Home church basics

Ok, so as you all know, I plan on us meeting as a "home church" from September 2009 until Palm Sunday of 2010. Then we will start with our public worship meetings and such. Basically I want us to try not to grow until after this home church phase. I think it will give us a good time to get comfortable with each other and with what we would like to be as a church. All that to say, here is what I envision us doing for those six months or so before we "go public."

Each week I plan on us enjoying a meal together, thus we will rotate where we will meet. Hopefully each home won't have to host more than once a month. I believe that this will do several things for us. Namely, it will build our community. It will also prepare us all to build community in the future. Plus I think it helps us to learn about one another in a fairly informal setting.

Then I plan on us learning and discussing our church together. For the first eight weeks, I would like us to work through three different books. "unChristian" by Kinnaman and Lyons, "The Emotionally Healthy Church" by Scazzero, and "Exclusion and Embrace" by Volf. Now, I am not usually a "work through books in small groups" type of guy, but I think using these three as a foundation for who we are will really help us. The first, "unChristian" basically sets up why it is important to plant a church. It talks about people our age and their response to church in general. "The Emotionally Healthy Church" is the best practical church book I have read. I am usually not a fan of those type of books, but this one is exceptional. I think it will help us to avoid many pitfalls most churches suffer from. The last "Exclusion and Embrace" is mostly about forgiveness, but it is also about living in a world with people very different from you. Obviously I have read all three, but I would prefer not to teach through each. I am working through each and making tentative 8 week plans for each. Now, since we will be talking about each a little bit each week, we will not take a long time with any of them. I think that will help our ADD generation.

After that, I have us going through some of the more difficult things we will deal with as a church. The reason I have us going through those books first is so that, hopefully, we will have some perspective on how to disagree and still belong to the same church.

So, I have these topics divided into certain types of categories. "Discipleship" will hopefully bring us along on our journey in knowing Christ. The topics I have for that are "Bible" for 4 weeks, "Calvinism v Arminianism v Open Theism" for 4 weeks, "Church Polity" for 3 (this will be more of a discussion of how we want to run our church, not riveting, but necessary), "Trinity and Christology" for 2 weeks, and closing with "Eschatoloty" for 3 weeks (study of last things). The parts I want to lead in this section are "church polity" and the last week of "Calvinism v Arminianism v Open Theism" but I would say all the other topics are up for grabs if there is one you would like to teach. In the "Calvinism etc" study I have us spending one week on each belief system and then one week discussing the pros and cons of each.

Then I have a category of "Service" where we will spend three weeks each on various difficult topics on our world today. I see us being able to serve our community by mediating between the Christian church and our secular society. The topics I see us looking at, in this order, are "Consumerism" where we can discuss the idol of stuff, "War/Violence" where we can look at the various opinions about this difficult topic, "Gender Roles" obvious..., "Abortion" obvious again, and "Homosexuality" but we could extend this one to "Sexual Ethics" in general. Let me know. The only one of these that I would like to teach is homosexuality. But if someone is really passionate about that I would be willing to have someone else teach it.

Last, I have us working on "Mission" wherein we will discuss some of the various religions we will encounter. I plan on us spending at most 20 minutes on each of these per week, with two weeks each per religion. I have: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, New Age, Atheism, Christian Science, Jehovah's Witness and Mormonism. I am comfortable, in fact I would prefer, if I don't teach any of these.

Now, I am open to changing this plan, but I do have reasons for having it the way I have it now. I purposefully loaded some of the more controversial things toward the end. I think that will give us some time to get comfortable with one another and hopefully disagree peacefully on some of the less touchy subjects first. However, that presented a difficult decision, because I didn't want us to have two really controversial topics during the same week. So I purposefully separated "Bible," "Calvinism etc," "Abortion," and "Homosexuality."

There are several reasons that I would like everyone to teach, but since Grant was the only one to respond to that and he responded in the affirmative, I will take the silence as agreement. Grant, feel free to take any of those you would like to teach, but I think you would be good at working through "The Emotionally Healthy Church" because there is some counseling background to it, I think you would do well with any of the discipleship areas, and "War/Violence" but I am fine if you aren't interested in any of those. I would like it if Tanner taught about Islam, but if someone else really wants that one that's fine too. Let me know guys.

I got moved to days, finally. While not a promotion, I am hoping to get a promotion soon. Who knows. We are still looking for a rent house, so pray for us. I'm not really worried, we still have a long time, but it would be nice to get that locked down soon. What about the rest of you? Anything we can pray for you for?