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In The Eye of the
Storm
Part I
The First
Phase of the Church
The Spiritual Family Concept
Chapter
2
Belonging to a
Spiritual Family
People today, psychologists and
sociologists tell us, struggle with an intense sense of loneliness. They strive
to find meaning in relationships, but hurt and frustrated desires result in
increased alienation from others.
It does not have to be true of Christian believers.
When a new Christian is born again, he is born into the family of God. "You are
no longer strangers and foreigners, but
fellow citizens with the saints and
members of the household of God " (Ephesians
2:19). As part of
a new spiritual family, he is able to be
nurtured and cared for just as a
natural baby is nurtured and trained by his parents. He is accepted and
loved, fully and unconditionally.
The early Christians understood this love as they
responded to the message of Jesus. Scriptures say that; "Now the multitude of
those who believed were of one heart and one
soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his
own, but they had all things in common. And with great power the apostles gave
witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And great grace was upon them
all" (Acts 4:32-33). These people loved each other! Possessions were no longer
important, love was!
With a visible, Christ like love for each other, they
met house to house (Acts 20:20). Within a small group family setting, they were
loved and trained. In these secure family
relationships meeting from house to
house, the early church could easily accommodate all those who were being
added daily to the church. Larry Kreider, in his
book
House to House,
describes the importance of being trained
within a spiritual family setting,
We believe that some Christians never really grow
to their full
potential in God because they never had
a spiritual father or mother to invest their
life in them. Jesus invested the three
years of His earthly ministry in the lives
of twelve men. It was the most valuable time He spent on this planet:
fathering His spiritual children.
New
Christians desperately need spiritual families. True spiritual leaders are
willing to be spiritual fathers or mothers to young Christians. One of
the pastors who serves one of our local congregations told me recently
that when he received Christ in his mid‑twenties,
a 77-year-old man from his church took him under his wing and discipled him It
made all the difference for this future pastor's spiritual maturity.
Home cell groups are a part
of God's plan to establish spiritual
families for the harvest of
new believers who are going to be birthed
into the kingdom of God in the coming
days. New parents seldom feel
equipped. They learn by
doing. It may be scary to take the step of faith
to become a spiritual father or mother to someone the Lord brings into your
life. But it is a step of obedience that will bring eternal benefits.
Emily, a young
girl from our church and only a young Christian
herself, started to
witness to Debbie, a mother whose children Emily
baby-sat. When Debbie, a Jewess, accepted Jesus, Emily took her
along to her cell group. Cell
members introduced Debbie to Jean, a
mature Christian willing to spend extra time with Debbie explaining scriptures,
encouraging her and simply being a friend. When Debbie's Jewish parents disowned
her for becoming a Christian, Jean and the cell group helped Debbie through
those early difficult
months. Over the next year or two, Jean discipled Debbie, rejoicing
with her as God brought her victoriously through spiritual and physical crisis.
Debbie's spiritual journey started when a young
Christian took a step of faith
and shared Jesus, then God provided a
more mature Christian (along with a "spiritual family" or cell group) to invest
time in Debbie's life
to help her along the
way.
When people feel loved and accepted in a family
group, an outpouring of
this love will spill out into the world. They will be concerned for those who
never heard the good news and will want to
tell others of the hope only Jesus can bring. Not satisfied to keep the
good news to themselves, they will also reach out to become "disciple makers."
They will make disciples out of people so more disciples can be reproduced.
A disciple is a person who learns to live the life
his teacher lives. Soon he
begins to teach others to live the life
he lives. House fellowships, house churches, or cell groups provide
an ideal setting for disciples to be made and for spiritual families to grow and
mature together.
House
Fellowships: Vessels to Fulfill the Great
Commission
In II Kings 4:1-7 we read about a distraught widow
who appealed to the prophet Elisha to help
save her two sons from being taken by their creditor as slaves. Elisha
instructed her to borrow all the containers (vessels) she could from her
neighbors. From the last vessel of oil in her house, she started pouring and
proceeded to fill all of the vessels she had
borrowed! When the last vessel was filled, the oil stopped.
Are
we going to prepare new vessels (cell groups) that will be flexible and have
the potential to expand and grow indefinitely while
they embrace new believers and nurture them?
Or will we insist on using old, traditional methods which are limiting in
scope and often reach a "growth ceiling?"
From a
historical context, the cell group movement is nothing new.
