By Terry Chamberlin:
« Someone recently said about home churches: "House churches work until you grow to big for it. Nothing wrong with a building to meet in."
Grow too big? You mean like when 3,000 people came to Christ on the day of Pentecost? Those 3,000 who all met in homes all over the city, impacting all their neighbors?
Big churches prevent all that the Body of Christ is there to accomplish: Turn everyone in the church into power sources. The big church is made up of mostly people who come and sit and watch a select team put on a show for them.
They sit there and watch and are never involved in healing the sick or evicting satan or raising the dead or healing the blind, or even bringing others to Christ.
The Body of Christ is an organism, not an organisation. The stronger/bigger the organisation, the weaker the organism.
During the appropriately-named Dark Ages, the Roman Catholic church organization was stronger than most governments. During this time, seeing anyone heal the sick or raise the dead was so rare, the Catholic church declared those people to be "Saints" and raised them above everyone else (wouldn't want the regular people to think it possible that they too could do this).
The church organization is the biggest enemy of the Body of Christ that there has ever been. It strongly promotes the idea that there are those who do ministry and those who don't.
It creates a hierarchy of the professionals (who are paid) and the non-professionals (who are not paid). The leaders and the followers. The gifted and the ungifted. The spiritual and the unspiritual. None of this is in the scripture. It was the religious organization that resisted and eventually killed Jesus.
Jesus used an analogy that we ignore in the modern church organization. He made a clear distinction between the shepherd and the hired hand.
The hired hand runs when it gets tough. The shepherd does not. The hired pastor quits (or gets fired) when it gets tough.
Indeed, the idea of a pastor being the head honcho isn't found anywhere in the scripture. It is an invention of man.
This concept of the church being something you go to or attend services at is very destructive to God's agenda.
God's agenda is the energizing, empowerment and release of every member of His church, which is us.
A big building means a financial overhead. It means needing to constantly appeal to the people in it to give money to pay for it's expenses (mortgage, utilities, property tax, repairs and upkeep).
Who will own this big building? One person? What if that person later decides he wants to sell it? What if he doesn't like some of the people attending services there? It's his building, he can do what he wants with it, and no one can say otherwise.
So, nowadays, a corporation is created to own the building. The Christians get this "church" corporation from the non-Christian gov't.
The gov't makes the rules that govern that corporation. Who owns this corporation? A board of directors (the chairman, the president and the secretary/treasurer). Now they get to say who does what.
Whenever persecution happens, the church corporations are the first to go (or be controlled), and all that is left is the actual, real Body of Christ, who meet all over the place in homes, just like on the day of Pentecost.
It is also during the times when the church organization is at its weakest (or is non-existent) that the Church of God organism comes alive in power.
The gathering of the saints (we are ALL saints) is designed by God to be a close-knit, intimate fellowship of people who know and love and support and help each other.
As soon as a gathering gets too big for that, it should split into two smaller gatherings to protect this love and intimacy.
« Someone recently said about home churches: "House churches work until you grow to big for it. Nothing wrong with a building to meet in."
Grow too big? You mean like when 3,000 people came to Christ on the day of Pentecost? Those 3,000 who all met in homes all over the city, impacting all their neighbors?
Big churches prevent all that the Body of Christ is there to accomplish: Turn everyone in the church into power sources. The big church is made up of mostly people who come and sit and watch a select team put on a show for them.
They sit there and watch and are never involved in healing the sick or evicting satan or raising the dead or healing the blind, or even bringing others to Christ.
The Body of Christ is an organism, not an organisation. The stronger/bigger the organisation, the weaker the organism.
During the appropriately-named Dark Ages, the Roman Catholic church organization was stronger than most governments. During this time, seeing anyone heal the sick or raise the dead was so rare, the Catholic church declared those people to be "Saints" and raised them above everyone else (wouldn't want the regular people to think it possible that they too could do this).
The church organization is the biggest enemy of the Body of Christ that there has ever been. It strongly promotes the idea that there are those who do ministry and those who don't.
It creates a hierarchy of the professionals (who are paid) and the non-professionals (who are not paid). The leaders and the followers. The gifted and the ungifted. The spiritual and the unspiritual. None of this is in the scripture. It was the religious organization that resisted and eventually killed Jesus.
Jesus used an analogy that we ignore in the modern church organization. He made a clear distinction between the shepherd and the hired hand.
