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Wednesday, November 21

the story of 'engedi' in suffolk

'Engedi' started in 1999/2000. Several families moved from London to Suffolk to experiment with church life and to gain the freedom to enjoy God together without the restrictions of the Institutional Church and certain party lines to keep. We wanted to see what God had to say to us and not what a denomination dictated.

As with many others before us, we misguidedly assessed our church practice according to what we knew of church from previous experiences. After experimenting with cell church principles and finding that this was just a structure like any other, and that it still required very strong leadership to drive it forward and maintain it's momentum, we realized that our foundation was flawed and practically an idolatrous one. We concluded that the Holy Spirit was still active and that Jesus was still alive. No great revelation there, but knowing it and living it are two vastly different things.

Jesus should be our only true foundation. He should be our focus. Not a structure or a denomination or any thing that deflects us from pursuing Jesus. We want for our lives, our gatherings and our churches to be focused on him. For us to discover what Jesus has for us, we have thrown ourselves completely on him with no safety net. This is very scary but has proven to be a total release. In hindsight of course that is surely what the Lord requires of us anyway.

We now model ourselves entirely on what we can glean from the pages of the New Testament and what can be applied by the Holy Spirit. Jesus is alive and his Holy Spirit guides us as one man. We have no man-made structures to maintain, no salaries to pay and no building to upkeep. This brings with it new problems, but problems that we believe we are supposed to have and not those suffered by the established church.

Each person is responsible before God for the other members of the ecclesia. It is the responsibility of each believer to ensure they are developing their own walk with God and to hear from the Lord for the rest of the body. We are there for each other and look out for each other. It is no longer the responsibility of the paid professional to ensure that the body is cared for or ministered to, or taught, or served. It is the responsibility of us all. We all have to rise to the challenge and take up our job as an eye, or as a hand, or an ear, as members of the same body with Christ as our head.

In this time some have been saved, others have joined us, some have left, some have moved away, some have started new lives and we have made good friends of many - believers and unbelievers alike. We have tried to be flexible and maintain time for other people in our busy schedules. We have joined clubs and found social lives outside of church. This has meant for the first time we have been touching many peoples lives that we would never be able to with a conventional church setup.

With our emphasis on relationships and not having party lines to keep, we have emphasized the whole body and refrained from sectarian division, We have found that we have managed to maintain flourishing relationships with those that disagree with our practice and methods across the spectrum of the church. We are committed to the body of Christ and seek to live completely in harmony with all Christian groups. We are open-minded enough to realise that we haven't got it all sewn up and haven't cornered all truth. We therefore seek to find Christ wherever we can find him. It is our conclusion that he speaks to all in different ways. Ways that are relevant to them. What he has revealed to us is for us, but we love to hear his voice and remain open to all traditions. We can learn from all, and have fellowship with anyone that love the Lord Jesus.

We seek to please him and don't measure our success by numbers or sermons preached, but by the Kingdom of God being released in our lives and through our life together.

posted by alexander @ 4:53 PM 1 comments

1 Comments:

Great thoughts. The "traditional" setup of a building, paid staff and whatnot in churches is not what we should focus on. We should focus on building meaningful relatiosnhips with people, just as you said. Through those relationships we can show Jesus and find out who Jesus really is.
Thanks for your words. Very encouraging.

Patrick
Franklin, NC, USA

By Anonymous, at 6:30 PM

3 Comments:

This link for Frank Viola's article doesn't seem to work. Can you repost it. It sounds very intersting.

Thanks.

By Anonymous, at 6:32 PM

It seems like there is a problem with Frank's site which is where this link goes. I suggest coming back in a day or two to see if it is back online.

By alexander, at 6:16 PM

It's an interesting article but I am a bit skeptical about inviting a church planter from the suggested source.

I believe God raises apostles but in my experience the apostles require their authority to be acknowledged. They are not like Paul, they plant churches and expect the allegiance to them.

I find whatever church group I try there is always someone else whose authority I am expected to come under. How can this be in an house church movement?

I appreciate Viola wrote this for the US but are there any UK apostles whom we might try in order that we might test the waters?

By Joe, at 2:13 PM

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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.

L and A