Started forward with home church, four people, two couples. We held the first meeting at my house. I think I underestimated the amount of work to prepare. It wasn’t unlike a small home Bible study we hosted years ago in our home.

Worship

What are we going to do for worship? I used to lead worship in the small group setting but it’s been years since I’ve played guitar. Not an option at this point. Ended up making a play list of some worship songs to last about 30 minutes. Worked great.

We agreed we’d like to include communion every week, not just once a month as is typical. Too infrequent in my opinion. We held communion right after worship so as to continue with it in the context of worship.

Word

What about the word? Of primary importance since the primary reason for doing this is the mediocre preaching in the churches we tried. No biblical illiterates will come out of this little group. I want some depth here and I want to focus on our own priorities in teaching the Word. I can teach…no seminary degree but I’ve actually taught in the small group setting for years. The few people we started with are mature Christians and we have a decent command of the Bible. We are not scholars but at least we can go to some depth and rotate the teaching responsibility around. It’s true that the person doing the teaching learns the most. I took the first teaching and taught on the great commission, the mission of the gospel we have from the Lord. Led to a good discussion. It’s nice to be interactive and get more understanding of the word in home church! Awesome.

Prayer

We can pray for our needs and the needs of the saints around the world. We can spend as much time as we need.

Fellowship

Shared a meal together after we were done with our meeting. In all we spent about 4 hours together and talked about our hope for this new direction.

We have no idea where this is going. It’s wonderful to just rely on the Lord to either sanction this through his blessing or not. It’s his church.

The Burgeoning Interest in Home Church

I was sharing in another Christian online forum about home church and my intent to start one. I was asking for prayer. What surprised me was the interest in home church that emerged. A lot of people out there, unsatisfied Christians who see the hand writing on the wall about the current church model, are rethinking what “church” means.

Can they sense from the Lord that it’s time to seek something more satisfying? Are they hungry for something different?