One of the problems with the "Honey, I shrunk the church!" approach is that it is too complex to be reproducible, especially by new believers. Since most people's greatest fear is of public speaking, that makes giving a talk a huge hurdle for people to attempt, even with a smaller audience. What if there is… Read More
Category: House church
In the last post, we described that we are not looking for, "Honey, I shrunk the church," where someone leads from the front and there is pre-organized worship and teaching. But before we look at what a church meeting looks like we need to answer an important question, "What is church?" All of us know… Read More
All over the country, people are meeting in homes instead of in buildings as their main expression of church. According to George Barna, that figure is about 5% of the adult population of this country! Similar results were obtained in surveys by Ed Stetzer of the Southern Baptists and the Pew Forun. Amazing! Who would… Read More
Jesus defined his ministry in Luke 4:16-18: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of… Read More
A few months ago, I asked people which topic they would prefer, "inner healing" or church planting. The majority chose church planting, but a significant number asked me to cover healing. So I'm taking a break from topics specifically related to church, and will be looking at inner healing for the next few posts. Part… Read More
For some years I have pondered the question of discipleship. I have to confess, discipling others has been something of a mystery to me. I know the theory, but have always had questions about it. Discipling someone is usually portrayed as helping a baby in Christ towards maturity. Maybe my questions are because I became… Read More
Aaron Snow of Intentional Gatherings recently posted this on his blog (http://bit.ly/cae2Jh). I use it here with his permission as a great example of the kind of thing I've been blogging about recently. “…Can you imagine what it would look like if college students who claim Jesus as Lord were equipped and released to lead… Read More
No discussion of discipleship within the organic/simple/house church movement would be complete without pointing people towards Life Transformation Groups (LTGs). Many years ago the Lord posed a series of questions to Neil Cole: What would you do if 100 people came to Christ this week? What would you do if 1000 people came to… Read More
Having written the last post on how Jesus trained his disciples, yesterday I came across a key point that I had missed. I discovered it on the blog of Paul Watson (http://bit.ly/cqS21C ). His premise is that "Jesus discipled groups." Obviously he had one-on-one interactions with individual disciples, but most of his training was done… Read More
My apologies if you get this post twice. I've had a couple of people tell me that it came out in Greek! Hopefully this is now corrected. How did Jesus train his disciples? · He shared the rough and tumble of everyday life with them (Luke 8:1-3) · He asked them questions to show them… Read More