Recently, my wife and I felt a calling from
God to leave the local church we had helped to plant. The dream God had given
us was to start a new sort of a church, one where everyone took following Jesus
seriously, where the practice of compassion to others was expressed in the
giving of 100% of the offering to the poor and the needy. Our conviction was
that everyone who called themselves a follower of Jesus was, by default, a
missionary to their culture. Because we wanted to be reminded of this, we
called our new church, “The Mission”.
Our challenge has been to inspire this
sort of activity within our own weekly house church gathering. While we’ve
called ourselves, “The Mission,” not everyone has come to the place where they
have their calling figured out completely. This is where discipleship comes in.
Our goal is to lovingly assist everyone in our house church to discover their
gifts, their talents, and their mission field.
Part of what inspired us to start a
house church was the idea that we, as followers of Jesus, should imagine the
Church less in terms of where we meet, or the building we gather in, and more
in terms of who we are and what we do. Our goal is to learn what it means to
“be the church” and not to just “attend a church”. Our assumption is that
“being the church” is what Jesus had in mind for us in the first place. Jesus
did not suffer and die to commission a Body of Believers whose only goal and
aim was to meet once or twice a week and have a little meeting.
He intended that we would be His
full-time ambassadors to the world, living His teachings with our entire life,
every single day.
The Christian life isn’t lived on
Sunday morning or Wednesday night. That might be when we meet and sing songs
together, but that’s not where the Christian life is actually realized.
Fellowship is great. Corporate worship
is great. Sermons are great. But when we live for God, I believe we engage in
the best form of worship possible. (See Romans 12).
For over a decade my wife and I have
lead Children’s Ministry in the local church, and many of those children we
taught came to faith in Christ as a result. We are thrilled for that experience
and we applaud all of those who serve in this way. However, we recently began
to feel a tugging in our hearts for those children who played with our sons
every weekend in our neighborhood and yet did not know Christ. So, in response
we decided to host a Sunday School program in our living room on Sunday
mornings for all those children who weren’t going to church anywhere else.Our first step was to start a
Sunday Morning “Kids Club” in our new neighborhood as part of our family
calling to be missionaries to our neighbors and share Christ with our friends.
Four elementary-aged children came and joined our two sons to spend five weeks
studying the life of Jesus. We sang songs, played games, and had fun together
learning more about how Jesus loves us and can change our lives. Next our plan
was to get to know the parents of these children by hosting a series of monthly
Barbecue’s in the front yard and inviting the families to come and join us. Our
first such event was a community breakfast on our driveway. We passed out
flyers to every family in our cul-de-sac and provided pancakes, eggs, bacon and
juice for everyone who showed up. It was a rousing success. Everyone who came
thanked us over and over again for doing this. Neighbors who had never met
shared smiles and
exchanged handshakes on our front
lawn. Before the breakfast was over people were asking us when we could get
together to do this again. Eventually we plan to invite each family over
for dinner and, one by one, to get to
know them and to practice the art of conversation with them.
One day, we plan to invite them to
join us all on Sunday Morning for our regular House Church gatherings. This is
the way my wife and I have felt called to express our calling as missionaries
in our neighborhood. Your talents are probably different than ours. Your area
of ministry is probably a little different too. But your calling to “Go” is
exactly the same.
For years I lived my life in a box. I
did my Christian stuff on Sunday’s and my work stuff on the weekdays, and my
family and friend’s stuff on Saturday’s. I had totally compartmentalized my
life. I had convinced myself that this was the only way to live, but eventually
I began to realize that this was not the way that God intended for me to live
my life. Mainly because it meant that my “Christian stuff” really never spilled
over into my work life, or my recreational life.
My life as a follower of Jesus was
safely isolated from the rest of my life, where I actually lived, and over time
I realized that what God wanted for me to break out of that box. I had to leave
my
compartmentalized life behind. The
first thing I realized was that, when I lived that way, it was me who was in
the box, not God. God was never inside a box, but I had tried to keep Him
there. My life was constricted, and
made small, because of my desire to keep things separated. God wanted me to
live my life outside of the boundaries I had created. I can still remember the
first time I heard God speak to me about the idea of living my life wide open.
I realized that all of Creation is His and that my whole life is meant to be
lived with Him in relationship. I had to admit that the world I was born into,
the world I lived in and worked in and played in, was the only real world.
There was no other world but this one, in spite of the illusion that there was
some sanitized, non-secular version of the world alongside of this one.
My calling was to operate in the real
world, the actual world, and to forsake the world of illusion where we can buy
our Christian milk from a sanctified cow. I stopped asking people if they were
freshening their breath with “secular” mints or the new, holy “Testamints” that
I’d bought at the local Christian bookstore.
I finally started to wake up to the
fact that mints were mints and labels were irrelevant. “All authority in heaven
and on Earth has been given unto me, therefore go and make disciples of all
nations, baptizing them in the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey
everything I have commanded you. Surely I am with you always, even unto the
very end of the age.” - Jesus (Matthew 28:18)
It’s in the going that we experience
life with Christ. It’s not so much in the sitting or the attending that we
encounter Jesus, or become empowered by the Holy Spirit. We have to be in
motion, we have to “go”, in order to be the Church that God has called us to
be. As I’ve looked through the Scriptures I don’t often notice that the power
of God falls on people when they’re in the meeting. Instead, it is when the
disciples are in the marketplace, or walking along the way, that the Spirit of
God falls on His people in power.
When God pours out His Spirit on us,
it’s for a purpose. It’s not for our personal enjoyment. God fills us up in
order to send us out. The gifts we’re given are for others, and they’re meant
to be spent on others and given away for the benefit of others. I believe this
is why sometimes when a church has grown old, or when Christians have grown
tired, we see less and less of God’s power flowing through the people. It’s
because we’ve started to build reservoirs to hold the blessings, rather than to
trust God to give us more if we continually give His gifts
away to others. The reason God doesn’t
give us more is often because we’ve started to hoard what He gave us to share with others. Much like manna, which
would rot if the Israelites took more than they needed for a single day, the
gifts of God are for sharing, not for storing up. God wants us to trust that if
we give away the blessings, He will supply us with more. In order to
demonstrate that we trust Him, we must
let go of our gifts, our talent, our
time, and even our money, and share freely with those who are in need. God will
make sure we have enough when we need it. Our job, as ambassadors of Christ, is
to develop a discipline of letting go and giving away the blessings God gives
to us so that we can be continually refreshed and blessed with the ongoing
ministry of Jesus.
Whether or not you decide to start a
house church is beside the point. The issue of who we are as Christians is
still just as important, if not more important, than what we say we believe in
our heads. Our message, the Gospel, is only relevant if our lives demonstrate
its power. Following Christ, from the very beginning, was a practice. It was
intended as a way of life, not simply a set of beliefs. The truth is that we
must begin to live out the power of the Gospel in our everyday lives, no matter
what. We must begin today.
