Stephen Terry, Director

 

Still Waters Ministry

 

 

An Exciting Way to Get Involved

Commentary for the September 5, 2020 Sabbath School Lesson

 

A home church meeting."I served the Lord with great humility and with tears and in the midst of severe testing by the plots of my Jewish opponents. You know that I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you but have taught you publicly and from house to house. I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus." Acts 20:19-21, NIV

 

Several decades ago, as a teenager, I gave my heart to Christ. At that point, denominationalism meant little to me. Like my young school friends, I attended the church that was in my neighborhood, the church my nearby friends also went to. Church was more about seeing my friends outside of school than about religion. As I have grown older, I have found that for many, this is still true. People tend to go where their friends go. When asked they may say they go because their denomination teaches "the truth." But if put on the spot to explain those truths, many could not. This can be a byproduct of attending church to listen to someone speak up front at the pulpit with no opportunity for interaction. We get our weekly dose of preaching and hope that will carry us through to the next one. Most denominations have a pre-church school before the service where a more dialectic approach is possible, but often a leader simply presents the denominational line and questioning of dogma may be squelched either by the leader or by peer pressure. Church can become more about moving everyone to denominational uniformity than about personal exploration and growth. In such an environment, I doubt I would have discovered a personal relationship with Christ. Fortunately, the ministry of that denomination did not end at the church doors.

 

The church had a ministry to the youth that met each week in a church members home. Although the demographic was based on an age requirement, beyond that, it was a classic home church. There was far more interaction between the leader and the attendees than was present at church. And because the format was intended to reach the lost, there was a lot more openness to questions and searching, at least at first. In practice, I discovered that once a person accepted Christ the denomination felt that was when such questioning and growth should stop and the new convert should work hard at settling into the overall uniformity of the corporate church. The result was that I left that denomination and began a life-long search for the kind of atmosphere that I felt in that house church before I gave my life to Christ, but with my relationship with Christ alive and growing rather than stagnant and mired in unquestionable dogma.

 

As part of that search, I have attended college and majored in both biblical languages and theology. But far from causing me to "settle in." it opened ever more questions to my mind as I began to understand the vastness and at times, incomprehensibility of God. For instance, it staggers my mind that God, bigger than the universe, could speak into that house church all those years ago and reveal himself to me. I was raised in an alcoholic home. Although we were fed and clothed and had more than some in other parts of the world had, our home life was not stable or conducive to doing homework and getting somewhere in life. My father felt since he had not been educated, it was not necessary for us either. He acted out this belief by refusing to attend my college graduation. But when God spoke to my heart that evening in the home we were meeting in, something changed about my life. Where I had just been drifting with a lot of emotional pain, I found that a door had opened in my mind to greater possibilities. This created added tension at home as my father wanted nothing to do with religion. But where my grades in school had been abysmal before, they began to improve. Faith and hope in the future replaced the aimless ennui that was my existence before. It is what drove me, not only to complete high school, but to graduate college as well. It has been ironic, however, that the experience that encouraged me toward those interactive experiences turned out to be unable to go beyond the didactic to a more open faith reality. It has been as if allowing such questioning would cause a person to revert to a pre-saved condition, even though that questioning brought about my salvation in the first place.

 

More recently, about ten years ago, my wife and I experimented with having a weekly home church meeting, and the first meeting went well, but subsequent meetings became difficult as some attending were not there to grow together but to interrupt and put down anyone they felt was questioning denominational dogma. It became so ugly that we had to stop the meetings for the emotional health of those being set upon. We could have banned the offending members from the meetings, but the ones creating the problem were wealthy, influential members in the church and they implied they could begin a campaign with the church board against our meetings. Instead, I moved to another church where members and visitors could ask their questions and raise their challenges without being attacked. Disagreements still exist within the group, but ad hominem attacks are not tolerated. That allows a more open, sharing atmosphere as together we look for answers.

 

Many corporate churches seem to have drifted away from the intimacy of home churches. There may be a fear of exactly what we experienced, an inability to grant validity to everyone's search on the part of the church leaders. This may also be why so few attend church more than once per week, if that often. It is difficult for them to support that posture of consistent uniformity beyond that limited exposure. But that may be indicative of the real problem. We are trying to force ourselves into perfect obedience, even when we know that is not our experience. We all struggle with flaws of character and the poor choices we sometimes make. Should we then, under the mantle of denominational imprimatur, pretend this is not so? At church, where interaction is limited by the nature of the service, we might believe this to be true. But in the intimacy of home church, this is much harder to pull off. Typically, the people who come know us; they know we are not perfect. That can set them at ease in their own imperfection. Home church then can find power in our shared imperfections and the shared grace that can spring from that realization.

When we attend institutional church, the implied message is that the speaker, raised above the congregation and didactic rather than being a channel for two-way communication, is closer to God than the congregation, and therefore able to lecture the congregation as a right of office. The result can be a temptation to include ideas more like Johnathan Edwards' 1741 sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by an ecclesiastic looking down on the members in the pews set out on a lower level than his august person. That some pastors can resist this temptation is commendable, but too many succumb. Even as students preparing for the ministry this trait can raise its head. A fellow student when I was attending college went about offering to pray for people, telling them that a theology student's prayer was worth more than the average person's. That student entered the ministry and enjoyed a long career with the denomination despite such a belief. Hopefully, his attitude moderated over time.

 

The early church experienced similar tension between the institutional religion of the Jewish people and the upstart Jesus sect that arose in the first century. Due to the opposition of the official religious leaders, the people met in their homes and shared their experiences and their meals, supporting one another materially as needed.[i] Our recent experiences with the pandemic and subsequent lockdown has brought many to the point of questioning whether we have departed from the early church model in favor of centering our faith on the idea of large buildings filled with hundreds of people as the proper model for ministry. We have all wondered in view of apocalyptic persecutions foretold by several denominations how church would organize itself under those pressures. This lockdown may be an opportunity to explore that. Should we rethink church or return to church as usual as soon as possible? The temptation to keep things as they have gone for centuries can be extraordinarily strong, even when it can be proven to be dysfunctional.

 

While I was attending college, all those many years ago, I had the opportunity to study the Bible with a man and his wife who were searching for some answers from the Bible. I shared with them what I had discovered. They pondered what I had shared and then said that it was obvious what the truth was on the issue. They thanked me for helping them to see it. I then asked them what they planned to do with this truth. The husband replied, "Nothing." A little surprised, I asked why they sought the answer if they were going to do nothing? He said they had been doing things differently for so long, it made no sense to change. Maybe he summed it up for many of the rest of us as well.



[i] Acts 4:32

 

 

 

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Scripture marked (NIV) taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION and NIV are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc. Use of either trademark for the offering of goods or services requires the prior written consent of Biblica US, Inc.