Simply Church: A House Church Perspective

How can we respond in a good way when things go wrong?

In the last post, we saw that we are composed of three parts--body, soul and spirit.

Each of the three parts of us is not independent of the others.  For example, most of us have experienced times when we get physically sick.  Sometimes this causes us to feel emotionally depressed.  This is the body impacting the soul.  If this in turn prevents us from spending time with the Lord, then it has impacted our spirit too. A beautiful sunset impacts our senses; it may arouse a sense of joy that overflows in praise to the Creator. Or maybe we have spent a prolonged time in waiting on the Lord.  We feel uplifted in our emotions and we seem to have fresh strength to tackle the tasks that face us.  This is the spirit impacting the rest of us.   Our soul impacts the other parts of us too.  A person who is consistently stressed may develop physical symptoms such as an ulcer, or may become spiritually lukewarm.

We can often choose which part of us is in control.  For example, maybe we have a bad night’s sleep and wake up feeling a bit under the weather.  We can choose to live from the body: “I have to take a nap—my body needs more sleep.”  Or we can choose to live from the soul:  “I had a bad night’s sleep and so I’m kinda cranky today.”  Or we can choose to live from the spirit:  “The Word of God says, ‘I will bless the Lord at all time and His praise shall continually be in my mouth.’  I will praise Him despite a bad night.”  In choosing to live a life full of praise, even when we don’t feel like it, we are choosing to live from the spirit within and it usually does not take long for our emotions to come in line with our spirit.

One of the ways in which Christians often unwittingly live from the soul is by reducing the Christian life to a set of rules—a set of do’s and don’ts to live by.  It is similar to a marriage where the romance and fun has gone out of the husband/wife relationship and it becomes a dutiful partnership, dull and dry.  In contrast, living by the Spirit is a glorious journey, an epic adventure through life with a friend who walks alongside (the literal meaning of parakletos often translated “counselor” or “advocate” and used to describe the Holy Spirit).

As we spend more and more time in Jesus’ presence we will find it easier and easier to live from the spirit within.  Romans 12:1, 2 says, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.  And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”  As our mind is renewed, it becomes more and more attuned to the Spirit within.

How Does God Speak to Us?

Many believers are under the mistaken idea that when it says, “God spoke” or “the Holy Spirit said” that the people heard an audible voice.  But if you ask people who clearly hear Him on a regular basis, they will tell you this is not the case.

Let’s take a look at how humans function when it comes to interacting with the spiritual. 

It is helpful to visualize a person as consisting of three parts which can be diagrammed as three concentric circles.  Although the Scriptures usually just refer to an inner and outer man, 1 Thessalonians 5:23 details this more fully. 

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The outermost circle represents the body.  This is obviously the physical part of us.  It receives stimuli from the world through the five senses.  The middle band is the soul or psyche.  Traditionally people think of it as the mind, the will and the emotions.  It is the basis of our personality.  This is where our thoughts reside.  It can receive stimuli from both the body and the spirit as well as generating its own thoughts and ideas.  The inner circle is the spirit—that part of the person that becomes alive when a person becomes a follower of Jesus.  This part of us is where the Holy Spirit dwells.

 

We can choose to live under the control of any of the three areas. 

• Some people choose to live from the flesh, from their body.  Maybe they are fixated on food, or on sex.  They are controlled by their bodily desires. 
• Many more people live from their soul.  Perhaps their emotions control them.  Their lives are dominated by the emotion of the day and how they feel directs how they live.  Or maybe their intellect is in control.  They will not believe or do something unless they can understand it and analyze it, unless there is scientific or philosophic rationale for it. 
• We can choose to live from our spirit and allow the Holy Spirit to be in control of our lives. As we surrender to Him, He affects every part of our lives including our soul and our body.  As we yield our lives more and more to Jesus, we find ourselves just naturally living more and more in accord with the Word of God.

For the Christian, the aim is to live from the Spirit within—that is, from the inner circle.  The Bible tells us that it is very difficult to distinguish between the soul and the spirit.  In fact it takes the Word of God to do so (Hebrews 4:12).  We will know if we are living by the spirit if our lives line up with the Scriptures, but our motivation in doing so isn’t to keep a set of rules, but to learn to live from the life of the Spirit within us. 

