For the five of you who have been following my blog for any period of time you know I have some trouble with church related issues for some time now.  It began when my views on the tithe changed which not only eliminated the possibility of me being a traditional church pastor but eventually seemed to eliminate me from membership and ministry from most of the traditional churches I visited in an attempt to fit into the mold.  For some time I have been fighting what I felt God was pushing me towards but recently with some help I have learned to stop worrying and leave the church.

Over a month ago I and a few of my friends began to move away from going to church and move toward being the church.  I would think that things began when I read a book by George Barna called Revolution.  George Barna has been following trends within the traditional church for many years and he has successfully predicted many fads and trends that have come through the years.  In Revolution he talks about a group of people that love Jesus but don’t love the church, these people are sometimes disenfranchised, hurt or just have never been in church but for what ever reason they have no intention of walking through the door of a church unless someone is getting married or has died.

He predicts for many reasons that churches as a whole will move to smaller models, and many already have.  I don’t know of many churches that don’t practice some sort of small, care, cell or G12 group.  Christians have realized that they want to have a closer community than is entirely possible in a large church setting.  These groups will not follow the traditional church model of going to a building but will simply be what Jesus talks about in Matthew 18:20 “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”

At any rate maybe I will talk more about that at a later time, the point of this was to say that for five weeks now I have been taking part of a home church with some of my closest brothers and sister and it has made a great deal of difference to me.  I think we are closer to each other than we could have been before and growing in Christ more than I thought possible.

We gather together, we pray together and for one another, we confess to one another, we eat together and fellowship, all the things commanded by the Bible for believer to do for one another.  Of course it is possible to do these things in a traditional church but it is also easier to not do them, and those who do these things with their brethren do them in smaller groups anyway.  You can not possible have deep fellowship with several hundred people.

I am not sure where this is going quite yet, all of my training was in how to run a church that was the diametrically opposed to what we are doing now.  But it is wonderful to wait on the Lord.