A little over a month ago, the church where I attend held an Organic Weekend, led by Neil Cole and the Church Multiplication Associates team. As a church, we have embraced and been doing house churches (a.k.a. simple church, organic church, etc) for going on four years, and a lot of our foundations were based upon shared truths we discovered and found in Neil’s book the Organic Church.
For me, this training was timed nicely with a shift going on in our family’s journey with house churches, as the one we were attending had grown to fill one house, so we heard from the Lord and were preparing for multiplication into two churches, with myself helping to co-facilitate the new one. We are currently meeting in our home, and have been this whole month.
At the training, much of what was talked wasn’t new to me, but it was great to hear from some folks that have been doing it longer than our church had and gain some new insights. As I sat there the two days, this quote below was probably one of the key pieces of information I left with mulling over:
The Gospel is like a seed, and you have to sow it. When you sow the seed of the Gospel in Israel, a plant that can be called Jewish Christianity grows. When you sow it in Rome, a plant of Roman Christianity grows. You sow the Gospel in Great Britain and you get British Christianity. The seed of the Gospel is later brought to America, and a plant grows of American Christianity. Now, when missionaries come to our lands they brought not only the seed of the Gospel, but their own plant of Christianity, flower pot included! So, what we have to do is to break the flowerpot, take out the seed of the Gospel, sow it in our own cultural soil, and let our own version of Christianity grow.–Dr. D.T. Niles of Sri Lanka
Now, I realize that two people can read something and be impacted two completely different ways, but honestly, this is big stuff to me. A few things jump out to me:
1) “The Gospel is like a seed, and you have to sow it.” This is an area where I feel like God is teaching me a lot. The house church model we currently follow has three parts: Dynamic Truth, Nurturing Relationships, and Apostolic Mission (DNA). All three pieces of the DNA work together, largely at the same time, to perform the functions of the church as God has called it (I have a post coming soon about the scriptural foundations of the DNA), and none of them can be separated from the other two. Being a disciple means we are doing all three, together.
2) “but they bring their own plant of Christianity, flower pot included!” If you question this, then look at how America plants democracy. It’s true. As a nation, we tend to pass along not just our beliefs, but our interpretation of those beliefs as well. And while I don’t know that is always a bad thing, I don’t know if it’s always a good thing. The seed of the Gospel has the ability to grow anywhere it is planted, as long as God as prepared the soil. If we try to bring our own soil with the seed, it is likely just adding layers on top of what God has prepared, causing it to take longer to take root as part of the culture, not just apart from it.
As we began preparing to facilitate a house church, this has been a big prayer of mine. That I would let the seeds of the Gospel be planted and not worry about what the flower pot (our structure for house church time wise) looked like, but just that we are seeing the seed watered and taken care as we watched the DNA being lived out. This new house church can look completely different from the last and still be planting those seeds.
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