How Did Jesus Hear God Speak?

It is notable that Jesus did not begin His earthly ministry until the Holy Spirit had come upon Him at His baptism.  From that point onwards, the Holy Spirit led Him.  Philippians 2:7, 8 says “When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death…  (The Message) When Jesus went to be with His Father after His resurrection, He asked the Father to send the Holy Spirit to us (John 7:39; 15:26).  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth.  He leads us into all truth (John 16:13). He helps us to communicate with the Father (Romans 8:26-27).  When we become a Christian, the Holy Spirit makes our Spirit alive and dwells within us.  He awakens within us a God-given ability to hear what the Father is saying.

So how does God speak to us?  Is He limited to speaking through His Word?  Can we learn to recognize His voice?  Does God speak in an audible voice?  Does He speak through our own thoughts?  If so, how do we distinguish between our own thoughts and what He is saying?

A quick read through the New Testament shows that the early disciples expected God to speak to them.  In Acts 2, Peter knew that what they were seeing on the Day of Pentecost was a fulfillment of the prophecy in Joel.  How did He know that?  In Acts 13, the Holy Spirit spoke to a group of prophets and teachers and told them to set apart Saul and Barnabas for a specific work.  How did they hear Him say that? 

The majority of Christians here in the West rarely experience this vibrant and alive walk with Jesus.  Most struggle to know when God is speaking.  Probably 90% of us are not sure if we hear God clearly. We have learned to rely on others hearing God’s voice for us, whether that is through the Sunday sermon or a Christian book.  And our walk with the Lord is the poorer for it.

Does God Still Speak Today?

Everything that we know about God teaches us that He desires to communicate with us.  It is a part of His very character.  Romans 1 tells us that God speaks to us even through the magnificence of His creation.

 

John 1:1 describes Jesus as the Word:  In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  Words communicate.  God desires to communicate with His people.   In Matthew 4:4, Jesus tells Satan, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”  The verb “proceed” is in the present continuous tense.  A better translation might be “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that is continually proceeding out of the mouth of God.”  

 

In John 8, Jesus says that He only did what He saw the Father doing and only spoke what He heard the Father saying.  Jesus Himself continually heard from His Father.  He was in constant communication with Him.  His life demonstrated a total dependence on hearing from the Father and then obeying Him. 

 

Was Jesus able to do this only because He is part of the Godhead?  If that is true, hearing God speak in this same way is outside of the realm of our capabilities.  Or was Jesus dependent on the same Holy Spirit who now indwells us. 

The One Key Skill in Simple Church Life

One of the main paradigm shifts within this movement of simple churches is the belief that ordinary men and women hear God.  They can be entrusted with the affairs of the Kingdom.  It does not need specially trained people to manage the church.  The Holy Spirit is able to run the church by speaking directly to His people.   He will do a far better job of it than our organizations and denominations ever can.

Within simple church, we like to say that church is as simple as knowing God, hearing His voice and responding to what He tells us.  Jesus is head of His church, and if we believe that we are to take this literally, it means that both at an individual and at a corporate level, He desires to communicate with us.  It also presupposes that we have the ability to recognize His voice when He is speaking to us.

Imagine the adventure of hearing God speak and recognizing His voice.  We might hear Jesus say to us, “Go and sit down next to the person on the bench and get chatting with him, He needs to hear from Me today.”  Imagine a community of God’s people that knows when God is communicating.  God might tell them to get involved in a certain apartment complex.  He would tell them where their finances were to be spent.  They would know what they were to do with their children during the times they meet together.

I know the photo accompanying this blog as "His Master's Voice."  To me it says that God is speaking loudly and clearly.  Are we listening?

Starfish Infrastructure Again

A few days ago I posed this question on facebook.  "What does the infrastructure of a starfish look like.  Neil Cole was one of those who replied.  His comment: "Self-building and self-replicating, internal and decentralized."

