn’t the main objective of the house church community. It serves as a summary or a catch-up session encapsulating the events and interactions of the week. The communal life should permeate all facets of our lives beyond the weekly gathering. Every possible activity that can involve other community members should be an opportunity for engagement. Whether it’s a coffee shop visit during lunch break, taking kids to the dentist, retail therapy, or selecting plants for your garden, these mundane tasks can become communal endeavors. Similarly, shared interests and hobbies present excellent opportunities for connection.

We need to dismantle the American ideal of independence and self-reliance and foster interdependence within our communities. Our daily mindset should be reoriented to see every situation as a potential opportunity to spend time with our community, working in unity as much as possible. There is no task too big, small, mundane, or challenging that can’t be shared with the family. A collective effort makes tasks lighter, struggles less burdensome. We must let go of the notion that we can handle everything independently, even if it’s possible, because it contradicts God’s plan for us. The worldly view encourages self-reliance and individual resilience, but God calls us to rely on each other and live in community.

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Books / Videos

Gospel Houses

Here is an excerpt from Gospel Houses written by Art Thomas. The book is a great resource for creating and sustaining House Church. It is packed with practical and real life scenarios of doing life together that will help your House Church grow and become effective. After reading this I found myself refreshed and fired up to go out and make disciples.

A shepherd’s primary responsibility is not to feed the sheep or make them healthy. A shepherd’s primary responsibility is to make sure the sheep are alive. Yes, this involves feeding them, caring for them, and monitoring their health; but these are all activities we do with living sheep. Otherwise, we find ourselves rolling carcasses from one pasture to the next, force-feeding and grooming them in hopes that something will change for the better.

The gospel is God’s power for salvation. It’s the mechanism that makes dead things live. And it’s the one meal that provides eternal life for sheep.

A moment ago, I said that the main problem isn’t the shepherd. But this doesn’t completely absolve shepherds of all responsibility. Yes, the main problem is dead sheep, but shepherds have been entrusted with a life-giving message that must be lived, proclaimed, and applied so that the sheep can live and thrive. When shepherds focus first on feeding and not on resurrecting, the work is hard, and messes ensue. Shepherds must make the gospel the priority in ministry to the sheep. As mentioned in chapter 13, it’s the solution to every problem. All other teaching or advice build on a gospel foundation so the Holy Spirit can express Jesus’s life through each person.

Far too many pastors are tempted to shepherd the old man. They give advice that even a person dead in their sin could follow. They try to manage people’s behavior. And when that behavior can’t be managed, they find ways to cater to unsanctified personalities.

Living sheep are harder to control but far easier to lead and serve. And that’s great because our mission was never to control the sheep anyway. Healthy, living, thriving sheep often take care of themselves. They eat on their own. They multiply without the shepherd forcing the issue. And they raise up the young with natural instincts and minimal help from the shepherd.

Jesus doesn’t expect you to shovel dead sheep from one pasture to the next. That’s not Christian leadership. He expects you to shepherd living sheep–people who have been made alive by the Spirit through the power found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Books / Videos

When the Church Was a Family

What does it really mean to be adopted into the family of Christ? Are we truly brothers and sisters in Christ? How far have we drifted from God’s original intent of His church being a family? Below is an excerpt from the book above.

Around AD 260, a devastating plague afflicted the great city of Alexandria. People were dying right and left, and the church family suffered some devastating losses. The response of the local church to the plague constitutes one of the most powerful examples of Christian brotherhood in the annals of church history.

Here is a section of a letter written by Dionysis, the overseer of the Christian community in the city:

“The most, at all events, of our brethren in their exceeding love and affection for the brotherhood were unsparing of themselves and clave to one another, visiting the sick without a thought as to the danger, assiduously ministering to them, tending them in Christ, and so most gladly departed this life along with them; being infected with the disease from others, drawing upon themselves the sickness from their neighbors, and willingly taking over their pains…In this manner the best at any rate of our brethren departed this life, certain presbyters and deacons and some of the laity…So, too, the bodies of the saints they would take up in their open hands to their bosom, closing their eyes and shutting their mouths, carrying them on their shoulders and laying them out; they would cling to them, embrace them, bathe and adorn them with their burial clothes, and after a little while receive the same services themselves, for those that were left behind were ever following those that went before. But the conduct of the heathen was the exact opposite. Even those who were in the first stages of the disease they thrust away, and fled from their dearest. They would even cast them in the road half-dead, and treat the unburied corpses as vile refuse.”

Dionysius began his description with the use of family words: “brethren,” “the brotherhood.” He closed with a pointed contrast, comparing the behavior of his Alexandrian Christians with behavior among the natural families of pagans in the surrounding community (they “fled from their dearest”).

