emerging church, emergent, simple church, house church, home church.
Thursday, November 1
a familiar story
Here's a story which I suspect will resonate with one or two.
My husband and I are older Christians who have had much to do with organised religion over many years. We have visited many churches, both at home and abroad, and have observed all varieties of expressions, of faith and of worship styles, looking both from the congregations and the ministry side.
Quite simply, we began to feel more and more unhappy with the last church but one, and God began to speak. It took a year of desperately hanging on for our position in that church to become absolutely untenable. Everything became dead to us and we could no longer support in any shape or form a leadership, backed by an apathetic people, whose ways and beliefs, though we are Bible believers, we had rejected long ago.
In the next church, which in many ways suited us better, things went reasonably well (ignoring any 'uneasy feelings' and taking the good along with the bad) when, after about a year, God started to speak again. I wrote it all down, with a sinking feeling, as I knew it meant trouble. One day, the pastor, curious as always to know everything about everybody, asked me what I was musing about, as he knew something was on my mind. So I told him just one of the things which the Lord had told me. Just one. Pastor, I said, you are doing a one-man-band-act.
He didn't like it, and he soon isolated me from the rest of the 'flock'. Very soon, we were out of there, too.
His parting words were 'I am very sorry you haven't found a place with us, but I hope you find somewhere else you can be happy'. In other words, try another church. But, by this time, we were thoroughly disillusioned with every church and - as far as we were concerned - they were all the same, all building their own little empires, and we were pretty sure that disillusionment would set in again, sooner or later, if we were to join somewhere else. As I said, we knew the scene very well, because we had a very large and wide experience of the churches.
The only thing for it was to start a church in our home and we soon had put together a good dossier from the Lord and other sources on how things should work. We started off as three, with meeting together over a shared meal and sharing together. After that, we added the Lord's Supper after the meal and tried to cut down the chatting afterwards (with mixed success). Then our chatty member left and we gained another from a Gene Edwards conference we attended in Bournemouth - a young Polish man.
That was in 2004, and we have grown in our Christian faith and in freedom of expression ever since, though we are still small in numbers.
We are extremely happy and would never go back to organised religion now. Currently, we are checking out new contacts nearby which have come from the Simplechurch website.
Something is happening across Britain today: a new kind of church is beginning to appear; increasing numbers of
christians (recent research suggests between 40 & 100,000) are starting to gather in homes, colleges and work places.
Living out a 24-7 faith, they are missionally focused with a 'go to them' dynamic instead of a 'come to us' invitation.
These communities are small, fluid, organic, reproducible and most of all simple; so simple that any believer would respond
by saying "I could do that!"
The aim of this site is to connect, report and resource these new groups.
If you'd like to know more check out the vision page.
