00:00:00.000Hey everyone and welcome to this episode of How We Do House Church. My name is Dr. Jason Barker
00:00:12.860and it's my privilege to serve as the academic dean at Reformation Seminary where we have one
00:00:17.660mission and Dale that mission is to train men to plant biblical house churches all around the
00:00:22.380world. Amen. How you doing today? I'm excited because we're going to have a discussion about
00:00:27.540the practicality of a house church in the sense of what happens, what's the minute by minute
00:00:34.340outline format for a house church gathering. I think this is probably one of the main questions
00:00:41.660that people ask me. So I'm excited. Yeah. So let's just dive into it. How does a house church
00:00:46.040worship gathering work? What are some of the distinctives philosophically or practically
00:00:50.260when a house church gathers on Sunday mornings? Yeah. I mean, one thing we have to keep in mind
00:00:54.460is house church. Well, church is for believers. Now it is not restricted to the lost,
00:01:04.560but it's also not the place that you invite people to evangelize to. We're called to go out
00:01:13.140and to make disciples. We're called to evangelize to the lost. And when someone is converted,
00:01:19.560we would bring them to the church where they could be baptized, where they could
00:01:23.840become a member of the church. But a lost person can't even say amen at the end of a prayer
00:01:28.980because they don't agree. Now, they can't do communion. They can't be a part of that. Now,
00:01:34.940it doesn't mean that we don't invite somebody that might be evident that the Lord is drawing them.
00:01:41.420There's a genuine, honest seeking that you're seeing the Lord has put upon their heart.
00:01:47.520So we'd invite those individuals. But it's not the same as the megachurch world where it's like, invite your friends and if they come on Sunday, we'll give them a $5 gift card to Starbucks. We're not doing that where we're basically outsourcing our responsibility of evangelism to the paid pastor so that he could do it for us.
00:02:07.400where inviting people to church has replaced evangelism.
00:02:12.040And we have to just keep in mind that the purpose of the church
00:02:17.220is the edification of the saints for the work of ministry.
00:02:37.000No, I'd absolutely say, come on in. But it's it's not a invite your friends kind of thing that don't know Jesus or have rejected Jesus, but just want to come.
00:02:51.640You know, so there's just some discernment required there.
00:02:55.680You know, I think you're right on because in many traditional churches, worship has become about attracting the unsaved.
00:03:02.380And I'm probably going to butcher this quote. I don't know who said it. I know I've heard you say it many times before, but what you win a person with is ultimately what you win them to.
00:03:11.280And it's not that activities and things like that are in and of themselves wrong, but if you've taken your Sunday morning worship service and you've wandered down your gospel message to make it less offensive, if you have picked songs that are less doctrinally challenging or something because they might be troublesome or misunderstood,
00:03:32.440understood then you are robbing the believer of a rich worship experience while providing
00:03:42.040something that the unsaved person actually can't do anything with yeah you're you're essentially
00:03:46.900feeding the goats and starving the sheep sure i mean that is what so many churches have done
00:03:53.520in the church growth movement um this pragmatism that's there so that's step one step two is
00:04:02.100discussing the outline of a house church gathering right one let me just say this uh if you're going
00:04:08.680to gather with a house church in the reformation fellowship network expect to be there for five
00:04:16.500hours so just that's kind of typical sunday we start at uh 10 o'clock for our gathering and at
00:04:26.10010 a.m., we have this wonderful experience of fellowship with each other. We start getting
00:04:33.960together as families. We have some snacks and maybe some cinnamon rolls or whatever that might
00:04:39.240be. And at 10.30, we would call the meeting to order. And again, this is a meeting. It's not a
00:04:47.440service. It's a gathering. It's not a production. And we sit together down in a, again, more of a
00:04:58.820circular structure than less of a monologue structure where everybody's pointed in one
00:05:05.060direction. We try to want to be facing one another so we can discuss with one another.
00:05:08.600And then we have an order of worship, what we call the free worship liturgy. It's this idea where
00:05:13.480there's some freedom because we're small to basically have some spirit prompted
00:05:21.540free discussion. And I, you know, I'm not a charismatic, right? So when I say spirit
00:05:28.740prompted, I'm meaning just that the Lord's laying something on your heart and you, there's an
00:05:33.460opportunity to say that within the right structure and discerning times and gender roles and all
00:05:37.860those things that are there. But if you want to sing an extra hymn, we can do that. If you want
00:05:44.380to bring a prayer request in at any given point, you can basically do that. If you have a question
00:05:51.180during the sermon and you're a man asking that question, because scripture says in 1 Corinthians
00:05:56.78014, if a woman has a question on these things to go home and ask her husband, but if a man has a
00:06:00.440question, he can do that. And so there's some free worship there, but there's also a liturgical
00:06:05.440structure. So we actually have these things printed out. So you would actually have a copy
00:06:11.660along with your hymnal. And the first thing we do is I assign these roles as the elder of the church
00:06:21.100or one of the elders of the church would do this. You would assign roles to the men to fulfill in
00:06:28.540this liturgy, which is great because men can't check out. They are engaged and involved by design,
00:06:38.300where in a traditional model, you have one or two guys involved on the stage and 200 men doing
00:06:47.240nothing. And so here you get an opportunity to activate these men to be engaged in the spiritual
00:06:53.880edification of the body. And so I assign one guy to open up in prayer and that individual
00:07:01.940open us up in prayer. And then I assign another individual to lead us in song. And so we'll go
00:07:09.100through typically three hymns out of the hymnal. We do the hymns of grace from the master seminary.