If we apply these principles to anything we try to put in place in terms of infrastructure, we won't go far wrong!

What would this look like when applied, for example, to training?  Or to resources?  Any thoughts?

Starfish Infrastructure

John White had some interesting thoughts on my last blog about infrastructure.  I recommend reading them and the comments of others too. His comments referred to the book, The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom which compares types of organizations.  Most organizations that we grew up with were like spiders--sever a limb and the spider cannot regrow it.  Remove its head and the spider dies because it central nervous system is centered in its head. However, if one of the limbs of a starfish is severed, is not only able to regenerate the limb itself, but as long as part of the central ring of nervous system is included, it is able to grow a new starfish from the severed limb.

These days we are seeing more starfish type organizations--much of what is growing up around social media typifies this. 

The house/simple/organic movement, at least in the West, is more like a starfish.  There is no central organization that is keeping track of what is going on.  There is no superstar to follow or location to visit to see what is going on.  The Holy Spirit Himself seems to be in control.  One of the most common communications we receive at House2House is the person who says, "We started meeting in our house (or the local coffee shop or our workplace) because that was what the Lord told us to do.  We thought we were the only ones doing this until we came across your website.

That is not to say there is no leadership.  There is leadership, but for the most part it is relatively hidden and unseen.  Sure, some people may have national or even international influence, but they are there to serve the vision of others.  The Lk10 website which John White runs is a good example of this.  (See www.Lk10.org).  There are training materials and courses available, books have been written and there are some great blogs.

I also recommend getting hold of Neil Cole's new book, Church 3.0.  Neil writes about the growth of a  movement from the perspective an insider and he has some great insights.  I read the manuscript some months ago and have been quoting it ever since. 

Infrastructure will enable the growth of a movement.  Tony and I definitely came away from India with the sense that we needed to think about infrastructure and to do what we could to help create more of it; hopefully the Lord will lead us clearly in this. Our sense is that this infrastructure will include training and follow-up from that training, the enabling of communication using all the technical advances that are transforming the way we talk to each other.  We are also aware we need to think more about resources, including finances, and how they enable growth within the Kingdom. 

Any more thoughts? 

What does the Infrastructure of a Movement Look Like?

 

While we were in India, several times the main leader we work with there (who has seen hundreds of thousands of people baptized this year in his network), mentioned that the key to the growth they have seen was the building of infrastructure before they needed it.  Since then, Tony and I have spent many hours discussing this.

According to Wikipedia, "Infrastructure is the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. The term typically refers to the technical structures that support a such as roads, water supply, sewers, power grids, telecommunications, and so forth."

So the question we have been asking ourselves is this:  What is the basic infrastructure needed for a sustainable move of God?  By this, I mean what are the unseen (and therefore receiving no glory), practical factors that facilitate a move of God?

Our Indian friend was primarily referencing the leadership training they have had in place for several years.  They recognize six levels of leadership and training.

1. Working at a grass-roots level by starting a house church
2. Leading a cluster of house churches in a block of 150 villages
3. Leadership of several clusters of house churches
4. Master trainers at a district level
5. Master trainers at a state level
6. Master trainers at an international level

Each level is responsible for training others, so for example, the master trainer at a state level is responsible for training those at a district level who is in turn responsible for training the leaders of the clusters of house churches in his area.  There are more than twenty key subjects that everybody is trained in although at different depths according to their function. These twenty key subjects are basic but with a very missional emphasis.  Everybody is brought together for several days of training per year. Even an illiterate woman leader is able to expound on these subjects including chapter and verse.

My sense is that this level of organization is probably not good in an American context with our propensity for control and competition.  What does anyone else think?

So what would infrastructure look like here in a Western context?

Infrastructure enables growth and communication.  We share some infrastructure with the secular world in the shape of the Internet--websites, blogs, twitter etc. that enable communication that can have a profound spiritual impact.  Groups such as CMA produce great resouces (go to a Greenhouse training if you haven't yet been to one.  You can find details here). We are in the process ourselves of resurrecting our Luke 10 courses too.  We have one planned for a weekend later this month. Details about future ones will come out in the House2House e-letter.