Jim Egli of North Star Strategies says,
The New Testament church also met in homes. As
early as the account in Acts chapter two, we see both large and small group
contexts. The believers met "in the temple courts" and "in their
homes" as "the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved"
(2:46-47). Throughout church history a similar
pattern emerges—in the Anabaptist movement
of the 16th century, the Methodist movement of the 18th century, and in
the Charismatic movement of our generation,
small groups have been the basis for
outreach and discipleship. But the magnitude of what is emerging today
is astonishing and it is gaining momentum. In a wide variety of cultures and
settings, often unbeknownst to each other,
cell groups are emerging with a passion to penetrate the world for Jesus
Christ.
As you evaluate this
movement, I encourage you to also evaluate
yourself Do you have a sense that God wants
to do a greater work in the world
than has ever been done before? Are you wondering if
there is a way for the church to empower
every member for minis try and outreach as part
of a supporting community? Are you
willing to do whatever God asks to reach this generation with the love of
Christ? 2
Although it is true that small
group ministry is nothing new, the scope of
this new form of church life emerging called "cell groups" is phenomenal. It is
shaking the traditional church, and many are beginning to realize that radical
changes are needed if the church can enter
into her true destiny. Will we be ready with new vessels to
contain the end time harvest? If we build
according to God's plan, it is possible.
House
Churches in Ethiopia
The cell movement is growing rapidly around the
world. God is up to something. To
illustrate, I want to share with you three areas of the world where cell
ministry is growing by leaps and bounds—Ethiopia, Russia and China:
An exciting, modern-day
example of
a traditional church experiencing
a great revival through cell groups and making many new
disciples took place in
Ethiopia.
In 1982 half of all the evangelical
churches in
Ethiopia were closed due to
harassment, legal banning, and persecution.
The Meserete Kristos Church fell under
a complete ban. All of their church buildings were seized and used for
other purposes. Several of their prominent
leaders were imprisoned
for years without trial or accusation.
The church membership of that denomination at that
time was approximately 5000 believers. The fires of persecution got hotter
and hotter each year forcing them to go
underground and meet in clandestine home groups. Nearly a decade later,
the Marxist government fell. The same
government leaders who closed the doors of
the church buildings a few years before,
led the procession of God's people back into the buildings. However, the
church had grown "underground"
from 5000 to 50,000!
During persecution, these believers met from house
to house in small groups. Hundreds of believers began to get involved in the
work of ministry in those cell groups. They
no longer were focusing on the church building or the programs of the
church. Their time together was spent in prayer, reaching the lost, and in
making disciples.
Focusing on Jesus and the church meeting from
house to house takes our emphasis off of
meetings and programs. We can focus on Jesus and the Great Commission.
3
House
Churches in Russia
The spiritual need in this vast region of the world
staggers the mind, but our God has a strategy. I have seen it firsthand in my
many travels to Russia. Amidst overwhelming economic troubles
and rampant alcoholism (statistics indicate
that 60% of those in the work-force struggle with an alcohol problem),
cell groups are exploding as people in a
once atheist society turn to the living God. In 1992, I founded Home
Fellowship Leaders, International, a nonprofit
organization which supplies literature and
training to cell group leaders worldwide. Within a year, we felt we had
received a "Macedonian call" to
Russia
because the Russians were pleading, "Come and help
us!" Our offices in Pennsylvania and Moscow started
focusing and channeling our efforts into
publishing, translating and distributing home cell group literature for
Russia.
We can hardly keep up with the
demand. Weekly we are inundated with letters like these:
Our church in Kurgan, from
the group of seven people, became a church in
which there are five groups of thirty people who attend
regularly. I have three home groups a week
and the material being sent by you is helping me a lot.
—South Central Russia near Kazakstan
There is no church in our
village. No pastor. We are very thankful for
your lessons and literature. We came to know Jesus Christ through you. Thank you
for everything.
—Village near Yakutya, over 5,000 km from Moscow
When we gather together in
the name of Jesus, the Lord is among
us. Our group has already divided, new
people are coming and God is doing
miracles. One lady was unable to have children for twelve years, but God
set her free from the curse and now we are "all" expecting a baby!