The hired hand runs when it gets tough. The shepherd does not. The hired pastor quits (or gets fired) when it gets tough.
Indeed, the idea of a pastor being the head honcho isn't found anywhere in the scripture. It is an invention of man.
This concept of the church being something you go to or attend services at is very destructive to God's agenda.
God's agenda is the energizing, empowerment and release of every member of His church, which is us.
A big building means a financial overhead. It means needing to constantly appeal to the people in it to give money to pay for it's expenses (mortgage, utilities, property tax, repairs and upkeep).
Who will own this big building? One person? What if that person later decides he wants to sell it? What if he doesn't like some of the people attending services there? It's his building, he can do what he wants with it, and no one can say otherwise.
So, nowadays, a corporation is created to own the building. The Christians get this "church" corporation from the non-Christian gov't.
The gov't makes the rules that govern that corporation. Who owns this corporation? A board of directors (the chairman, the president and the secretary/treasurer). Now they get to say who does what.
Whenever persecution happens, the church corporations are the first to go (or be controlled), and all that is left is the actual, real Body of Christ, who meet all over the place in homes, just like on the day of Pentecost.
It is also during the times when the church organization is at its weakest (or is non-existent) that the Church of God organism comes alive in power.
The gathering of the saints (we are ALL saints) is designed by God to be a close-knit, intimate fellowship of people who know and love and support and help each other.
As soon as a gathering gets too big for that, it should split into two smaller gatherings to protect this love and intimacy.
By Terry Chamberlin:
« Someone recently said about home churches: "House churches work until you grow to big for it. Nothing wrong with a building to meet in."
Grow too big? You mean like when 3,000 people came to Christ on the day of Pentecost? Those 3,000 who all met in homes all over the city, impacting all their neighbors?
Big churches prevent all that the Body of Christ is there to accomplish: Turn everyone in the church into power sources. The big church is made up of mostly people who come and sit and watch a select team put on a show for them.
They sit there and watch and are never involved in healing the sick or evicting satan or raising the dead or healing the blind, or even bringing others to Christ.
The Body of Christ is an organism, not an organisation. The stronger/bigger the organisation, the weaker the organism.
During the appropriately-named Dark Ages, the Roman Catholic church organization was stronger than most governments. During this time, seeing anyone heal the sick or raise the dead was so rare, the Catholic church declared those people to be "Saints" and raised them above everyone else (wouldn't want the regular people to think it possible that they too could do this).
The church organization is the biggest enemy of the Body of Christ that there has ever been. It strongly promotes the idea that there are those who do ministry and those who don't.
It creates a hierarchy of the professionals (who are paid) and the non-professionals (who are not paid). The leaders and the followers. The gifted and the ungifted. The spiritual and the unspiritual. None of this is in the scripture. It was the religious organization that resisted and eventually killed Jesus.
Jesus used an analogy that we ignore in the modern church organization. He made a clear distinction between the shepherd and the hired hand.
The hired hand runs when it gets tough. The shepherd does not. The hired pastor quits (or gets fired) when it gets tough.
Indeed, the idea of a pastor being the head honcho isn't found anywhere in the scripture. It is an invention of man.
This concept of the church being something you go to or attend services at is very destructive to God's agenda.
God's agenda is the energizing, empowerment and release of every member of His church, which is us.
A big building means a financial overhead. It means needing to constantly appeal to the people in it to give money to pay for it's expenses (mortgage, utilities, property tax, repairs and upkeep).
Who will own this big building? One person? What if that person later decides he wants to sell it? What if he doesn't like some of the people attending services there? It's his building, he can do what he wants with it, and no one can say otherwise.
So, nowadays, a corporation is created to own the building. The Christians get this "church" corporation from the non-Christian gov't.
The gov't makes the rules that govern that corporation. Who owns this corporation? A board of directors (the chairman, the president and the secretary/treasurer). Now they get to say who does what.
Whenever persecution happens, the church corporations are the first to go (or be controlled), and all that is left is the actual, real Body of Christ, who meet all over the place in homes, just like on the day of Pentecost.
It is also during the times when the church organization is at its weakest (or is non-existent) that the Church of God organism comes alive in power.
The gathering of the saints (we are ALL saints) is designed by God to be a close-knit, intimate fellowship of people who know and love and support and help each other.
As soon as a gathering gets too big for that, it should split into two smaller gatherings to protect this love and intimacy.
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek
हिन्दी