Since our old paradigm of church life has often revolved around the Sunday morning gathering, we often find ourselves on a quest to discover what “New Testament” gatherings might look like and feel like. We have learned from our church traditions that the make-up and how-to of the gathering is at the crux of the Christian life so, if we are transitioning into simple/organic/house church type experiences, we tend to become very focused on the make-up and how-to of these new types of gatherings.
The result is that stage two, for many transitioning Christians, is the exploration of New Testament gatherings.
While this is natural, if we remain in this stage as the end-all of our transition, we will not fully grasp that Jesus calls us first to an organic lifestyle and only secondarily to organic gatherings (as a result of our lifestyle of fully following him)...
In fact, one of the difficulties in describing New Testament gatherings is that scripture does not provide us with the kinds of specifics that we would want. Jesus called his followers to radically follow him, yet he offers virtually no instruction on what to do during a “prayer meeting” or a “church service.” Yet the disciples did gather and were an intimate community. From this, we can deduce that the lifestyle of mission (following Jesus and being a light to the world) was the guiding star of their relationship with God and one another. Gatherings supported this lifestyle, not the other way around.
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He goes on to describe aspects of the New Testament gathering, but his main point is that we have it backwards. The point of church is notSunday mornings! The point of church is to be a body of believers 7 days a week, one of which happens to include a more (or less!) formal meeting as a larger group. Without the body life the rest of the week, Sunday is just a shell of what it could be.
Now, as Roger says, when transitioning out of an institutional church, the Sunday gathering can be very important. But, it should always have as its underlying purpose the creation of body life the other 6 days.
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1 comment:
Excellent article. The focus on gatherings and "how to" meet is perhaps the main distraction from the essence of following Christ among those seeking an alternative to institutional church expression. In the experience of about 35 of us that left the IC seven years ago it was beneficial not to meet at all for some time. This expedited the "detoxing" process and taught us how to depend on God alone as our rock. Now gatherings are life giving and different on every occasion. It would seem that gatherings would be as varied in frequency, expression and emphasis as there are people, cultures and needs, and would always be, as you pointed out, supplemental to the larger expression of the church happening 24/7.
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