No Gathering: 1-15-17. Sickness

We won't meet today because I've been fighting a snot issue since shortly after the last gathering two weeks ago and I need a day to rest up to keep up with the demands of my job and because we don't want to expose the older people to my germs.

[Lizzie and I just returned from our Sunday morning drive. We got off to a late start and saw only 38 horse and buggy teams.]

There was a brief time when I was in love with the idea of a house church for its own sake. That was about the same time that there was genuine enthusiasm for house churches and a house church movement in the U. S. which believed that an important spiritual movement was about to take place led by groups of committed disciples meeting in homes.

My guess is that that sentiment peaked in 2009-2010. And, it's fizzled since then.

Honestly, I never bought into it entirely.

I was impressed by the fact that early disciples met in homes but I never really believed the house meeting was the point per se.

I remember, even before we began meeting in homes, exchanging a series of emails with Fran Leeman in which I said that the important thing for primitivists, which is how I think of myself, is to "exegete the actions of early disciples" or to "notice the fruit they produced" and to search for the truth that guided it and then to live from that truth in one's own time and place.

There was always something that bothered me about house church movement leaders talking about participating in a "church planting movement." It's never about having a church. It is about being disciples and discipling.

One of the characteristics of the institutionized church today which concerns me is what I label Ecclesiolatry, or venerating and serving the church, not the Lord of the church. I saw too much of that attitude among house church people about gatherings in homes.

Having said that, I have never seen people produce the fruit early disciples produced in their gatherings when they were meeting in a so called church building.

Anyway...

...one issue unique to a gathering in a home is that when someone who lives in the home becomes ill that illness put the kibosh on the gathering.

That's what happened today here.

I have to admit to being conflicted over cancelling the meeting because I wanted to have a day of peace and rest but knew that people who thrive on the fellowship of these gatherings would lose out.

In the end, we all took the day off because of me.

Tough.