Folks who follow the blog (or my Facebook or Twitter projections) know that our family’s primary community of worship has been a house church since we moved to San Francisco almost three years ago. This has been a great experience. We found close community quickly, made the kind of friends with whom we can celebrate life’s joys, mourn life’s tragedies, care for in time of need, and be cared for in our own.
And for the past 6 weeks or so, we have been adding normal church to our Sunday routine, heading to an evening worship service at a smallish church plant.
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Why are we adding “normal church” to our regular pattern of worship?
For one thing, I have always missed large group singing. I find that atmosphere to be more often conducive to connecting with God through song. In small groups the experience of joint worship is usually not as enveloping.
Another dynamic is opening up more connections. While the intimacy and depth of small group relationships is a crucial part of our life together in Christ, there are gifts and opportunities that one finds in a larger group that cannot exist in a small house church simply because of numbers. In this case, we were looking for a little more diversity in “age and stage,” especially after some turnover in our house church. Currently there is no peer for our 6 year old in the house church, Laura and I are the oldest members, and there is only one other man in the church besides me.
A larger community contains a healthy “more” than the house church in this respect. That is to say, “more” is not always better. Having more connections can often be a cover for having fewer significant relationships. But the up side of numbers is to be found both in opportunities for connecting with more and more kinds of people and also in being in community with people who have more gifts for the building up of the body of Christ.
So, house church has been and continues to be a rich source of worship, community, and sharing in Christ with people in San Francisco. And, we’ve started enriching that sharing in Christ together by starting to connect with the good folks at Eucharist.
Any questions?
no . . but I do have a comment . . good for you!
I’ve spent the last year and a half in a small dinner/church group, and the things I’ve missed are very similar to those you mention – group singing and “age and stage” diversity. As an addendum to the felt need for “age and stage” diversity, I also miss interacting with what I call Random Christians. Random Christians are just other people who I would otherwise have nothing in common but Christ were we not also in the same location once a week for “church.” My life has been enriched by Random Christians in surprising and deep ways, and I miss that dynamic.
I’m currently considering rejoining a normal church, and I find I feel like I need a guide to help me ease back in. How have you managed the… difficulties with being part of a normal church again?
We’re easing in. No difficulties thus far. It has been a very gracious welcome, including walking out once with a homebrew in my hand!
I think that’s a healthy move. You’re not moving away from your primary community of faith, you’re supplementing. I know you and your wife are great healthy cooks (minus the cocktails), but it doesn’t hurt to supplement with a multi-vitamin and maybe some fish oil. We’re moving away from our mother church involvement this summer as an experiment of sorts. We do a neighborhood kids church in the morning on Sundays (in place of “normal” church), a men’s study once a week, a women’s study once a week, and a “adult gathering” for study/communion/prayer every other week. After the summer, we’ll be deciding whether to do things different or whether some kind of supplement is necessary. It’s no question to us that our local community group is our “church,” but we will see whether we need to add to and or subtract after the summer. When I do something different than “normal,” or move back toward some “normal” I feel like I have to explain every move I make … even though not many (if any) people are asking me to explain myself.
This is a similar rhythm that our church (www.renewcommunity.org) adheres to. We have a big-small-big-small monthly gathering rhythm. Specifically, we meet one week as a larger gathering (think ‘normal church’). The next week we meet in scattered house churches around the area. We find that it provides both the intimacy and relational family feel in a house church and a space of community formation, storytelling, teaching and corporate worship during large gathering weeks.
This pace/rhythm certainly has both advantages and disadvantages, but its a rhythm our community has come to embrace and love in the balance between “gathering” and “scattering” and it helps us to think more in terms of networks than events.
J.R.: I closely follow the network you belong to and love your suggestions. I’ve even thought of stealing your church community’s name.
A lot of people would accuse you of “shopping” for a church or church “home.” Not me. The whole concept of belonging to a church (a specific one, with a specific, excerpted from the whole mentality)) is very unscriptural. In some sense, this practice your family has adopted is very Biblical; is not the church the called out ones that form the Body of Jesus Christ?
I have seen great value in the ideas of recovering the objectivity of the New Covenant. It promotes a far more ecumenical spirit and sees all Christians as in the Body of Christ, though admittedly, some are more faithful than others. Whenever the people of God gather near your home in San Francisco, I see no problem in being a part of that.
Much of the problem that people have with more loose communities is rooted in being part of something very specific and precisely different. Instead, the Scriptures talk about a wide, generous, broad Body of Christ that we come into union with through Christ once we are Christians. If you accept the latter idea, you can see yourself as a part of any gathering of fellow disciples of Jesus.
