If you have never been a part of a home church, you might be wondering what we do when we meet up. All home churches will be different because they all have different people with different preferences in them, but you will find some things that frequently occur in most home churches.
The gatherings are heavily based on what the early church did as recorded in Acts 2:42:
“[The early church] devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
In this blog I will talk about teaching.
In the early church, it says they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching.
The apostles in this context refers to those people who had constantly been with Jesus. These were the ones who saw him open blind eyes and make the crippled walk. They saw him methodically fashion a whip for the sole purpose of flogging money changers who weren’t giving God due respect. They were the ones who deserted him when he was arrested. And they were the ones who placed their fingers in his nail pierced body after he rose from the dead. They were mostly uneducated fishermen and they simply taught other believers from their experience of walking alongside him.
Obviously, those apostles are no longer alive to teach us, but their teachings live on in the Bible.
For believers now, we can learn how to be like Jesus through reading the Bible. That is what we do together when we gather for home church.
This is how it works practically for us. I normally pick one of the smaller letters in the Bible to read aloud as a group such as Titus, James or 2 Peter. Each person reads 3 or 4 verses then passes to the next person to carry on. If at any time, someone has a question or a comment, they can interrupt the reading to do so. If we don’t finish the letter, then we carry on the next time.
It is amazing what questions and comments people come up with.
Everyone has a different view of what God is like and how we are to reflect him in this world. Those views will come out in their comments. They may be true and reveal great insight into the nature of God, or they may be completely false and lead people astray. It is up to us as a group to sharpen each other with our shared knowledge.
If no-one has an answer to a certain topic, we simply pray and ask God to give us understanding, because we have the best teacher in the universe in our midst. The Holy Spirit.
Jesus said this about the Holy Spirit in John 14:26:
“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
In our group we may have a wide range of people, from wise theologians to new believers, from ex-pastors to young children and all sorts in between. God can use anyone in our group to give wisdom to. We don’t need an anointed ‘man of God’ with all the answers because we have the Holy Spirit to teach us all things.
If we are all born again and have the Holy Spirit indwelling us, we can all teach one another.
Do you have a question or a comment? Feel free to provide feedback below. We’d love to hear it!
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