Dionysius clearly viewed his church community as a well-functioning Mediterranean kinship group, and he was proud that they were living up to their family ideals, even at the cost of their very lives. As Tertullian had said some years earlier:

“The practice of such a special love brands us in the eye of some. “See,” they say, “how they love one another and how ready they are to die for each other.”

Tertullian, Dionysius, and the Alexandrian Christians were only following in the footsteps of their Master: “This is how we have come to know love: He laid down His life for us. We should also lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16).

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Books / Videos

Is This Book For You?

I usually wait until I finish reading a book before I add it to my Resources page, write a commentary and then, if something really touches me, create a blog post about it. I had only finished reading the introduction of the book When the Church Was a Family by Joseph H. Hellerman when I came across a truly honest and inspirational few paragraphs which I want to share.

Is this book for you? The author states that his book is for the Traditional Church Leaders and what he defines as the Emerging Church Visionaries (House Church included). The paragraphs below are addressed to the Traditional Church Leaders.

A good portion of those who serve the institutional church sorely recognize the need for renewal and reform in the way we do ministry. Our programs are tired, our services have often become repetitive and nonengaging, and – most notably – we increasingly struggle to keep people connected with one another in ongoing networks of mutual support and accountability.

We tried for a season to play the consumer game by appealing to our people’s felt needs through programs such as “Three Keys to a Healthy Marriage” and “How to Find Success at Work.” You have surely heard the sermons, and you may very well have preached them yourself. The spiritual bankruptcy of consumer Christianity has become quite clear in retrospect. Indeed, it has completely backfired where the cultivation of community is concerned. The “let us meet your needs” approach to marketing the church, which became so popular among the baby boomers in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has only served further to socialize our people to “prefer a variety of church experiences, rather than getting the most out of all that a single church has to offer.” This hardly encourages lasting Christian community, so we continue to long for genuine renewal.

I trust that those of you who are attempting to revitalize an existing congregation’s values and structures will find this book a promising vision for church as God intended it. But I must caution you in advance to prepare yourself for an acute paradigm shift. A return to the community orientation of early Christianity requires much more than a slight course correction in our weekly programming or the addition of another line item to the church budget.

Contextualizing New Testament social values in our congregation requires us to significantly revise the way that we conceive of church. And there will inevitably be a cost to pay as leaders. For as is generally the case during seasons of renewal, those of us who have the most invested in “church as it is” will inevitably be called upon to sacrifice more than the others in order to liberate our people to experience “church as it was” during the New Testament era.

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Biblical Church

Great Quotes

Charles Spurgeon

Does God need a house? He who made the heavens and the earth, does he dwell in temples made with hands? What crass ignorance this is! No house beneath the sky is more holy than the place where a Christian lives, and eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and praises the Lord in all that he does, and there is no worship more heavenly than that which is presented by holy families, devoted to the fear of the Lord.

Charles Spurgeon

As the church started in the home, it is going to come back to the home.

J. Vernon McGee

The church is never a place, but always a people; never a fold but always a flock; never a sacred building but always a believing assembly. The church is you who pray, not where you pray. A structure of brick or marble can no more be the church than your clothes of serge or satin can be you. There is in this world…no sanctuary of man but the soul.

John Havlick, Southern Baptist pastor

The expression ‘in church’ (en ekklesia)…refers to an assembly of believers. There is no suggestion of a special building. Indeed, the idea of a church as representing a building is totally alien to the NT.

Donald Guthrie

Even the meetings of the ‘whole church’ were small enough for a relatively intimate relationship to develop between the members.

Robert Banks, Fuller seminary professor speaking about the early church.

The early church was able to defy the decadent values of Roman civilization precisely because it experienced the reality of Christian fellowship in a mighty way… Christian fellowship meant unconditional availability to and unlimited liability for the other sisters and brothers – emotionally, financially and spiritually. When one member suffered, they all suffered. When one rejoiced, they all rejoiced. When a person or church experienced economic trouble, the others shared without reservation. And when a brother or sister fell into sin, the others gently restored the straying person. The sisters and brothers were available to each other, liable for each other and accountable to each other. The early church, of course, did not always fully live out the New Testament version of the body of Christ. There were tragic lapses. But the network of tiny house churches scattered throughout the Roman Empire did experience their oneness to Christ so vividly that they were able to defy and eventually conquer a powerful, pagan civilization. The overwhelming majority of churches today, however, do not provide the context in which brothers and sisters can encourage, admonish and disciple each other. We desperately need new settings and structures for watching over one another in love.

Ronald Sider, seminary professor

For two or three centuries, Christians met in private houses…There seems little doubt that these informal gatherings of small groups of believers had great influence in preserving the simplicity and purity of early Christianity.