Burly –
You can steal it.
We didn’t invent the word.
Our church loves the name The Renew Community (even though its grammatically incorrect) because
(a) it reminds us we are all imperfect
(b) we have been renewed by God – past tense
(c) we are continually having our lives renewed by Christ – present tense
(c) and we join God in the renewal of all things – future tense.
Just ran across your blog via Jesus Creed, glad to find it! We’re a “normal church” (some would disagree!!) experimenting with going the other way. We’ve run the standard “cell and celebration” model for 18 years. Now encouraging more creatively decentralized communities. Just this week were talking with some younger leaders about four sociological “groupings” that seem to be important to humans: one-to-one/triad; small grouping 8 – 18? for intense support; middle grouping of 50 to 100 or so, friendship, “social set”; a “tribe” of 100+ for larger social identity, causes and interaction. We’ve got a grouping of summertime houseboaters who livestream in for worship at the dock, as a group. Mixed feelings on that and jury is still out . . .
Oh, this is good: http://www.eucharistsf.org/?page_id=120.
I wonder if these communities exist on the east coast.
we’ve been going through a slightly similar experience. i like the models that advocate “smaller groups” coming together periodically into larger, “tribal” (i like that word!) gatherings. imho, there is something of the life we are made to live in both. it is encouraging to read your post. thank you for sharing.
Awesome. News for me on your bio. Thanks for the personal note.
The Barna/”Revolution,” DAWN, DOVE, Rolland Allen, W. Simpson, F. Viola et al gang of home churchers is an amazing recovery of a long lost practice of church as small, simple, and organic. I got to spend several months with an awesome ordained Quaker (former Calvary Chapel/later Vineyard) traveling minister and prolific planter of house churches. Because I work in rural service areas and meet with clients in their homes, and because I pray with and otherwise counsel with clients, about a dozen spontaneous small groups from interested neighbors and friends have just sprung up – emergently – as after-effects of these small, in-house, client meetings. I never try to make this happen. It’s mysterious. And unbidden. I’m still surprised. Across a dozen small and rural areas. I’ve been asked to stay on with some of these home groups. Extremely tempting. But, I cannot. Or will not.
So what?
So the most extreme of these rural and poor areas cannot support what you call “normal” church. I’d like to take a cheap pot shot at you for catechizing larger as normal (payback is coming!).
I do agree with you, however, about the non-negotiable virtues of scale. On the other hand, one large Vineyard in Cincinnati disbanded to go small and distributed itself across neighborhood homes. Vineyards in rural Maine are hubbed. One mid-size Vineyard in Tahoe went small with the population exodus of the middle class during the recent economic catastrophe (a long term event in Tahoe), but of necessity and not of any normative theological motive. That’s on pace for many other smaller communities. I’ve heard other such stories of the scale moving from large to small. Including first hand knowledge of soccer stadium, Billy Graham type, huge revivals (Venezuela, Argentina) predominately producing home churches, and even partly eschewing denominational and large-scale church models, so according to my DAWN friends. I’m reviewing a doctoral thesis from a student at Regent who is doing empirical research in the economies of scale relative to costs/benefits of home churches versus larger churches, where exorbitant amounts of near hero worship and money goes to pastoral salary, insurance, building maintenance, utilities, and where people become passive spectators to the large … and so on. I’m sure you know the drills.
But I do agree with you in my two cents-worth that church exists across all scales … like any other scala naturae, wherever two or three, or two or three thousand gather, but with no homogeneous single model, and certainly with no perfect scale, large or small, as “normal” (there, gotcha back!). You may have meant “normal” with a sense of subtle irony anyway?
It was great to hear your story.
… one last jab at you for your malapropism on larger church as “normal,” see the Christian Canadian rocker, Bruce Cockburne’s rockin’ song, “… the trouble with normal, is that it always gets worse …” I double dare you to have the whole LAAAARGE congregation sing that rockin’ song the next time you and King Kong go Big …
Cheers,
Jim
Thanks, all, for sharing your stories. Part of what we’re thinking about these days is that varying what we do is often healthy (I see that as a common threads in comments here and on FB and Twitter) and that for many of us one community will not meet all of our social / emotional / spiritual needs–and that’s o.k. Perhaps if we had a more engrained sense of needing to be part of one community to give x part of ourselves and another to give y we’d be healthier (and perhaps pastors would feel the freedom to get out to other communities and find places they can “receive” in order to be recharged from all the “giving” they do).
I’m looking for a house church in SF. Can you point me to any?
“The Table.” Email me offline. jrdkirk[at]gmail