00:07:14.600In my opinion, it's probably the best hymnal that's out there. And we sing three songs. And
00:07:19.980again, there's an opportunity for, you know, one of the ladies might say, can we sing Rock
00:07:24.900of Ages? And we, oh yeah, let's do that. And then after that is we pray for the local city
00:07:31.980that we're in, the persecuted church and the government. This is again, right in scripture,
00:07:40.880we're called to do this. And I assign another gentleman to pray for that. Then we have a time
00:07:47.180of prayer requests and praise reports. And this is the best time. It's the thing that
00:07:54.060the traditional church is absolutely missing, is that we get to hear back and forth the
00:08:00.580prayer requests and praise reports from the men and women. Now, the men do the praying
00:08:05.780as according to 1 Timothy 2, but the men and women can offer these prayer requests and
00:08:12.340reports of prayers answered. And you're just shocked how every week there's something going
00:08:18.760on in someone's life that just knits you together closer. And that time can sometimes take five
00:08:25.360minutes. Sometimes it takes 30. Then we do a Bible reading. So I'll assign a chapter of scripture
00:08:31.800to be read aloud by somebody, by one of the men. And this again is a wonderful
00:08:37.740inauguration of a conversation about something that's there because it leads us into what I
00:08:43.240call an open teaching time where the men get an opportunity to teach for basically a reactive
00:08:50.960teaching moment of what it said there in Ephesians 1 about being predestined before the foundation
00:08:57.400of the world. This has been so comforting to me. And there's a little bit of a moment for these men
00:09:02.160to exercise this gifting of teaching under the supervision of elders for the edification of the
00:09:09.360body. And that sometimes lasts for, again, five to 10 minutes. Then we go into an expository sermon.
00:09:15.380So I'll prepare a full 30-minute, 40-minute expository sermon verse by verse. After that,
00:09:22.180we do a time of communion and repentance. So what we do is we give everybody a time,
00:09:30.020about one minute of self-examination before we do communion together. And this allows the
00:09:35.700believer to make sure they're right with the Lord. There's no shadows between them and the Lord.
00:09:40.800There's no shadows between them and another believer and examine themselves as 1 Corinthians
00:09:45.34011 tells. And so that we can do communion together and we do the bread and the cup.
00:09:53.240And then after that, we have announcements and sometimes the men or the women, we have men's
00:09:59.720meetings and women's meetings and people are going to be gone and birthdays or whatever.
00:10:03.520And then we close where we assign somebody to do prayer. We close out the meeting prayer.
00:10:07.960Then we potluck for two and a half, three hours of time where all of the things that
00:10:15.360were said in the meeting, all the discussion, the sermon discussion can happen there where
00:10:20.220we're in different conversations, group conversations, private conversations, men and
00:10:24.240women conversations. And all of this is fully family integrated, which I know is what we're
00:10:32.200going to be talking about next. But this is kind of that big vision, families together,
00:10:36.420worshiping God. And it's just a wonderful and edifying time.
00:10:40.600Yeah. And I'm glad you brought this up about families because I know that that's one of the
00:10:45.060more frequent questions that we get from people. And probably one of the things that scares people
00:10:49.920most about doing a house church is we've really been trained that the appropriate thing on Sundays
00:10:54.720is to adults go to worship and kids go to Sunday school or, or what, or, you know, whatever small
00:11:01.240group or kids ministry or youth ministry. And this is a different approach to that. Now it brings
00:11:08.820with it some unique problems and challenges is probably the better way opportunities. What do
00:11:14.760kids do? How do we integrate them into that worship time? And how does that work on a Sunday
00:11:21.220without being just a big distraction or too big of a challenge? Yeah. So we often, one,
00:11:29.560being so close with one another, you'll quickly learn which parents are good at child training
00:11:35.560and which ones aren't. And lovingly, the ones that are good, that have no plank in their eye,
00:11:41.060can walk up to those other families that might need help in child training to teach their children to
00:11:47.580sit still. And the toddler zone is always the hardest, right? You have babies that are going
00:11:52.440to cry no matter what. You can't stop a baby from crying. And then you have toddlers who are really
00:11:57.520in the training zone. Now, if you have seven-year-olds and eight-year-olds that are just
00:12:02.800thrown a fit, it's an evident problem. And so the great beauty of being close with one another is
00:12:09.960that those things become evident and they can be corrected. Our flesh hates that. We don't want to
00:12:15.080be corrected. We don't want to be pointed out that my kids are actually not well-behaved.
