John Armstrong talked about house church movement in his blog today.

And yes, you guessed it. I’m recommending another book!

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/john_cross/dark_night.txt

I think that if a book is truly important and groundbreaking, some negative reaction to it should be expected. The Emotionally Healthy series never suggests that we should begin our Christian lives with introspection. But it does become very important later in our walk with the Lord.

The second book in the series (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality) describes six stages in the Christian life.

Stage 1: Life-changing awareness of God
Stage 2: Discipleship (learning)
Stage 3: The Active Life (serving)
—————— The Wall —————
Stage 4: Journey Inward (understanding my inner life)
Stage 5: Journey Outward (understanding my relationships
with others)
Stage 6: Transformed into Love

The problem is that many committed Christians get stuck at The Wall between State 3 and Stage 4. To get
beyond that wall we have to be willing to get very honest about ourselves, acknowledge what we feel and try to understand why. If we don’t do this, we remain spiritually immature because we remain emotionally immature.

Encountering The Wall is the recurring experience of Christians throughout history (Augustine, Ignatius, John Wesley, Francis Schaeffer, to name a few) and is exceedingly common among pastors and church leaders in modern evangelical churches.

Francis Schaeffer spent ten years contending for the faith, pastoring churches and upholding sound, orthodox doctrine. But he hit The Wall when he saw profound unreality in how many Christians live. While they profess faith in Jesus and uphold sound doctrine, they can be so defensive, irritable, hypercritical, unloving, etc. He felt this so strongly that he began to deeply question whether the gospel was in fact true. He went back to the Bible and found that the gospel is indeed true, and that evangelicals of his day were ignoring much of what the Bible actually teaches about the emotional component of our walk with God. In our zeal to stress fact and faith over feeling, we lose our sense of who we are, and we lose the ability to have loving relationships with God and with others. Many Christians sense that this is true but are afraid to honestly face it in their own personal lives. They give trite spiritual advice like Job’s friends rather than wrestling with the fundamental questions of who they are and who God is.

Though I haven’t read “The Emotionally Healthy Church,” I guess not everyone gave it a thumbs up. I happened to read this review from the 9 Marks ministry of Mark Dever of Capitol Baptist Church in Washington: http://www.alliancenet.org/CC/article/0,,PTID314526_CHID598026_CIID1880196,00.html

Going off his review (not the book), I’m thinking that Christians, who are solidly grounded in the gospel and in the grace of Jesus, would not be thrown off by the book that supposedly stresses that we begin by being emotionally true to our own inner selves (not be a hypocrit), rather than resolving all of our interpersonal issues by personally going deeper into the gospel.

I recently discovered that much of the understanding and inspiration behind the Emotionally Healthy book series came from the lectures of Dr. Francis Schaeffer developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s. These are summarized in his classic book True Spirituality which was published first in 1971. That book has a more theological and philosophical style (Schaeffer was a philosopher) but it is based on sound, orthodox, faithful reading of the Bible. At first, I was tempted to dismiss the Emotionally Healthy series as liberal Christian pop psychology. But it is nothing of the sort. It is rooted in faith that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer for all of our problems.

We discussed the results together and honestly shared where we are at in terms of our emotional development as well as how this has implications with how we relate to one another in our church (and in our marriages!)

As for me, I am currently an “Emotional Child” on many categories. Somewhat humbling realization.

Thank you for bringing such refreshing honesty to my life, to our family and to our ministry. I love you.

There is a great need to address the excesses of modern culture in the US. Americans need to be constantly challenged to overcome theses excesses. The disciplines I learned in the UBF community (Daily Bread, 1:1 ministry, testimony writing and sharing, Fellowship meetings and more) have helped me to do so. I can’t overstate their importance to my life.

However, in addressing the excesses of individualism and selfishness, are we afraid to look inward enough? Are we willing to loosen our UBF disciplines to give room for something else? For fear of indulging myself, my feelings, or losing my point and my mission, I know I often neglect important aspects of the whole spiritual life. This is not a small matter, since spiritual maturity (being in Jesus) must be the true center of the house church ministry.

For years, I evaluated myself and my ministry in light of our outwardly focused UBF disciplines and attributes (maintaining 1:1 ministry, faithfulness to DB, testimony writing and sharing, etc) But I began to feel like a hamster on a running wheel trying to keep up with them. I found I had to jump off and evaluate what I was doing. It’s not easy to integrate family and church, because it’s not easy to integrate the spiritual life into visible life. Disciplines are made for man to make us grow into spiritual maturity. But disciplines aren’t Jesus after all, whose yoke is easy and burden is light. Without fellowship with Jesus, disciplines are worse than useless. Spiritual maturity requires more than soldier-like obedience and discipline. It requires honesty and it requires as Jennifer Rabchuk said, an anointing of the Holy Spirit who goes wherever He pleases, not where we expect. I like what she said about being flexible and supportive of each other, in an environment of trust. I love the way the Apostle Paul trusted the work of God in other people. It was an expression of his trust in God. I don’t want to avoid discipline. I want to refine my disciplines, making them deeper and richer band more honest.

