I saw this podcast making the rounds on social media and had a few friends mention it to me before I finally had a chance to listen. I’ve written here before about how I’ve felt a connection to Francis Chan and his journey with house church as it was about a year after we started Simple Church Alliance that he left his megachurch to eventually begin house churches in California.
What’s so wild to me is that while the conversation is promoted as primarily about house church (he does discuss the story of moving to a house church approach in this conversation), the content ends up landing right where I’ve found myself. I’ve written and spoken at length about how, since our daughter Wylie’s birth, God has been taking me on an adventure of discovering just how great His love is for me! It turns out He’s doing the same for Francis.
I’ve reflected on this a bit, as several folks who started in the house church world have also ended up in this same place—a place where we realize that Christianity is more about what God has done for us than what we are going to do for Him. I don’t think this is a coincidence.
For one, in house church, when you try to get busy doing things for God, the exhaustion sets in much sooner than if you had the machinery of an institution behind you keeping things going. That’s when the questions set in: God, we can’t do all this stuff. Do You still love us? Do You even like us? We may not ask these questions directly, but it seems they surface after maybe being buried deep down in many of us.
Perhaps getting us to this place—a place Francis articulates arriving at so well—is a big reason God is leading so many to simple/house/organic church expressions. Perhaps it’s only when the apparatuses that keep the machine moving are removed and we come to the end of ourselves that we begin to understand just how great His love is for us.
Then, we can extend real love to others as a natural outflow of what He’s doing in us.
This is such a good conversation and well worth your time (even if the ad reads are a bit annoying 😉 )…
