Dale Partridge - How Is Sunday Worship Ordered In A House Church？

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone and welcome to this episode of How We Do House Church. My name is Dr. Jason Barker

00:00:12.860 and it's my privilege to serve as the academic dean at Reformation Seminary where we have one

00:00:17.660 mission and Dale that mission is to train men to plant biblical house churches all around the

00:00:22.380 world. Amen. How you doing today? I'm excited because we're going to have a discussion about

00:00:27.540 the practicality of a house church in the sense of what happens, what's the minute by minute

00:00:34.340 outline format for a house church gathering. I think this is probably one of the main questions

00:00:41.660 that people ask me. So I'm excited. Yeah. So let's just dive into it. How does a house church

00:00:46.040 worship gathering work? What are some of the distinctives philosophically or practically

00:00:50.260 when a house church gathers on Sunday mornings? Yeah. I mean, one thing we have to keep in mind

00:00:54.460 is house church. Well, church is for believers. Now it is not restricted to the lost,

00:01:04.560 but it's also not the place that you invite people to evangelize to. We're called to go out

00:01:13.140 and to make disciples. We're called to evangelize to the lost. And when someone is converted,

00:01:19.560 we would bring them to the church where they could be baptized, where they could

00:01:23.840 become a member of the church. But a lost person can't even say amen at the end of a prayer

00:01:28.980 because they don't agree. Now, they can't do communion. They can't be a part of that. Now, 0.88

00:01:34.940 it doesn't mean that we don't invite somebody that might be evident that the Lord is drawing them.

00:01:41.420 There's a genuine, honest seeking that you're seeing the Lord has put upon their heart.

00:01:47.520 So 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.

00:02:07.400 where inviting people to church has replaced evangelism.

00:02:12.040 And we have to just keep in mind that the purpose of the church

00:02:17.220 is the edification of the saints for the work of ministry.

00:02:20.600 And so it's not evangelism.

00:02:23.400 Evangelism is an outward mission of the church,

00:02:27.300 but the church gathering itself is for the edification of the saints.

00:02:31.440 So again, there's a balance there.

00:02:32.920 And it's not that if someone shows up in my house that was lost,

00:02:35.740 that I would say, you can't be here.

00:02:37.000 No, 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.

00:02:51.640 You know, so there's just some discernment required there.

00:02:55.680 You know, I think you're right on because in many traditional churches, worship has become about attracting the unsaved.

00:03:02.380 And 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.

00:03:11.280 And 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,

00:03:32.440 understood then you are robbing the believer of a rich worship experience while providing

00:03:42.040 something that the unsaved person actually can't do anything with yeah you're you're essentially

00:03:46.900 feeding the goats and starving the sheep sure i mean that is what so many churches have done

00:03:53.520 in the church growth movement um this pragmatism that's there so that's step one step two is

00:04:02.100 discussing the outline of a house church gathering right one let me just say this uh if you're going

00:04:08.680 to gather with a house church in the reformation fellowship network expect to be there for five

00:04:16.500 hours so just that's kind of typical sunday we start at uh 10 o'clock for our gathering and at

00:04:26.100 10 a.m., we have this wonderful experience of fellowship with each other. We start getting

00:04:33.960 together as families. We have some snacks and maybe some cinnamon rolls or whatever that might

00:04:39.240 be. And at 10.30, we would call the meeting to order. And again, this is a meeting. It's not a

00:04:47.440 service. It's a gathering. It's not a production. And we sit together down in a, again, more of a

00:04:58.820 circular structure than less of a monologue structure where everybody's pointed in one

00:05:05.060 direction. We try to want to be facing one another so we can discuss with one another.

00:05:08.600 And then we have an order of worship, what we call the free worship liturgy. It's this idea where

00:05:13.480 there's some freedom because we're small to basically have some spirit prompted

00:05:21.540 free discussion. And I, you know, I'm not a charismatic, right? So when I say spirit

00:05:28.740 prompted, I'm meaning just that the Lord's laying something on your heart and you, there's an

00:05:33.460 opportunity to say that within the right structure and discerning times and gender roles and all

00:05:37.860 those things that are there. But if you want to sing an extra hymn, we can do that. If you want

00:05:44.380 to bring a prayer request in at any given point, you can basically do that. If you have a question

00:05:51.180 during the sermon and you're a man asking that question, because scripture says in 1 Corinthians 0.78

00:05:56.780 14, if a woman has a question on these things to go home and ask her husband, but if a man has a

00:06:00.440 question, he can do that. And so there's some free worship there, but there's also a liturgical

00:06:05.440 structure. So we actually have these things printed out. So you would actually have a copy

00:06:11.660 along with your hymnal. And the first thing we do is I assign these roles as the elder of the church

00:06:21.100 or one of the elders of the church would do this. You would assign roles to the men to fulfill in

00:06:28.540 this liturgy, which is great because men can't check out. They are engaged and involved by design,

00:06:38.300 where in a traditional model, you have one or two guys involved on the stage and 200 men doing

00:06:47.240 nothing. And so here you get an opportunity to activate these men to be engaged in the spiritual

00:06:53.880 edification of the body. And so I assign one guy to open up in prayer and that individual

00:07:01.940 open us up in prayer. And then I assign another individual to lead us in song. And so we'll go

00:07:09.100 through typically three hymns out of the hymnal. We do the hymns of grace from the master seminary.

