We had our first house church gathering here yesterday. We tried to do a couple of things a little differently, and overall it went well. My brother and his family are joining us for a while as we get started, which is great as he’s had experience introducing open formats to different groups, which is something that will be new to just about everyone who will be a part of our group.
First of all, we shared a meal together, but rather than just dig in and eat, we tried to set up a new rule – nobody can serve themselves. If you need something, someone else has to get it for you. This didn’t work out quite as smoothly as we had hoped, but in hindsight I think it went rather well for the first time. We didn’t have too many people (8 adults, 11 children), but we’re anticipating a few more next week so things might get hairier.
Overall, we’re trying to think of ways to turn the meal into something more than just an opportunity to eat. Our idea was to figuratively add in a bit of the washing of feet into the mix. Everyone liked the idea of it, but we’ll probably tweak the execution as we go along. Kids always make things like that interesting and more complicated.
After we ate and cleaned up a little, we moved into the den for worship. We spent 25 minutes or so with the kids, but it was a little disjointed. Britt brought some instruments for the kids to play, but it turned out the instruments were WAY too loud for kids to use. Give a kid a stick and a drum and all they want to do is bang it! So this week I’m on the hunt for some good kid-friendly percussion that isn’t too loud.
We then sent the kids down to the basement. We have a great person to help with the kids down there – she’s 13, lives in a nearby neighborhood, and is phenomenal with the little kids. Her dad works with youth camps and orphanages in Russia and Ukraine, and she’s spent many summers working with youth camps in Russia. She’s worked with kids for our larger house church gatherings that we’ve held here, and we’re extremely blessed to have her helping us out.
While the kids were learning some Bible stories, playing games, and singing songs, we continued upstairs, thankful for the relative quiet. I informed everybody that there was no plan. I printed out a sheet with a list of songs on it, all of the songs I had ready to go in my worship lyric software (more on that in a future post), and let them know that if there was a song they wanted to sing, to say so. I led some songs, some folks read some scripture that was on their heart, and some others requested some songs. From what I remember, we sang “So Good to Me,” “Today,” “Your Love is Deep”, and “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever” (kid songs), followed by “Praise the King,” “Glorious One,” “Restore to Me,” “How Great is Our God,” “We Fall Down,” and “Come Fall on Us.”
As we wrapped up that phase, Britt talked about commitment to the cause of Christ. He noted that Jesus wasn’t terribly interested in the disciples knowing everything perfectly – but that it was their commitment to him that had to come first. Likewise, when the church first began in Acts 2, you didn’t see much in the way of “right doctrine” before people began joining the church. It began with an acceptance of the gospel followed by commitment to the church, and discipleship naturally followed.
I had wanted to start in with a reading of 1st Corinthians 12, but felt that chapter 11 was a better start. We ended up talking a lot about communion as a meal, and that led to a good discussion of rituals. I’ll blog about that later, because I have too many thoughts on that to summarize quickly. I decided to save chapter 12 for later.
After that, we talked some about logistics and how we might handle things from week to week. With the exception of Britt and his wife Becca, everyone we had yesterday was from our previous house church. While it would have been awesome to have more folks show up, I think it was actually perfect for us to do this and talk some things through, because it was different from how we’ve had house church together in the past. What we’re doing now is more open, and the goal is for others to be contributing more directly. That will come with time, but I think we set a good starting point of not having things too structured.
We’ve had some more people tell us that they’ll be coming next week, and we’re looking forward to it. It was a good bit of work preparing to host it here, but I imagine that will get easier as we go.
Derek, thanks for sharing all of this – it sounds to me like you guys had an awesome night. In a way, you never work out all the kinks because it’s real life and real people, and I find a lot of comfort in this actually. I’ve said before, if it weren’t messy, THEN we’d need to question our methods. Another note, we’ve definitely learned that the house prep gets more efficient each week until eventually it’s like clockwork and it takes little mental effort.
Anyway, we’re so very excited for what God is doing in this new work, and will support it any way we can.