—Village near
Mongolian border
Staffed by an American self-supporting missionary
couple, the Moscow
office resources hundreds of cell group leaders and churches
across the Commonwealth of Independent States with regular lessons. Initial
literature sent out tells how to start home cell groups, how to get people
involved and how to be a spiritual family within
the cell groups. The cell leader is then
supplied with monthly Bible lessons,
and he or she reports back monthly before receiving a new set of lessons.
A file is kept on each group, including a leader's
personality profile. Knowing if the leader is inclined pastorally or
evangelistically, for example, helps in giving counsel to the cells as they grow
and multiply.
Up until recently, 95% of the Christian work in
Russia has been evangelistic. Many
evangelists realize they cannot possibly take care of all the people
being saved if they try to do it within a traditional
church setting. To illustrate, I know of an
American evangelist who conducted an evangelistic crusade in Moscow where
8,000 young people turned out. During an altar call, 2,000 people responded!
These people were invited to a
local church the following Sunday.
On the first Sunday, out of the 2,000 people
saved, 60 showed up at the church
service. The next Sunday only 6 returned. The third Sunday,
one lonely soul saved at the crusade showed up. By the fourth
Sunday, no one who had been saved at the
evangelistic crusade was at the church service. What a tragedy!
What can be done about so many new Christians needing
to be cared for and virtually no follow-up ministry available? First of all,
I believe this is a sad commentary on what
happens when the body of Christ is not utilizing apostles, prophets,
teachers, evangelists, overseers and so on in their proper place within the
Body.
But we will talk more about this later in the
following chapters. For now, let's look at the enormous advantage of home
fellowship groups in helping to solve this problem.
If the young people saved at the evangelistic rally
were given information on how to start cell groups themselves, they could go
back to their communities all over Russia and begin to spread the Good News. I
know of one evangelist with a university ministry in
Russia
who regularly teaches at his seminars the importance of the
young people learning how to start cells and
being discipled as they disciple
others. He has already started 1,000 cells this way through
the young people who are taking the gospel
back to their home towns across Russia. It's working!
Cell groups allow regular
people to immediately lead out as they are
called of God. It's a heaven-sent way to operate. These local people are best
able to reach and relate to their own particular culture.
Because cell ministry is
carried on by Russian people, if religious
freedom is taken away again, the groups can easily go -underground."
The clandestine ability of the home groups, and the fact that people are
not only saved but trained and discipled to reach others, is the great advantage
of cell groups advancing God's kingdom in
Russia.
Many in Russia are now realizing the benefits of the
home fellowship
vision because they see it working. There is a great need for cell
training literature to be distributed to these leaders. It is not unusual for
us to see one leader start 15-20 home groups in a few months' time.
And like many spiritual
awakenings, most of these leaders are
young people. Statistics in
both Russia and China house fellowships
claim that teenagers make up the largest
percentage. We see young men and women of
15-30 years of age leading cells which are expanding and growing rapidly. What
a joy it is to see God's Word falling on fertile soil and growing strong in
people's hearts as the kingdom of our God is expanded and multiplied!
House
Churches in China
Although the cell group
movement is global and there are rapidly
growing groups emerging on every continent, the movement in
China must be the most
remarkable. Reports have it that thousands
are coming to Christ on the mainland every
week, despite the new
wave of repression since the communist
hard-liners' return to power after the
Tiananmen Square
massacre.
Even so, committed
Christians gather for prayer in one another's
homes, copy Bibles and tracts by hand and circulate them among hundreds of
worshipers. Christian workers usually have to be trained in secret. Underground
Protestants recently passed the following
message to Hong Kong Christians from a remote part of North China: "It is
not unusual for us to have 40 to 50 people for a short-term training class,
living together for 40 days in farm courtyards or caves. To avoid discovery, we
often travel by night, moving from house to house."
An American Christian who has made many trips
into the interior of
China
once arrived in a farming village at 4:30 a.m.
His guides led him to a
courtyard packed with men and women, all on
their knees in prayer. There
were nearly 600 people altogether, most of
them native evangelists under 30 years of age. The meeting
continued for three days almost without
interruption. During short breaks, they bombarded the American with questions,
"How do we preach? How do we run a
house church? How can we get Bibles
?"4
The growth of the early church
in the book of Acts was a house
church movement. The explosive
growth going on in China today is
a house church
movement. The early church growth and the growth
of modern day house churches share the commonality of people being flexible,
mobile and hungry for the Truth, without being bogged down by a "church
building."
In the next chapter, we will explain more of the
history of house churches and why they are so
needed in today's world.
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