00:12:21.360But it's really wonderful, actually. It's a beautiful sanctifying process.
00:12:25.920But as a pastor, not only am I preaching to the children regularly, I mean, I'm engaging the kids,
00:12:33.280We're making sure they're singing. The kids that are maybe seven, eight, nine, that zone,
00:12:39.960we want them to have Bibles open, notes available if possible. We want to teach them what it means
00:12:47.120to worship and what it means to be serious about listening to the word of God being preached.
00:12:52.000But we also ask questions, rhetorical questions, direct questions to the children,
00:12:56.440even in the middle of the sermon. And then after we've had ideas and discussions,
00:13:00.580And in the past, we've done this is what we'll have maybe a time right after the sermon, five minutes of a catechism time for the kids or 10 minutes of scripture memorization for the kids, where one of the adults will take the kids aside and we'll go, hey, we're going to memorize this passage of scripture.
00:13:16.940Hey, we're going to do our first five questions for that catechism.
00:13:19.780And so there's some integration of creative ideas that gives you that freedom to do that.
00:13:24.220But the big thing is that they are integrated.
00:13:27.540They are not segregated from the adults.
00:13:31.140and they really are a part of the body and they feel it, they know it. And, um, and the, the
00:13:40.980relationship between children and their parents, especially their fathers as the shepherd of the
00:13:45.380home is reinforced. Um, and it's just a, when you do it, it's kind of like the difference between
00:13:52.500going from public school to home school or from, from like conventional farming to like,
00:13:56.740homesteading. It's so rich that you're just like, I can't do it any other way now.
00:14:05.060Yeah. You know, Dale, I remember being a little kid going to church and it was always a good
00:14:12.140Sunday when my parents didn't have me go to children's church or Sunday school, but they
00:14:17.100brought me to big church. And I would see my dad pray. He was a deacon. He would sometimes get
00:14:21.900call on to pray. It was a great opportunity to see my parents and my dad in particular in a
00:14:28.720wholly different light than maybe what I would sometimes see him in. He worked a lot. So it was
00:14:33.500a great opportunity to just see him step up into leadership. And so I think that what we're talking
00:14:38.360about here with family integrated worship, it's so supportive of a strong family structure. Kids
00:14:44.800get to learn how to, you know, behave and learn how to worship and to participate. They don't
00:14:52.040grow up thinking that church is a place that they come to to be served, but they see that service
00:14:57.920up front. Parents are challenged and equipped and it's just modeled on Sundays that this is
00:15:07.160our life together. And, you know, as I understand it, God created two institutions to help with
00:15:12.120raising kids. One of them is the family and it's the primary one. The second one is the church.
00:15:17.100Yes. It's the secondary one. It's there to help parents raise their children. And so what better
00:15:22.040way than integrated family worship? Amen. And again, I just say when you do church and everything
00:15:28.440we've done and we talked about today is rooted specifically in scripture. Our free worship
00:15:33.160liturgy is backed by scripture verse by verse. And again, just the closeness, it really does
00:15:40.100create an experience that you feel like you're living in New Testament Christianity. And it
00:15:45.800produces an environment and connected relationships that everybody is longing for. And it solves so
00:15:53.920many of the problems that the traditional church is faced with right now. And so again, it's just
00:16:00.820a great, wonderful thing to be a part of these communities. So come plant a church, guys. Men,
00:16:08.480if you're out there, we want you to come be trained at Reformation Seminary because we need
00:16:14.420more men to step up to plant these communities. There are so many people that inquire to us
00:16:21.040about a house church on a regular basis and we have to tell them, no, sorry, we don't have one
00:16:25.160there. We don't have one there. We don't have one there because we need men to step up.
00:16:29.160Yeah. So that's a shameless plug for Reformation Seminary. So if you have questions about being
00:16:36.440trained men as a biblical house church pastor, biblical house church planter, head to
00:16:41.700reformationseminary.com, fill out an enrollment inquiry, and we'll get you connected with Dale
00:16:46.560to answer all of your questions. Now, I know it's also possible that you tuned into the podcast,
00:16:51.100this podcast, specifically because of the title. You had questions about how do families integrate
00:16:57.480into the worship gathering. For answers, more detailed answers, I guess, to those and more
00:17:04.340questions, you can always check out Dale's book, How We Do House Church. This is actually one of
00:17:08.000our textbooks at the seminary. It essentially sums up all of the doctrines and convictions that
00:17:13.900are specific to Reformation Fellowship Network churches. Anything you'd add about this book,
00:17:18.420Dale? It's just a short book. You could read it in an hour and a half. And everybody that reads
00:17:23.340it writes me and says, how do we do this? Where do we find one of these churches? And so,