1. On House Church – Part One – Intro
2. On House Church – Part Two – The Meeting
3. On House Church – Part Three – The Monies
4. On House Church – Part Four – The Leadership

Today we’re going to talk about the house church/simple church model of “doing church.” The purpose of this post and/or series of posts is not to explain why other models are bad, but why house church is good.

But first, a short history lesson.

About three-ish years ago, our great friends the d10s felt that God was calling them to host a house church in their home. Heather and I were invited to be a part of this, as well as several others. Since then, we’ve grown and learned so much about the Lord, and about growing closer to one another in community. The meeting has changed nights, changed locations, changed members (both leaving and coming) drastically, and much more.

During this time we’ve learned a lot about church, what the bible says about church, and what to do in the event of all sorts of situations. And throughout that entire time, we’ve found our approach to be the most biblically sound approach to church, as laid out by the New Testament. That’s not to say our group perfectly lives out what we see in the Bible about church, but that our vision and what our meetings look like try to reflect what we see in the Bible.

Ben, in explaining what I said in the paragraph more effectively than I, said the following (paraphrase):

“Since we’ve started doing church this way, I’ve read through the New Testament several times. And with this way, there’s no ‘gotcha’ verses that I have to ignore or downplay to fit into my framework of church.”

That probably conveys my point as much as anything else I could say would. We’ve found a peace and steadiness in both our ecclesiology as well as our community that we didn’t necessarily find previously.

So where does that leave me as far as the traditional church goes? Do I hate it and everything it stands for? Hardly. I still feel honor and respect toward the traditional church goes, as well as many believers I know that are a part of it. I will say though that as a result of not being a part of this type of church after 3 years does make it more difficult to relate and understand the particular methods some churches employ – my thinking being that I’ve stepped back, and now some things just seem so alien, so strange.

In [potential] future posts, we can explore some of the specifics that makes what we do work, and what makes it different than what others do. If you would like such posts, you know how to contact me (and if you don’t: email, gmail chat, blog comment, facebook message, homing pidgeon, etc.).

Heather has never been, and as such there’s been some reservations about this camp, because most images and descriptions of it include some level of craziness (mud sliding, games with shaving creme, mass chaos), which is exactly the type of activity Heather is not a fan of. I’ve done my best (as well as Britain, mad props homegirl) to re-assure her that there is a place for her, and not everyone is crazy. In fact, there is a large swath of people who are very chill and quiet, and I think Heather could totally do well with those people.

On a related note, we had some Chinese food on Tuesday night, and each got a fortune cookie. Heather opened hers, and it read:

You’ll accomplish more later if you have a little fun this weekend.

Holy crap. I started shouting, something along the lines of: “SWEET BABY JESUS, THANK YOU FOR BESTOWING US WITH THIS EXCELLENT PROPHECY OF TRUTH.” It was all kind of blurry. I’m thinking about taking the fortune and scanning it in to the computar.

So anyway, see you next week. By the way, if you haven’t subscribed to the ericonceaday photostream (RSS LINK), you’re doing it wrong. Here’s a sample of some of the last two weeks best pics, that you’ve been missing.

More pictures forthcoming, but here’s a taste of one of the new tools I picked up at Ace… it makes splitting wood much easier than with a sissy axe. For you suburbanites, its called a splitting wedge (mad respect to the true outdoorsman who knows way more about this crap than me), I put it in the top of the vertical log in the last picture from the last post, and then slam the top of it with a sledgehammer, till the wood finally gives up and is split in halves. Yeah!