The Relational Mission

Last week, I wrote about five things we can learn from small group house churches from the first three centuries. Actually there is a sixth, but the last one is so significant—and so often overlooked in our day—that it merits its own post. This attribute of the early church is related to how leadership operated in early house churches; it was team based. If we are academically honest about how we understand the history of the early church, we have to admit that we have very little detailed data about how leadership operated. Some have argued therefore that the early church was absolutely flat, that there were no appointed leaders. Then there are others who read the modern approach of singular leadership into the early church. We cannot read the New Testament to find some kind of house church leadership manual. We have to enter into the story and read between the lines. And we must be careful not to read our current experience into theirs. New Testament theologian, Gilbert Bilzeki...

In my mid-20's, I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia to being a degree in New Testament studies and work under the direction of Gordon Fee, the author of the some of the best commentaries from the last fifty years. I had been working for a TOUCH Outreach Ministries, which promoted the Cell Church model and encouraged churches to embrace a New Testament model of church life based on scriptures that talk about how the early church met from "house to house" (Acts 2:42-46, 5:42, 20:20). In those days, I assumed that the goal was to find the secret ingredients to life in the first century church and to determine how those secrets have been forgotten by the church. I thought my studies would tell me about all the things we need to do today that they did back then which would fix the church.   The more read about the early church, the more I discover what I did not expect to find. (This is usually the case with good research.) For instance, I found that all the research demo...

As a part of the work I do with churches, I often contextualize pieces for the leaders with whom I interact. The following is a letter to one of these leaders that discusses how small groups strategies must be developed to fit the social location of the church. Dear Pastor Jerry, As you move forward in the coaching and consulting, there are things that I will want to share with you that take things a bit deeper than we will have time to process in our monthly coaching sessions or during the days that I am with you during the consultation visits. I could just point you to some books on these topics, but I want to contextualize some key principles so that you can process and apply them to your situation more easily. In this first letter, I want to talk about church strategy, small groups and the social location of the church. I know that this sounds like a mouthful, but as you develop groups, it's important to realize a couple things before diving into strategies. First, small g...