- The combination of corporate worship and intentional Christian community produced disciples and missionaries sent to change the world.
At 12 years of age, I boldly announced to my mother that I wasn’t “going back to that church anymore.” We were a church-going family and, every one of us was dressed and out the door to church each week without fail. Until now.
My mother, instead of doing perhaps what she ought to have done – forcing my hand and getting me into the car anyway – recognized something in my declaration. She knew how truly pitiful the spiritual fervor of our local church was and also sensed my steadfast frustration. I am convinced that, had she made me attend, I wouldn’t be a Christian today. Instead she said, “Well, you have to do something.”
She sat me down in front of the TV prosperity-gospel preacher in vogue at the time. After two or three weeks of that, I similarly protested, “Yuck, I’m not doing that anymore either.” Again – “Well, have you to do something.”
At that point, phone calls were made to Dad’s best friend, an evangelist who happened to have a house church. When I arrived that first Sunday, I saw one of their sons and some other boys playing basketball in the back alley and joined in. Afterwards we sat in their living room and sang contemporary Christian choruses, shared some testimonies, opened up our Bibles for a study, prayed about how to apply the lesson to our lives, then had a little lunch together.
That evangelist became the go-to for pastors who encountered rough individuals, people with substance abuse problems, and others who might prove a difficult fit in their own congregations. They knew they could send anyone to the evangelist’s home, and they would be welcome. Add to that troubled kids from school or the neighborhood, and there was always a very interesting collection of neediness in attendance for the presentation of the gospel.
For most of my adult life, our family has had some version of small group meetings in our home, in connection with our local church. Just like the model of my youth, we laugh, we eat, we sing, we open our Bibles and discuss, and we pray. People sit around and chit-chat for an extended time thereafter and it all feels – well, like home.
According to the book of Acts, the early church met regularly in the Temple and from house to house, thereby providing this burgeoning movement something more than formal worship inside an official building. The combination of corporate worship and intentional Christian community produced disciples and missionaries sent to change the world.
Keith Miller, in his volume A Scent of Love, suggests this very thing as the key to church growth. In New Testament times, some guy would be walking down an alley in Ephesus, for instance, and out of the corner of his eye spy a home with a small group of people sitting in a circle and tenderly talking about a man and a a cross and a death. He would stop, peek in for a moment, but continue on. Then something would stop him in his tracks and he would go back to that window and look again. He didn’t understand but was attracted to the “scent of love” that emanated from that circle of affection and need and eventually drawn in by his own need and loneliness and desire for…more.
I have been drawn, with hundreds of others I know, by that same scent. For multiple decades now, I have been impacted profoundly by a method of assembling together as old as the Christian movement itself.
This last week “the scent” was evident in a rather motley crew, as diverse and beautiful as any I have ever been involved with. Three PhDs, one former meth addict, a self-described recluse seeking comfort in her camper, a former crack addict, a retired businessman, the owner of a tech firm, and a painter. A meal, enjoyable conversation, some songs, discussion around a gospel passage, prayer.
Home.
Matt Friedeman
