New Blogsite

After I started blogging one of our good friends looked at my site and thought it needed some work.  He went about creating a new site for me to blog on.  This is the new site.  If you I will no longer be posting on my old site so if you were following the conversation, it has moved.  Thanks and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Jared

House Church books

                A couple people have asked me what books have really guided me on the journey that Lara and I have been on for the past year.  It is impossible to name them all because I have read more this year than any year in the past.  God has used many different authors to reveal truth to Lara and I.  Countless times I have read something and thought to myself that I wished I had written it or I read something and what it said resonated in my heart.

                Organic church by Neil Cole; This is a new classic.  It is all about how the church is supposed to be small, less structured and led more by the Spirit and the Bible than by rules and systems.  He rightly points out that we have made it far too difficult for churches to reproduce and he seeks to show us ways to correct that.  Neil is not afraid, not afraid of churches where people are able to lead out of their brokenness, churches where people work through difficult theology together.  He holds deeply to the idea that experience is the best teacher.   Neil is by far the best writer on this topic from a North American perspective if you are ever considering doing a house church here in the United States this is a must read book. 

                Church Planting Movements by David Garrison; This is a book that looks at numerous church planting movements (cpm) around the world and seeks to learn lessons from them.  A cpm is where a large group of people begin to embrace Jesus in a rather short amount of time.  This book more than any other gives some hard and fast rules while at the same time showing just have fast and powerfully the gospel can spread in places that we would not expect it too.  He also gives a list of warnings, things that the evidence has shown have prevented church planting movements from taking place in various places.  This book is a most read, it shows the power of simplicity and causes us to think about the things we are doing and if they may be holding back a movement.

                The House Church Book by Wolfgang Simson; Wolfgang has done some lectures that absolutely inspire me.  His book is no different.  He is quick and to the point.  He is passionate about small reproducible gatherings of Christians.  In his opinion Christians who are stuck in their mindset are the biggest hindrances to cpms taking place.  It was through him that I developed a passion to pray that people would see visions of Jesus as a means of them coming to him.  Wolfgang believes that in small committed relationships we grow fastest and healthiest.  This book is great for learning some ideas about how your house church should look.

                There are many other books that I am sure that I should mention but am a little to lazy right now to review.  These three though are the key ones in my opinion and while I do not agree with them completely they are provocative and thought provoking and worth a read.

House Church - Week Five - Flexibility

                House church, because of its size, has a natural flexibility built into it regarding meeting times.  This past week was a great example of that.  We met on a Thursday night for the first time.  When we originally set this past week’s meeting time we knew that two of us were going to miss it because of retreats we were on.  As a group though we were still going have the rest meet on Saturday.  Well, two weeks beforehand it became obvious that four of our group, in addition to the other two, could not make it on Saturday…so we changed.  Subsequently, this meant that two others could not come.  But the decision was made that we would change. 

                Changing the day allowed the majority of the group to participate in church without staying fixed to a schedule that would have prevented four people who were involved in an outreach project from serving.  The smaller a group, the more flexible it can be.  Communication is easier and there are fewer schedules to try and coordinate.  Get-togethers are easy to change and adapt over time or within a week when the Spirit leads.  Sometimes it helps when pragmatism is needed and other times it helps when people need to respond to a genuine leading by God. 

                At Ward, it would be difficult for us to ever change the day or the times when we meet.  Hundreds of people come to each service, they plan on it, we have classes that run in conjunction with our services and local restaurants depend on us getting out at certain times.  All of this would make it very difficult for us to change the time for next week or to elongate the service.  Structure within our worship services is not a bad thing.  However, it can at times make it more difficult to respond to the prompting to the Spirit.  Of course, we do seek to plan our worship at Ward by listening to the Spirit, and I’m not saying that God is not in our services.  What I am saying is that institutional church does not have the flexibility in this area that house church has.

