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If you know me and if you are part of Vintage Faith Church - you would hear pretty constantly that we don't believe the larger Sunday worship gatherings represents what the early church meetings were like. For the first 300 years of the church, the early church did primarily meet in homes in smaller settings and not in buildings with several hundred people and worship bands etc. But even though the larger worship gatherings are not formatted like the early church meetings, we still have larger meetings (3 currently) and strongly believe that larger worship gatherings have purpose and are used by the Spirit in peoples lives and in someone's spiritual formation and in the rhythm and flow of someone's week in part of a church community.
However, you would also hear us constantly promote mid-week Community Groups as where true community can develop and relationships deepen in ways that they can't in larger meetings. We try to communicate that we see these more than "small groups" which usually just last a short time - but we try to structure Community Groups to function in ways that empower leaders to shepherd, study Scripture, make decisions for their groups etc. So I believe that the house church or Community Group (or some sort of regular smaller meeting) format is very, very important. I can't imagine being a church without them and other mid-week meetings such as what we have for Soul Kitchen (for women of our church) etc. We also have taught in our church about the title "pastor" and how it was not originally a title as we use it today, but it was a spritual gift (shepherding) and that many people have pastoral/shepehrding gifts to be used in the church. We communicate that much "pastoring" happens in Community Groups and that the leaders of Community Groups and other smaller groups truly do biblically "pastor" people.
So looking into all the origins of what we do in churches and titles that Frank and George raise in Pagan Christianity, I love, love, love reading that. None of it surprises me or makes me upset that these origins are being written about. I wish every Christian would know the origins of why we do what what we do in our churches. For the past several years, both in our church and when I speak at conferences I also have been stressing that most of what we do in most church's formal meetings on Sundays is not based from the Bible. How preachers preach, pulpits, suits, robes, the design of the buildings we meet in, pews, the title of "pastor", the order of a worship gathering, bands etc. all were not practiced in the early church. I wish all Christians would know the origins of these things. If we all did, then we wouldn't feel so restricted to "this is what church is supposed to look like" and fight about things, when we realize most of what we do (and normally fight about) is no where to be found in the Scriptures. I will comment more on this in the next post.
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