Maybe I need to ask and be asked a different kind of question – things that don’t usually come up in our Daily Bread or inductive Bible study material, or UBF website. Things that few in UBF seemed to be asking me in my very hurried and limited time together with them. Things like: What do you really think? How do you really feel? Are you thriving in your vine and branch relationship with Jesus? Why or why not? Is your fellowship with others growing? Do you have any friends? Why not? If your ministry is too small to provide friendship, how are you going to make sure you take care of this basic need? Do you have a clear idea of the expectations you have of yourself and of others? Are they implicit or explicit? Are they God given? How do you know? Is your house church both inwardly caring and outwardly focused? (this was Ruth Tuckers question in her recent presentation to us on House Church ministry…. I want to think about this one a lot.) Would everyone in your fellowship agree with your evaluation? Why not? Etc, etc.

It seems so obvious. Yet I found that I hadn’t taken enough time to look at these things honestly. I wish I had. When I took time to hear these questions I found an iceberg of issues in my life. Areas that haunted me and simmered below the surface as nagging problems, past wounds that were not yet healed, stresses and burdens that needed to be brought into light and grace of Jesus through open and honest conversation with His people. I need to look more deeply into these issues in order to grow. I need to get to know others below and outside the parameters of my understanding of UBF discipline. And I think its healthy to get to know people outside of UBF, too. Rather than losing our mission and our focus, I think this will only clarify and strengthen them.

But I also agree with the point made in this article that “it waters down the historical and theological meaning of church” when we use this term. I am wondering if we run the risk of sounding arrogant or isolating ourselves from the Body of Christ, even unintentionally, if we take the term “church” too lightly. I’m not ready to say we do take this term lightly. Honestly, I know very little about what a church is historically and theologically but I would love to hear the thoughts of those who do know something.

So clearly a human family does not necessarily make a church. But when both spouses are saved, I believe there is a different dynamic operating. In this case, assuming my simple definition of church (above) is correct, I believe the family in this case is a microcosm of the Church. I’ll be quick to say that this does not mean that the family will necessarily reflect all the characteristics we’ve come to identify with the church. I’m not sure that any single local body of believers in the history of the Church has reflected all the characteristics we associate with the Church (e.g., see Revelation chapters 1-3). Speculating as I write, perhaps the complete fulfillment of the Church will come only when she has been perfected and is presented to Jesus for marriage in heaven.

So this is one point. (Guess this reaction is not so simple after all. :)) Another point I believe worth serious consideration, however, is the fact that UBF’s focus on a (saved) couple/family as a ‘house-church’ has an important impact. As a church, it means that UBF maintains a very strong emphasis on the sacredness of marriage. We know from Hebrews that “Marriage should be honored by all” (Heb 13:4), but how many Christians (especially in the American churches) do we see obeying this command? It is a frightening tribute to the decay of the church that the divorce rate in the church is little different from that outside the church – something around 50% I believe. I suggest that UBF’s focus on the family as a ‘house-church’ has been a major if not the main factor in keeping UBF as a church relatively pure in their obedience to Christ in the matter of divorce. So much follows from this… so much. We know that the purpose of marriage is to produce Godly offspring: “Has not the LORD made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his. And why one? Because he was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth.” (Malachi 2:15) (As noted above, Paul reiterates this same idea implicitly with his comment about holy children in 1st Corinthians chapter 7.) So honoring marriage is the bedrock of God’s purpose for us, and clearly God has blessed UBF with a Godly understanding of marriage as exhibited by the evidence of a very low divorce rate. As a result, I would not easily suggest a change to the culture of UBF with its emphasis on the family as a ‘house church’ without extremely careful consideration of all the implications of this focus.

That’s my 2 cents. :)

Love in Christ,

Bill

Certainly there is a distinction: family is family and church is church. The point I’d like to make is that we can learn far more from studying how to integrate the two concepts than we can by disecting them separately.

In a broader sense, I believe people today can learn more from the integrated spiritual life, rather than trying to understand and uphold the numerous distinctions that theologians have made over the centuries.

When a family like yours is sent out to plant a church, it is a wonderful thing, and a cause for celebration. But even in your case, I would not say that your family *is* a house church. Your family members may be the stewards of a church that meets at your house. Perhaps on some Sundays your family members may be the only ones attending your worship service. But still I would say that your family and your house church are different entities.
To some, this may seem like splitting hairs. I’m not a person who likes to split hairs. But in this case, I think it is important, because it affects our view of what a church is and our view of what a family ought to be. We in UBF have given lots of thought to the latter, but not yet to the former.

Quite a few years ago, the Toledo chapter clarified this: we prayed for newlyweds to be a “family of faith” or a “Godly and healthy family”. Families, such as mine, who were officially sent out to another city are called “house churches”, where Sunday service is held each week. What do you think about this distinction? I would be in favor of not putting the pressure on newly married couples to be a house church. We should not mix the terms “family” and “house church” unless we know the meaning very well. I’m definitely in favor of working to clarify what a house church does and is. I think it is very different from the traditional meaning of “church”.

