Neighborhood Fellowships
I don’t know if anyone has already developed this idea into a full fledged para-church ministry with a paid staff, solicitation campaigns, and Statements of Faith. Both books on home church that I read or am reading emphasize an apostolic beginning to a home church. That is a high hurdle of a concept for me. What if you just want to fellowship with your neighbors and break bread with each other and pray for each other and your neighborhood? What if it doesn’t matter what they do on their Sunday mornings? What if you want to have your neighbors over for the purpose of glorifying our Father, for seeking the arrival of our Father’s kingdom and the doing of His will in your neighborhood as it is in heaven, for asking for His provision together, for seeking and granting forgiveness and encouragement? But what if it is church building/denomination/affiliation independent? What if it is hospitality dependent? And Holy Spirit dependent? What if it gathered around a substantial meal that included bread broken and wine drunk in memory of His body broken and blood spilt for us? What if?
Comments
I've read both books, Houses that Change the World by Wolfgang Simpson, and Rethinking the Wineskin by Frank Viola.
I appreciate the scholarship of both of these brothers, and have met them both about 6 years ago.
Frank is in association with Gene Edwards as one of Gene's trained "apostles" or church planters. One of their main ideas is the necessity of a house church being planted by a church planter. (Of which Gene says there are only three in the world today, himself, Frank and their other associate, whose name escapes me presently.)
Problem I see with this is most of us who have come to house church are not babes in Christ. Most of us have been in the Lord 10, 20, 30 or more years.
We know how to be a beleiver, we know how to love one another, we know how to praise the Lord in song and words, how to teach, how to have discussion centered around Christ.
Most of us realized at one point that being in intimate relationship with one another is the central part of our lives in Chirst, and the central part expressed in NT teaching, and chose to leave the system of programs, to just relate to one another.
This to me is the central idea of house church. We met in homes not to be different, but to be more relaxed, more at home with each other. We seek to develop family type relationships with each other. The reason we share a common meal is because this is what families do together, they don't just sit around and have a sip of wine, and a bite of bread, no they have a meal together.
I would recommend Steve Atkerson's site to you and all reading this, http://www.ntrf.org/, his discussions and the articles posted there from other brothers are very good.
My point is, most of us should already be elders in a body of believers. Only reason we weren't is because the church we belonged to had enough pastors already, there were no job openings. Or we didn't feel "called", funny Paul doesn't meantion being "called" as a requirement for elders to Timothy or Titus.
Kent