Here are some other areas that infrastructure might cover:

• materials that enable growth such as DVDs, books
• shared resources, finance
• missions

Any other ideas?

Thoughts from #Verge10

Photograph by Scott Wade

I just had the privilege of attending the Verge conference here in Austin.  (Tony and I shared at one of the workshops.)  There were more than 2,000 who had signed up for the conference and maybe double that number watching live-streaming video.

I was on the social media team and it was amazing to watch the tweets that just kept rolling in (and continue to do so).  If you're interested in some of the comments/highlights, search under #verge10 on Twitter.  You will be amazed at some of the comments made by the main speakers.

There was a great hunger expressed for missional communities.   Many simple/organic church concepts were shared by people such as Neil Cole, David Watson, George Patterson and David Garrison.  Those who shared from mega churches talked about how they recognized the disparity between big church and church as represented by the New Testament, with a humble willingness to count the cost to see a more relational and missional expression of church that will genuinely touch our communities.  

If some of the huge numbers of the on-fire-for-the-Lord young people involved in these vibrant mega churches are trained and released to make disciples and gather them into missional communities/simple, organic churches, we will see greater growth than we have ever imagined. 

Primarily in LA, but also here in Austin, there is increasing relationship between the leaders of mega and micro churches. What could happen in our cities if it doesn't matter who gets the credit?

Amazing Talk by Francis Chan at #Verge10

Here are my notes on what Francis Chan said at Verge this evening:

Exod 33:15 Moses said to God, “If your presence will not go with me we will not go up from here.”  Do we want the presence of God more than anything?  More than a big church?  More than speaking in front of crowds?  We easily lose sight of our original intention of being pleasing to God.

Verge means the outer limit.  This isn’t a “Let’s start a movement” conference.  God is doing something and we’re on the verge of seeing something happen.

Church 3.0 by Neil Cole is about everything the Lord has been putting on our hearts.

You read Scripture and see one thing and go to church and see something else.  Love, unity, etc.—the way the church ought to look.

Missional communities: Its not that we are trying to create a movement. The Holy Spirit has started it, and He is leading us.  It’s not just about breaking down the mega churches.  It’s about seeing it in the Scripture and doing what it says.

When I read the Scriptures, God doesn’t get mad at the people, He gets mad at the leaders!  We have to change.  We can’t quit the process of change because it’s biblically driven.  As we talk to other people, they’re feeling the same thing.

You can take scattered verses to justify your theology but it wouldn’t be the same as what you get through a simple reading of the Scriptures.  Would I ever have come up with doing church the way we do just from Scripture? I wouldn’t even think about the gathering.  I would be on mission.  I would think, “I need to reach as many people as I can and make disciples by teaching them to obey.”  And I would find others doing the same and because we are so different we would need each other.  I need people to stay on mission every day.  I would gather with people who do the same thing, because it’s there in the Scriptures.

The disciples saw Jesus rise from the grave and had to tell everyone.  What wouldn’t make sense would be if the disciples saw someone rise from the dead and just met together every week for some songs and teaching.  If you had seen someone rise from the dead you’d tell everyone you met, especially if he had told you to make disciples.

If we care about what Jesus wants, we will live like family, His body, an extension of one another.  We would be of one heart and one mind.

We’re not strategizing a movement.  You can’t create a movement.  The disciples didn’t plan out the Day of Pentecost.  (You learn Chinese, you learn Spanish!)  It was the Holy Spirit working in a bunch of individuals but creating a unified result.  This is similar.  It’s God doing something.

Jesus is building his church and nothing will stop it.  It’s not forced or pushed.  We’re not here to start a movement.  God has started a wave.  Let’s pray for the believers in our nation to love Him and start making disciples.  Can we pray that He puts a love within us so we become so much family that we are interdependent and share our belongings?  Looking at Scripture we know He wants these things.  Mission, missional lives, loving one another so much that people can see Christ in us.  Make Jesus Lord instead of playing a “Jesus says,” game.  In the book of Acts, the disciples were unstoppable.  A move of God will be unstoppable.  Can we continue the book of Acts?