In spite of some confusion over the term, I have come to understand that our “house church” life has three deep meanings:

1) For personal training for me and my wife, and children, to worship God. To keep a worship service each week by yourself and to dedicate one room of your house for a worship service room is not easy to say the least. Early on we decided to have a separate worship service without our children. We pray together with them, and they attend conferences, but this is a huge need for us as to how to help children.

2) For laying a foundation for possible future work. I have to understand and accept that we can only do small things now as a house church ministry. When we first came to Detroit, we thought (and many seemed to expect) that we would just form a mini-Toledo UBF, doing ALL the activities the same, but just on a small scale. Within 3 weeks, we found this doesn’t work. Instead of many meetings, we developed more of a lifestyle, a pattern of praying together as a family, keeping Sunday service and Bible study. Still we believe we are settling down in Detroit in order to provide a place for future co-workers to come and a greater work of God.

3) For welcoming travelling guests. I counted just under 100 people (from UBF and not from UBF) who have attended our worship service the past 6 years. We have not done much but I believe we served God’s purpose in some way for those who came into our house. I think the house of Pricilla and Aquilla sets a good example of welcoming, along with that of Lydia.

The greatest comment I received on our Sunday service is this: One uncle of a friend attended our service. During the service, he took off his hat. Later he told me he hasn’t taken off his hat in many years at any church he visited, because he did not sense the Holy Spirit. But when he came to our house church, he sensed the life of the Holy Spirit, so he took off his hat. Worshipping God in Spirit has been the greatest and most wonderful lesson I’ve learned since becoming a house church.

I have much to say, but I only want to write a few points at a time.

However, the larger difficulty is that we are not equipped to function as a church. Realities such as having a husband on the tenure track, three growing and active children, 175 miles separating us from the nearest UBF chapter, 500 miles from HQ ~all of these present challenges to serving as a house church. Our only UBF activities have been regional conferences, which are often about 400 miles away, and focused on college students. Of course, that is the point of UBF, but it didn’t do much to address our personal and family struggles. Each chapter is tremendously busy with their own ministry, Bible students and their own family struggles just like ours, there is little time for leaders to care for one another.

For us, the greatest difficulty (which Joe mentioned) is the spiritual health of our family, including ourselves and our children. We need prayer, encouragement, God’s Word, fellowship, godly counsel and more. As I became involved in our neighborhood and school, I encountered many sincere Christians. I often lamented why I was surrounded by earnest Christians, but had to feel alone serving campus mission ~basically cut off from others because we did not attend a local church.

I’m not sure of a creative solution, but ours has become involvement in different local Bible studies and Moms-in-Touch prayer groups and only very recently attending a local church. For a long time, I struggled that I wasn’t being true to our ministry and mission. But, God is encouraging us and strengthening us daily. I’m not sure what this will look like in time, but for now, we are thankful to be encouraged by other Christians and hopeful that God will continue to work in and through us.

I would love to hear others comments~of struggles and examples of dealing with these kinds of issues…we are still trying to learn and find our way in serving Him. I just pray that my heart may be focused on Him and nothing else!

It’s great to hear from you, and we are excited that you might be visiting next month. It will be great to spend time with you and your family.

The basic question “What is UBF?” has been coming up indirectly among UBF leaders a lot over the past year, but no one has tackled this issue head on. Are we a student ministry, or are we a church? Clearly we are more than a student ministry, because we are multigenerational and have taken on most of the functions of a church. Certainly the larger chapters are operating as de facto churches, and have done so for a long time. Administration of the sacraments is becoming more of our regular practice, though we are still working out how to do this. But as you point out, smaller chapters are not acting as churches, and rightly so, because they are not prepared to do so.

With regard to GMU, you said, “We cannot offer students or others the level of support that a defined church can.” Although I am concerned about students, I am much more concerned about fanmilies like yours who have invested a lot in our ministry and have a commitment to it that goes far beyond the student years. Are we providing an environment to sustain the long-term spiritual growth and health of your family? In some respects we are, but in other respects we aren’t. If we are falling short of what a church ought to be, what is the solution? I’m not sure. But the solution is definitely NOT to impose a greater burden on families like yours, to expect you to work harder than you already are and grow your chapter into a fully functioning independent church in the short term. Your experience is common. The majority of UBF chapters in North America consist of just one or two families. We have spread ourselves pretty thin. Perhaps small chapters like yours could spend more time with other nearby chapters — not in addition to, but instead of, some of your local chapter activities — so that you and your children can experience more meaningful community life. Perhaps small chapters like yours need to form symbiotic partnerships with churches in the local community. Again, I’m not sure what the solution is. But I don’t like the status quo, and I think we need to be honest about the challenges that we face and try to come up with creative solutions.