W.H. Griffith Thomas, co-founder of the Dallas Theological Seminary

For the first two centuries, the church met in small groups in the homes of its members, apart from special gatherings in public lecture halls or market places, where people could come together in much larger numbers. Significantly, these two centuries mark the most powerful and vigorous advance of the church, which perhaps has never been equaled.

David Watson, Anglican priest and evangelist

Since in the first and second centuries church buildings in the sense in which we think of them today were not yet in existence, families would hold services in their own homes.

William Hendricksen, Reformed scholar

The New Testament Church began as a small group house church, and it remained so until the middle or end of the third century. There is no evidence of larger places of meeting before 300. There is no literary evidence nor archaeological indication that any such home was converted into an extant church building. Nor is there any extant church that certainly was built prior to Constantine.

Graydon Snyder, Chicago Theological Seminary

Those…desirous of being Christians in earnest…should…assemble by themselves in some house…those whose conduct was not such as befits Christians could be recognized, reproved…or excommunicated… Here we could have baptism and the sacrament…and direct everything towards the Word and prayer and love…

Martin Luther

It strikes me that there would be a great deal of good done if persons who have large rooms in their houses would endeavor to get together little congregations… Where there is a Church in the house, every member strives to increase the other’s comfort, all seek to promote each other’s holiness, each one endeavors to discharge his duty according to the position in which he placed in that church.

Charles Spurgeon
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Biblical Church

Martha, Martha, Martha

Christ In The Home of Mary and Martha by Johannes Vermeer

 Now it happened as they went that He entered a certain village; and a certain woman named Martha welcomed Him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who also sat at Jesus’ feet and heard His word. But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Therefore tell her to help me.”

And Jesus answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Luke 10:38-42

If you’ve been a Christ follower for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard this portion of scripture expounded on and preached on. I’m not here to do that. I find it fascinating that an interaction in a home between two sisters and Jesus has been forever immortalized in scripture.

Mary was at Jesus’ feet hearing “His word”. Luke never mentions what Jesus was talking about but instead records the words of a disgruntled woman accusing Jesus of not caring about her plight. Surprisingly, Martha never interacts with Mary directly, instead she wants Jesus to correct Mary’s behavior. There is no indication if the situation ever comes to any resolution. Did Mary, after hearing the discussion, get up and help? Did Martha put away her things, stop working and listen? I guess we will never know.

Jesus was in a home, doing life with people. If you’re doing House Church you know people have all sorts of theology and beliefs and sometimes those beliefs must be lovingly challenged. What better environment to discuss disagreements or misunderstandings than among a group of spiritual family members.

If scripture was still being written today maybe some of your House Church conversations and disagreements would be immortalized too.

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Biblical Church

Bigger is Better?

NPR recently posted an article entitled “Megachurches are getting even bigger as churches close across the country.” The article highlights Liquid Church located in Parsippany, N.J. which is growing at a rapid pace.

For the last several years, Liquid Church has been one of the fastest-growing churches in the nation, and a big part of its success has come through assimilating smaller, more traditional congregations. Four of its seven campuses – all in New Jersey – have come through these mergers.

NPR article by Scott Neuman

An unfortunate truth mentioned in the article is that the average Christian congregation has about 65 members and a third of them are over 65 years old. With smaller and declining congregation, these churches are ripe to become satellites for the megachurches of the world.

If you facilitate House Church, you sometimes fight against the mindset that bigger is better. Early on, doing House Church, I had a friend that was attending our group and also attending a traditional church. During one of our meetings he began to complain about the traditional church he was attending. He had written a song and wanted to perform it at his church but the music director said no. My friend was very upset at the rejection he received. He was on the worship team and had been attending for years, but the answer was still no.

Naturally, I suggested that he share his worship song with us. He never did. The mindset that there is more worth performing in front of a large gathering than in front of 8 or 9 people is troubling. The lines between performance and ministry get blurred. Does Jesus loves us more if we minister or perform in front of large crowds? Are large crowds a sign of success and health?

In John 6, Jesus talks about eating His body and drinking His blood. This didn’t go over well with many of His disciples.

From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more. Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?” But Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

John 6:66-69

It’s fascinating that Jesus decided to do life with a small group of people; take some time and meditate on that. Why did He chose to do this? What was His motivation? Perhaps there is some merit in His example. For me, I’m content with doing life with a small group of people; maybe you too should give it a try.

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Biblical Church

The Missing Link

The excerpt below is from John Fenn’s book Return of the First Church, Chapter 8 entitled “The Missing Link”. In this chapter John addresses the topic of accountability. This first part of Chapter 8 is subtitled “Character Building Forged in the Midst of Relationships”.

