Missing the point, and finding it again

Unlike some, I didn’t go into house church all that willingly; I didn’t go because I was running away from the “system”. I actually went sort of kicking and screaming.

Allow me to ‘splain.

We started a church here in Tulsa in late 1999, attempting to do it the way most have done it–rent a hotel ballroom, make announcements, etc. We didn’t start the church because we were mad at some other church. We had been deeply hurt in church, and our eyes were open to a lot of the problems, injustices, and abuses that went on in institutional church; but we naively thought those things wouldn’t happen if we were in charge. 🙂 Besides, although God had spoken to our hearts that He was doing a “new thing”, we didn’t really know any other way to do the church thing. And we did think we had something unique to bring to the table, and we thought we knew what that was. And although Tulsa is a highly churched city, we’d heard the reports about churches that had sprung up to 4000-plus people in 2-3 years, and we thought when people heard about our unique brand of worship, we’d just explode. But nothing could have prepared us for what actually happened….

Nothing happened.

After 3 months in the hotel with attendance swinging between 4 and 20 people, circumstances and finances made it necessary to make other arrangements. We realized we could fit everyone into our living room without paying extra rent, so we moved it to our living room on Friday nights, thinking it would be a temporary measure. But that first Friday night was remarkable–God manifested His presence so sweetly in that room that everyone who was there can remember it. At one point in the worship, two teary-eyed college girls ran to our kitchen spontaneously to dig for communion elements. It was definitely a sign from God, confirming an inner witness that for whatever reason, the living room was where He wanted us…(and we inserted “for now” at the end of the sentence).

So now we’re in house church, and we thought, “Okay…we’ll make a network of house churches, and it will go all over Tulsa, and there will be thousands of people. God showed up in our living room, right? So that means this is the way to grow the church!” Over the next few years, whenever we got any encouragement, felt God visit us, got a fresh revelation, or a great idea, or saw an increase in people, we thought, “This is it! This is when the church explodes into mega-church status.” But nothing could have prepared us for what really happened…

Nothing happened. Over and over again…nothing happened.

Did I say “nothing happened?” Actually, that’s a bit inaccurate. Something was happening…deep below the surface. Two things, actually.

First…as people came to our living room week after week, year after year…they began to form relationships. They began laughing and crying together. Seems that this unlikely group of folks actually liked coming to our living room–not to hear our amazing teachings, but because they wanted to be together. These people became our extended family.

Second…when God brought us into our living room, and left us there…something started to change deep inside us. As we’d try over and over, unsuccessfully, to grow the church, with each “failure” God was patiently letting our religious mindsets and preconceived notions of “church” die inside us. And they held on, dying a slow and miserable death…but they did die, eventually. And so eventually, it began to soak through our religion-filled minds that maybe, just maybe…we had been missing the point.

I can remember getting very frustrated with God, not because He wouldn’t speak to my heart during those days, but because He wouldn’t talk about the stuff I wanted to talk about. I was like the disciples in the stormy seas: “Jesus, don’t You care that we’re drowning here??” After awhile of this, I began to realize that God was not nearly as panicked about my situation as I was; yet He still wasn’t giving me direct answers to my pleas. So it occured to me that maybe it wasn’t that God wasn’t interested in my problems; maybe I just wasn’t asking the right questions. Again…maybe we were missing the point.

We didn’t have church growth; by all human booklearning standards, the church should have closed down. But we looked at the wonderful community around us, the people enjoying life together, and growing spiritually because they were in community together…and we couldn’t shut it down. It was small, but it was alive…more alive than most churches I had visited. It was finally getting through…maybe the point of church wasn’t to grow into a mega-church to prove to everyone that you had something worth going to. Maybe the living, loving community we were seeing around us–maybe this was the point of church. A look at the Scriptures confirmed that although Jesus’ commission to us all to reach the world was certainly fresh in the minds of early believers–the point of gathering together was to gather together, to be a community. Mega-church had nothing to do with it.

Duh. It’s amazing how simple it becomes after the years of pain. 🙂

When I tell people we are a house church, I often get responses like, “Well, you gotta start somewhere,” or “That’s how we started out.” But they don’t realize that in our case, house church isn’t where we started. It’s where we ended up. And no offense to anyone else…for me, I wouldn’t have it any other way.