dp

1. It seems like time has mostly led to great improvement in different areas such as technology and medicine. Over time, these and other areas have made amazing discoveries and breakthroughs. Do you think the Church has missed out on the progress of time? Like the changes in organization, materials, and buildings… couldn’t these be wonderful steps of progress for the church instead of just a matter of the church being institutionalized? I agree some churches have turned things like their buildings into too much of a focus and status-quo, but does that make the things themselves bad?

2. Along these lines, what if today was the day of the Acts church beginning. What would it look like? With the way life and culture is now, do you think it would look like the Biblical account of the Acts church in practice, or might it indeed have a building, format, etc? In other words, how much of what we read about the Acts church was cultural and what parts were Biblical?

3. I think things like meeting in a church building have a lot of positives, for example the ability for visitors to just come in. If we all just met in houses it would definitely give us more incentive to reach people and get them in, but it would also leave out the drive-by who says, “Yeah, I really need to go to church. Let’s stop in.” Or the new family who just moved to town and is church hunting.

4. I definitely think that some obviously Biblical essentials are: ~Spreading the gospel. ~Discipling believers. ~Communion/eucharist. ~Teaching/preaching. ~Prayer.

5. These essentials I listed in #4 I see as things that could be done in church homes OR church buildings. I see that they could be done with a sense of “getting it” or of just “going through the motions”. So in other words, to me it’s not a matter of focusing on the hows or the styles but on getting it done and keeping the heart of it all right (mostly an individual matter and responsibility, not corporate).

If we took this philosophy in any other area (sports, jobs, etc.) would anything ever happen? The Bible uses the analogy of armies and wars to describe the Christian walk. Would an organic army win the battles? I agree there should be an aspect of the church that is organic. But there also needs to be an aspect that is structured and institutional.

Determining the essentials is important and I don’t disagree with your reference to Acts 2:42. Those are the bases on which our structure is built and I don’t even bring those things up for argument. If it’s biblical, it’s essential. Make sense? That’s why in my original post I stated we’re told WHAT we’re to be about, it’s the HOW that is in question.

So, my beef is more in the programming structure than the content. HOW do we carry out the biblical essentials most effectively? I think that’s the big question.

The tough part is having a group of people who agree on the essentials. For some, Sunday School is absolutely essential, others not so much. For some celebrating the Eucharist is essential to worship, others don’t agree. So I agree with the direction and the need to simplify, we’ll just have to step carefully as we seek to discern what are the essentials.

I’ll go ahead and cast my vote that the essentials are seen in the verse I quoted above-Scripture teaching, community (fellowship), the Eucharist (breaking of bread) and both formal and informal prayers. I know some, maybe even you, disagree and that’s okay, I still love you. But I think that verse gives our church a great starting point to figuring what the Church is supposed to be about. Thoughts?

I was just reading in Philemon this morning and Paul addressed his greetings to him and the church that meets in his house. Definitely precedents for the house-church movement. That’s what Jesse was talking about in his comments. That is organic in its essence. it’s certainly what we’re working on accomplishing through our Journey Groups, even if we do still have our corporate worship.

This all speaks to John’s point, too, about how we avoid burnout as leaders. There must be adequate training for leaders (ongoing) if you’re going to see healthy, thriving churches, whether home church or not. Avoiding burnout is one of my top priorities for our peeps. About the only way to really accomplish that is to simplify and have less demands, focusing only on essentials. Agree?