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Us AND Them by Dan Beaty: Essay About Organized Church

Viewing the Organized Church

For the past 7 years since my wife and I began doing Home Church, one question has persisted: How do we view the denominational/organized churches and those who attend them? I have to admit that my initial feeling was one of distaste and even disgust for a time. After all, did not some of the errors, excesses and unbiblical forms and practices of the traditional church system drive us to discovering the freedom and greater effectiveness of Home Church?

Our experience was that after having devoted nearly two decades of service to the traditional church system, we were beginning to see its failures on many fronts. From that God began to show us how many of the things we previously read into the book of Acts as being normal church life were simply not there. We saw how open the meetings were in the New Testament in comparison to the typical North American church service. We also saw how the leaders were expected to serve more than be served and adulated. Besides that, the attention given to the church building itself was compared to the First Century, when special church buildings were not given much consideration at all.

Having church in the home, of course, does not automatically fix everything. I see it as a step in the right direction, that direction being towards God’s perfect will for His people. But if we are not careful another dangerous step can inadvertently be taken in the wrong direction, away from God’s Heart and Mind for us!

Filed Under: Missions Tagged With: , ,

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When Small Is Big: The Impact of Love and Good Deeds at Work by J.P. Leo Castillo

Several years ago, some co-workers dropped in without any warning at the weekly small group gathering for Christians in our company. We were pleasantly surprised, of course, and asked what prompted them to join our group. They shared about a Christian co-worker who had been their supervisor for a few months on an assignment in another province in the Philippines. They were amazed by the way this brother conducted himself — he was a person of honesty and integrity, he showed that he cared for his people and he pursued excellence in his work. They also noticed that he had been with our small group before they went together on that assignment and came to the conclusion that there must have been something in what we were doing together that influenced the life of this brother. They came to us because they wanted to be like him. They saw Jesus in and through his life.

When the subject of influencing the world for Christ comes up the first images that flash into the minds of many believers often include Christian celebrities who use their status to affect change, massive evangelism events and big churches with outreach programs. The Lord may use such highly visible means but He often works in many other invisible ways to reveal His Kingdom to a lost world.

We often judge the success of what we are doing by its visibility and size. But somehow God’s economy seems to work differently. Jesus often illustrated influence for His Kingdom using the picture of small seeds falling to the ground or being sown in a field, a lamp on a hillside or grains of salt on a plate of food (Matt. 5:13-16; 13:1-42). Perhaps Jesus is saying that it is in the small deeds of “ordinary” Christians in everyday life more than the big people, the big events and the big programs that He and His Kingdom will be revealed.

Filed Under: Evangelism, Missions, Primary Tagged With: , , , ,

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Rethinking the Church by J.P. Leo Castillo

Nowadays, when a well-meaning friend or acquaintance asks me,

“Where do you go to church?”

I often catch myself groping hard for a non-controversial answer. Because to me, this question reveals an almost unquestioned assumption that church refers to building or to an event held once a week, often on a Sunday, and normally called a “worship service.” But is that really the church?

In his book Organic Churches, Neil Cole says that this same question reminds us about the Samaritan woman’s question in John 4:20-24 to Jesus. The Samaritan woman’s concern was about the place of worship. Neil Cole says “where” is the wrong question to ask. The right question is “who?” We do not need to go and seek God in some special place. He has been seeking us right where we are. I have come to the conclusion that church happens where Jesus and His people are – not in one fixed location on a single day of the week.

In recent years I have tried to look at the New Testament church as described in Acts and the Epistles through fresh lenses – to try to understand it without the assumptions that accompany contemporary church practices. This was easier said than done and I still have much to learn (and unlearn). But life is a journey and with it the ongoing discovery and application of God’s plans and purposes for His people. We can only begin to act on what the Lord has revealed to us thus far.

Filed Under: Missions Tagged With: , , , ,

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When Small is Great: The Organic Church

Interview with:

Neil Cole,
author of
Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens

by Christianity Today

Neil Cole is a pastor and the director of Church Multiplication Associates (CMA), a “growing family of organic church networks.” Cole advocates a decentralized, micro-church strategy to reach the growing number of people who will never be attracted to a worship service.

How did you come to faith, and how did that inform the type of ministry you do today?

Neil Cole: I came to Christ in college and grew at a very strong megachurch. I ultimately went on staff there. Later, when the senior pastor left, our church went from 3,500 people to 600. So I’ve seen the struggles of being part of a large church staff.

After finishing seminary and leading a small church in L.A., my denomination asked me to oversee church planting in Southern California and Arizona. We really wanted our first plant to succeed, so we poured in a lot of money. We paid for two full-time pastors, a sound system, worship teams, lots of publicity, consultants and toolkits. But a year later the church died.

What went wrong?

Cole: I think God wanted to teach us something. The parables about the kingdom are usually about starting with something small, like a mustard seed. We learned a church cannot be bought; it must be planted. And that means starting small.

I was trained —to create a church experience as an outpost and invite people to find Christ there. One of our early plans was to rent a coffeehouse to reach young people in Long Beach. We were getting ready to launch. But in the middle of one of our strategy meetings God spoke to us and said, Why not go to the coffeehouses where they are?

Rather than trying to convert people from their coffeehouse to our coffeehouse where we could then convert them to Christ, we decided to bring Christ to them. So we started hanging out at their coffeehouses, and things started rolling. People started coming to faith in Christ. That’s the difference between being centralized and decentralized.

Filed Under: Evangelism, Missions, Pastoral Tagged With: , ,

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New Church New Congregation In A New Culture

We have to consider in building a congregation that reproduce within the culture. This is a dynamic process where you won’t even know how will the Holy Spirit work within the culture.

There is no strict nor book by book instruction that we have to use in order to do this. As pastors, church planters, church leaders, we have to be innovative, open for possibilities and adjustments in case our current ministries is not working well. This should be [jtb2246] done by trusting the Holy Spirit and allow Him to work through the life of the Church.

God then will allow you as a church planter to see whom you should be working with. Having the right people in your core group in starting a church can really help you boost at the first few months.

Filed Under: Eschatology, FREEBIES, Theology Tagged With: ,

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The Organic Church

Starting a new congregation or let say a new church is not easy and may require lots of labor and lots of patience, not to mention all those people who needs to be involved in this task and the amount of money that is needed (depending on the method used).

An Organic Church is alive.
An Organic Church is alive.

Aside from all these, the main movement that we are pushing through right now is what we call the “Organic Church.” This is a kind of church that grows not just merely in numbers but in maturity and reaching out more people for the Lord.

Sometimes, we have the misconception that a growing church is based on numbers. But in Organic Church, we based the growth to the amount of workers and people who reaches out in the field. And this is being measured in the ratio of the church membership.

Filed Under: Evangelism, Missions, Primary Tagged With: ,
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