00:07:14.600 In my opinion, it's probably the best hymnal that's out there. And we sing three songs. And

00:07:19.980 again, there's an opportunity for, you know, one of the ladies might say, can we sing Rock 0.98

00:07:24.900 of Ages? And we, oh yeah, let's do that. And then after that is we pray for the local city 0.98

00:07:31.980 that we're in, the persecuted church and the government. This is again, right in scripture,

00:07:40.880 we're called to do this. And I assign another gentleman to pray for that. Then we have a time

00:07:47.180 of prayer requests and praise reports. And this is the best time. It's the thing that

00:07:54.060 the traditional church is absolutely missing, is that we get to hear back and forth the

00:08:00.580 prayer requests and praise reports from the men and women. Now, the men do the praying 0.80

00:08:05.780 as according to 1 Timothy 2, but the men and women can offer these prayer requests and

00:08:12.340 reports of prayers answered. And you're just shocked how every week there's something going

00:08:18.760 on in someone's life that just knits you together closer. And that time can sometimes take five

00:08:25.360 minutes. Sometimes it takes 30. Then we do a Bible reading. So I'll assign a chapter of scripture

00:08:31.800 to be read aloud by somebody, by one of the men. And this again is a wonderful

00:08:37.740 inauguration of a conversation about something that's there because it leads us into what I

00:08:43.240 call an open teaching time where the men get an opportunity to teach for basically a reactive

00:08:50.960 teaching moment of what it said there in Ephesians 1 about being predestined before the foundation

00:08:57.400 of the world. This has been so comforting to me. And there's a little bit of a moment for these men

00:09:02.160 to exercise this gifting of teaching under the supervision of elders for the edification of the

00:09:09.360 body. And that sometimes lasts for, again, five to 10 minutes. Then we go into an expository sermon.

00:09:15.380 So I'll prepare a full 30-minute, 40-minute expository sermon verse by verse. After that,

00:09:22.180 we do a time of communion and repentance. So what we do is we give everybody a time,

00:09:30.020 about one minute of self-examination before we do communion together. And this allows the

00:09:35.700 believer to make sure they're right with the Lord. There's no shadows between them and the Lord.

00:09:40.800 There's no shadows between them and another believer and examine themselves as 1 Corinthians

00:09:45.340 11 tells. And so that we can do communion together and we do the bread and the cup.

00:09:53.240 And then after that, we have announcements and sometimes the men or the women, we have men's

00:09:59.720 meetings and women's meetings and people are going to be gone and birthdays or whatever.

00:10:03.520 And then we close where we assign somebody to do prayer. We close out the meeting prayer.

00:10:07.960 Then we potluck for two and a half, three hours of time where all of the things that

00:10:15.360 were said in the meeting, all the discussion, the sermon discussion can happen there where

00:10:20.220 we're in different conversations, group conversations, private conversations, men and

00:10:24.240 women conversations. And all of this is fully family integrated, which I know is what we're

00:10:32.200 going to be talking about next. But this is kind of that big vision, families together,

00:10:36.420 worshiping God. And it's just a wonderful and edifying time.

00:10:40.600 Yeah. And I'm glad you brought this up about families because I know that that's one of the

00:10:45.060 more frequent questions that we get from people. And probably one of the things that scares people

00:10:49.920 most about doing a house church is we've really been trained that the appropriate thing on Sundays

00:10:54.720 is to adults go to worship and kids go to Sunday school or, or what, or, you know, whatever small

00:11:01.240 group or kids ministry or youth ministry. And this is a different approach to that. Now it brings

00:11:08.820 with it some unique problems and challenges is probably the better way opportunities. What do

00:11:14.760 kids do? How do we integrate them into that worship time? And how does that work on a Sunday

00:11:21.220 without being just a big distraction or too big of a challenge? Yeah. So we often, one,

00:11:29.560 being so close with one another, you'll quickly learn which parents are good at child training

00:11:35.560 and which ones aren't. And lovingly, the ones that are good, that have no plank in their eye,

00:11:41.060 can walk up to those other families that might need help in child training to teach their children to

00:11:47.580 sit still. And the toddler zone is always the hardest, right? You have babies that are going

00:11:52.440 to cry no matter what. You can't stop a baby from crying. And then you have toddlers who are really

00:11:57.520 in the training zone. Now, if you have seven-year-olds and eight-year-olds that are just

00:12:02.800 thrown a fit, it's an evident problem. And so the great beauty of being close with one another is

00:12:09.960 that those things become evident and they can be corrected. Our flesh hates that. We don't want to

00:12:15.080 be corrected. We don't want to be pointed out that my kids are actually not well-behaved.

00:12:21.360 But it's really wonderful, actually. It's a beautiful sanctifying process.