                Being forced into a certain meeting pattern makes it difficult to reach out to people.  Many people have jobs that have flexible hours.  Nurses, police officers and others cannot meet at the same time every week.  One week they may be able to make a service and another week they may have to miss it.  With a house church, there is a built in flexibility that allows the group to adjust with life change.

Retreat Review

             I have taken groups to FaHoLo camp for the past seven winters.  I have had more great conversations there with students than any other place besides Ward Church.  As a retreat center, it’s a place with above-average facilities, reasonable prices, a great staff, and an indoor pool and hot tub - all which make the place awesome.

            Two things really help to define how a retreat will go.  The first is facilities, and like I said, FaHoLo is great.  The next is the speaker.  This retreat, we hit it out of the park with the speaker.  We had Jason Raitz and he was amazing.  Jason had to speak 8 times; this is because we do both our middle school and our high school retreats on the same weekend, with the same speaker (just at different times).  Jason was able to communicate in such a way that all students, from high school seniors to sixth graders, were challenged to find their identity in Christ.   He was fun, biblical and someone that helped set our small groups up for success.

            One of the greatest things that can happen in student ministries is when the students get up and thank their leaders.  On Saturday night at winter retreat, we always have a time for our seniors to share advice.  The line that continued to be shared throughout the night was that our volunteers are amazing.  It has been a dream and a goal of mine that our students would see their small group leaders as the key people in the spiritual development at Ward.  It is impossible for me to have a close relationship with every student.  But with great leaders, it happens that the student has someone in their life that loves Jesus and loves them.  Saturday night was a testimony that that was happening, and I am so thankful for the leaders we have in Epic.

            Lastly, I love retreats for the conversations.  I had a number of great conversations with students this weekend.  Retreats are times where our students connect with God, whether it is through the music (3union did a great leading worship), the talks from Jason, or their small groups.  In those moments, their hearts are open and we can share with them at a time when they are open to God doing something in their lives.  I love those moments! 

House Church Week 4 - Hosting House Church

                Hospitality is not a spiritual gift of mine.  I prefer to teach, lead or do just about anything else, but when house church is at your house that week you have to learn some hospitality.  For us, hosting house church means preparing the meal, having a dessert and making sure that there is space for three separate groups to break out for prayer and accountability.

                Ideally, members of a house church live in close proximately with each other and frequently spend time with each other.  This proximity makes it much less an event when people come over because it would happen so naturally.  We are still in our training and so we live all over metro Detroit, from Dearborn to Livonia and Farmington to Ann Arbor.  For us, that means when someone host shouse church it is a little bit of a bigger deal than it should be. 

                With that in mind, Lara and I spent a lot of time thinking through how we were going to host.  We planned two different menus and finally choose spaghetti over breakfast for dinner.  We thought about the dessert and bounced from muffins to Rice Crispy treats to finally Root Beer and Vernor floats.  Lara and I also spent a lot of time cleaning the house and organizing things so people would have plenty of space.

                House church this week had one incredible moment and numerous good ones.  The good moments included small group prayer, discussing together Philippians 2, and just generally being with each other.  These moments tend to remind me that our lives, our relationships, our goals are all meant to be built upon the Love of Christ and our relationships with him.  We are not trying to judge how house church went according to how well we thought the lesson went.

                What was incredible though was a moment that we as a group got to share with one of the kids present.  See, in a traditional church it is possible for a family to have all of their spiritual moments apart from each other.  They each go to their own rooms and have their own lessons.  Not in all churches, but in many they don’t even have to spend any time together.  In house church, kids come in and out.  During prayer a diaper needs to be changed or two kids push each other.  Kids are there when we sing or at least some of them, or they are there when we talk about seeing God.  This week, one of our kids gave us the highlight when he shared some verses that he had memorized.  We as a group cheered for him and I hope he felt loved and encouraged.  It was a moment that a Sunday school teacher would get at an institutional church, but for us we all got to celebrate a fiee year old who is just really beginning to learn about Jesus.