HOUSE CHURCHES REACH 'CRITICAL MASS' - BARNA SURVEY

A new Barna Survey shows house churches on the rise in America.

The study was directed by George Barna, whose current best-selling book, entitled Revolution, estimates that this trend will continue over the next two decades, substantially reducing the share of adults who call a conventional church their primary spiritual community.
“The house church now appears to have reached ‘critical mass’ in the United States,” commented Barna. “Analysts typically find that once a new tool or institution reaches 15% market penetration, and has evidenced a consistent or growing level of affirmation for at least six years, that entity shifts from fad to trend status. At that point, it becomes a permanent fixture in our society. Today, house churches are moving from the appraisal phase into the acceptance phase. We anticipate house church attendance during any given week to double in the coming decade, and a growing proportion of house church attenders to adopt the house church as their primary faith community. That continued growth and public awareness will firmly establish the house church as a significant means of faith experience and expression among Americans.”

Read the article.
http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdateNarrowPreview&BarnaUpdateID=241

SHEEPCOMIC – ‘HEAVEN GREENEST HEAVEN’

Sheep Comic is a bit of a favourite with me. A fun send up of the type of church none of us want to belong to. You can search it yourself but here's a taster, one that might inspire the songwriters among us.
http://www.sheepcomics.com/strips/heaven/heaven.htm

DEAD MAN WALKING (2)

Continuing the journey into homechurch ....

THE BATTLE OVER PREACHING

I read once that every person needs, at least once or twice a week, a positive experience that fills up their need to be loved or appreciated and to engage in something significant. For most pastors that sense of personal fulfilment is associated with their one moment when all eyes are upon them, the Sunday morning preaching time. They give a lot of attention to that moment, working hard during the week to come up with a finely tuned word, full of wisdom and well developed logic, just enough humour to endear them to their congregation, and a passion and power of conviction that hopefully will, under the anointing of the Spirit of course, result, hopefully, in at least a mini revival, bodies scattered on the floor, catchers exhausted.

They wish.

Most times they are happy to settle for a few positive, appreciative comments by the more spiritually astute, enough for the Pastor to wend his way home feeling fruitful and needed, a good shepherd with contented sheep.

Actually it was before we went homechurch that I noticed how discontent I was becoming with the weekly preaching routine. It came to a head one day when I had finished my ‘performance’ and we’d broken for coffee. I noticed that, although I’d preached well and the word had been received well, the moment we finished the conversation immediately turned to fishing, work, kids etc. But I was still on a high from the word. Why wasn’t everyone else buzzing with it? Well, the fault was not with the congregation. I had simply not engaged them in any interaction with the Word.

Not only that but on this afternoon there was less than 15 people there. It would have been far more productive to pull our chairs into a circle and throw the topic into the ring and let them, under the inspiration of the Spirit, teach themselves - with me just acting as a facilitator. Sure it may not have had the three points, the brilliant ending and altar call but maybe we ALL would have gone home buzzing with the experience of the Spirit speaking through EVERYONE and not just me. Maybe Paul’s picture of each person having a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation - all for the strengthening of the church - maybe that is actually a much more fruitful way of meeting. (1 Cor 14:19)

Anyway, that’s what we do now. Not that it’s always easy. The preacher in me often wants to dominate and has to be tamed. And the trained passivity in the rest of us is also pretty intransigent at times. But when the real thing happens we go home buzzing, each of us having been engaged in the process of being taught by the Spirit.

There is a place for preaching though and I’m not walking away from it. I sometimes really miss it. But it’s all about horses for courses and getting away from religiously doing church the way we’ve always done it. Too many church meetings centre on the performance of the preacher and the worship team. If they perform well you go home feeling good. If they don’t you don’t! It isn’t meant to be that way and I suggest that there is a lot of dying that has to happen in those ministries before we truly become the mature man that Paul speaks of in Ephesians 4, which is growing up into Christ as “the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”

Personally I think that most Christians could go without hearing the weekly sermon for a couple of months without taking a nose dive! Especially if the time they spent listening to sermons was spent actively engaging themselves in spending purposefull visiting time with their ‘not-yet-believer’ friends. In fact what they would probably find is that every sermon they’ve ever heard would come alive inside them as they faced the challenge of being Christ in the market place instead of in the pew. Perhaps we preachers have to give them freedom to experiment. And perhaps when they do turn up for the next sermon they'll have a disciple in tow - and a fairly well grounded one at that!

DEAD MAN WALKING (3) coming up

WHY ENGLISH TEACHERS DIE YOUNG

I picked this up on another journal and can't resist passing it on.

They are actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. You kind of wonder what the rest of the essay was like.

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge free ATM.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
15. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
16. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
18. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
19. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
20. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
21. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
22. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
23. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
24. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
25. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
26. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

I will get to the 2nd installment of 'Dead Man Walking' when I get some time to compose it. Maybe I could get some inspiration from some of the above. Make it more interesting.

Maybe not.