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.