Righteousness in Christ is designed to be worked out in the midst of relationships. It is within this context and understanding the New Testament was written but is outside the thinking of most in the traditional church. Again, the reason for this is because the pyramid does not foster relationships. It’s all about the structure and program and person at the top. But withing the context of the New Testament interpersonal and inter-generational relationships among family and friends in someone’s living room and workplace were the norm, thus strong character was developed within these relationships.

Being a teacher, I like to refer to many scriptures when I am teaching. I am known for telling people to turn to a passage, then backing them up to the previous couple of versus ‘to set the context’.

If you’ve ever been quoted by a newspaper or other publication, you probably know what it is to have your words taken out of context, and the anger and frustration you’ve felt as you try to explain yourself. (Usually only digging yourself in deeper)

If you’ve ever been in an argument and someone says you said something, but you know it’s been twisted because it was taken our of context, you know how important context is.

The whole of the New Testament was written within the context of strong interpersonal relationships developed through the church (the people) that met in homes. This was their culture. Therefore, it is only within this context that we can fully understand the meaning of the New Testament.

Just like someone quoted out of context, what they said was true, but the context in which it was spoken is the only way to gain a full understanding of what was truly meant in the quote. If we today, try to read what the scripture says out of the context of the way it was intended, we introduce error into our understanding.

Therefore, when we try to understand the New Testament through the eyes of a pyramid style church, we are seeing things askew because the context of the NT was not a pyramid, but rather a flat V or square building, with leadership at the bottom, within the culture of close relationships meeting in homes.

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Books / Videos

Relational Revolution

If you grew up in a healthy family environment you should consider yourself blessed. Not many of us grew up in a House of Peace (Luke 10). Many adults still shows signs of dysfunction. So how do we love and function as a community as we gather together to do House Church?

A new book by John C. White, Toni M. Daniels and Dr. Kent Smith addresses this and other topics in Relational Revolution. I highly recommend purchasing a copy. Below is an short excerpt from a chapter called “Maturing Spiritual Parents”.

Unfortunately, many of us did not have the privilege of healthy family bonds that help us grow into families of peace. In communities of practice, we spiritual moms and dads (at the adult, parenting and eldering stages of maturity) train each other in the skills we missed growing up. As we mature emotionally, we establish houses of peace where God’s good news overflows in us and through us. We are able to love the younger and weaker in our midst and compassionately accompany them wherever they are in their stage of development.

God is in the business of re-parenting us, inviting us into a life-giving family (the Trinity) and connecting us with brothers and sisters with whom we can train. We do not have to have all the answers; we do not do all the work. Christ commands us to “call on the Lord of the harvest to send out more workers.” It is our privilege to find each other, connect together, and train one another to continue to be “houses of peace” spiritual parents for those in need, not only in our own homes but in our extended families and beloved communities.

Becoming and training emotionally mature spiritual moms and dads is rarely ever a working concept in most current church systems. Intellectual maturity, gifting maturity, social maturity might be expected from leaders, however, none of these maturities actually ensure that we love one another. And sadly, spiritual maturity is often defined by how well we know Biblical principles, not how closely we sense God with us.

If we do not have emotional maturity then it will be increasingly hard to love those around us, especially those who disagree with us.

For more resources click here.

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Biblical Church

Are You a Geode?

My friend Vince and I recently traveled to the Desert Gardens Annual International Rock, Gem and Mineral Show in Quartzite, AZ. One of my purchases was the geode pictured above. I love looking inside and seeing the beauty of the crystals, each one so unique. I found the following information about geodes online.

Geodes are formed when there are pockets of air within rocks. This often happens after volcanic eruptions when lava cools around air bubbles. These pockets leave space for groundwater to seep in. But the water itself doesn’t produce geodes–it brings along minerals which stay in the rock even after the water evaporates.

On the outside, geodes just look like plain balls of rock. It’s only after an experienced rockhound spots one and cuts or cracks it open that it’s true inner beauty can be displayed. Some are quite fantastic!

Most of my life I have been involved with media. I was good at it. My talent opened doors for me in church and ministry life but I always felt like I had a deeper purpose that I couldn’t quite find. I had something special inside but there were no spiritual rockhounds to help crack me open.

Do you feel like this sometimes? Are you an usher or greeter? Do you help clean the sanctuary, run the media booth, teach Sunday school? There are countless jobs to do in a conventional church but has anyone seen inside of you? Has anyone wanted to crack you open to reveal your true calling and the beauty Christ has formed in you?

My wife and I had the pleasure of going out to dinner with a great couple. I love meeting new people. I love hearing their testimony and hearing how God has been faithful in their lives. They’ve recently relocated to Phoenix and they’re thinking about getting involved in a House Church.

No matter where they go or what they decide to do, I hope we can keep in contact. I love to see what’s inside when God cracks people open!