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.
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