Liberating you from bad ideas about God
The church is the people of God who follow Jesus into the world, whether they meet in a building or not. Therefore, you cannot go to church; the church goes with you.
I believe there is only one church, the universal church (not to be confused with the Universalist Church) and all believers in Jesus Christ throughout time are part of this church. We are one body, united by one Spirit. Wherever you are, there is the church.
House church practitioners often accuse the institutional church of equating the church with the buildings the church meets in. “The church isn’t a building,” they say, “The church is the people.” We are exhorted to stop going to church, and start being the church.
But it seems that house church people may be guilty of the same thing. After all, it’s right in the name: “house” church. What is a house if not a building?
I suppose this might be part of the reason so many new names are popping up to help us describe “church.” We have organic church, simple church, and missional communities, but even here, in most of the books and blogs I read about this, the emphasis always seems to be that the church is only functioning when the people gather in a certain place at a certain time, usually in a house on Sunday morning. [Read more…]
There are a lot of blogs, books, seminars, and conferences about planning successful church programs. I have read many of these books and posts, and have attended several of these seminars and conferences. Below are three things I have never heard anywhere, but which would significantly help church programs become more relational and missional.
If you are a house church, you may not think you have programs, and so this post doesn’t apply to you. But while you may not call it a “program” if there is any activity that your gathering does together for other people in the community–whether you call it community service, outreach, evangelism, mission, etc.,–this post might also help you be more focused an intentional in what you do and why.
First, all programs should include something beyond just training. I’ve written about this previously. It does not appear that Jesus or the early church ever did training just for training. Most of the training was while they were on the way to do something. It was on the job training. [Read more…]
How can a church become more missional? Can we change the programs, training seminars, and conferences so they are more effective? Can we rework and tweak them? It might be possible, but I doubt it is worth the effort.
Church programs are like Government programs. They can be reworked, but only with lots of time, energy, and money being wasted. Even then, the end result is usually worse than what we started with. Attempting to retool a program is nearly always more damaging to the church and the people in the program than just flat-out cancelling the program. [Read more…]
Want to know what kind of church facilities people prefer most? Back in 2008, Dave Ferguson posted the results of a study done by the Cornerstone Knowledge Network. Here is what he reported:
Note: The answers do not equal 100% because I only listed the top answers and the survey allowed the respondents to give multiple answers.
I think that Dave Ferguson was trying to provide guidance on what kind of church buildings we should construct, but I think that if we begin with the question, “Should we construct a building?” rather than the question “What kind of building should we construct?” the survey results indicate that church buildings might only get in the way of people connecting with God and each other.
What do you think?