00:12:25.920 But as a pastor, not only am I preaching to the children regularly, I mean, I'm engaging the kids,

00:12:33.280 We're making sure they're singing. The kids that are maybe seven, eight, nine, that zone,

00:12:39.960 we want them to have Bibles open, notes available if possible. We want to teach them what it means

00:12:47.120 to worship and what it means to be serious about listening to the word of God being preached.

00:12:52.000 But we also ask questions, rhetorical questions, direct questions to the children,

00:12:56.440 even in the middle of the sermon. And then after we've had ideas and discussions,

00:13:00.580 And 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.

00:13:16.940 Hey, we're going to do our first five questions for that catechism.

00:13:19.780 And so there's some integration of creative ideas that gives you that freedom to do that.

00:13:24.220 But the big thing is that they are integrated.

00:13:27.540 They are not segregated from the adults.

00:13:31.140 and they really are a part of the body and they feel it, they know it. And, um, and the, the

00:13:40.980 relationship between children and their parents, especially their fathers as the shepherd of the

00:13:45.380 home is reinforced. Um, and it's just a, when you do it, it's kind of like the difference between

00:13:52.500 going from public school to home school or from, from like conventional farming to like,

00:13:56.740 homesteading. It's so rich that you're just like, I can't do it any other way now.

00:14:05.060 Yeah. You know, Dale, I remember being a little kid going to church and it was always a good

00:14:12.140 Sunday when my parents didn't have me go to children's church or Sunday school, but they

00:14:17.100 brought me to big church. And I would see my dad pray. He was a deacon. He would sometimes get

00:14:21.900 call on to pray. It was a great opportunity to see my parents and my dad in particular in a

00:14:28.720 wholly different light than maybe what I would sometimes see him in. He worked a lot. So it was

00:14:33.500 a great opportunity to just see him step up into leadership. And so I think that what we're talking

00:14:38.360 about here with family integrated worship, it's so supportive of a strong family structure. Kids

00:14:44.800 get to learn how to, you know, behave and learn how to worship and to participate. They don't

00:14:52.040 grow up thinking that church is a place that they come to to be served, but they see that service

00:14:57.920 up front. Parents are challenged and equipped and it's just modeled on Sundays that this is

00:15:07.160 our life together. And, you know, as I understand it, God created two institutions to help with

00:15:12.120 raising kids. One of them is the family and it's the primary one. The second one is the church.

00:15:17.100 Yes. It's the secondary one. It's there to help parents raise their children. And so what better

00:15:22.040 way than integrated family worship? Amen. And again, I just say when you do church and everything

00:15:28.440 we've done and we talked about today is rooted specifically in scripture. Our free worship

00:15:33.160 liturgy is backed by scripture verse by verse. And again, just the closeness, it really does

00:15:40.100 create an experience that you feel like you're living in New Testament Christianity. And it

00:15:45.800 produces an environment and connected relationships that everybody is longing for. And it solves so

00:15:53.920 many of the problems that the traditional church is faced with right now. And so again, it's just

00:16:00.820 a great, wonderful thing to be a part of these communities. So come plant a church, guys. Men,

00:16:08.480 if you're out there, we want you to come be trained at Reformation Seminary because we need

00:16:14.420 more men to step up to plant these communities. There are so many people that inquire to us

00:16:21.040 about a house church on a regular basis and we have to tell them, no, sorry, we don't have one

00:16:25.160 there. We don't have one there. We don't have one there because we need men to step up.

00:16:29.160 Yeah. So that's a shameless plug for Reformation Seminary. So if you have questions about being

00:16:36.440 trained men as a biblical house church pastor, biblical house church planter, head to

00:16:41.700 reformationseminary.com, fill out an enrollment inquiry, and we'll get you connected with Dale

00:16:46.560 to answer all of your questions. Now, I know it's also possible that you tuned into the podcast,

00:16:51.100 this podcast, specifically because of the title. You had questions about how do families integrate

00:16:57.480 into the worship gathering. For answers, more detailed answers, I guess, to those and more

00:17:04.340 questions, you can always check out Dale's book, How We Do House Church. This is actually one of

00:17:08.000 our textbooks at the seminary. It essentially sums up all of the doctrines and convictions that

00:17:13.900 are specific to Reformation Fellowship Network churches. Anything you'd add about this book,

00:17:18.420 Dale? It's just a short book. You could read it in an hour and a half. And everybody that reads

00:17:23.340 it writes me and says, how do we do this? Where do we find one of these churches? And so,

00:17:28.580 So, yeah, it's a great read.

00:17:30.960 You could buy that at relearn.org at our store there.

00:17:35.220 You could also buy it on Amazon.

00:17:36.520 Yeah.

00:17:36.960 You know, house church is a different concept.

00:17:39.260 And simply because it's different, it can sometimes be frightening.

00:17:42.560 But I know your experience is the same as mine,

00:17:44.560 is that when we talk to people about what a biblical house church really is,

00:17:48.500 we talk to believers about that.

00:17:50.360 That's what they're really looking for.

00:17:51.880 Amen.

00:17:52.100 And it's not always, unfortunately, what they're finding.

00:17:54.920 And again, that's not a knock on traditional churches.

00:17:57.240 There's just some things that house churches are really effective at doing.

00:18:02.080 So anyway, thanks again for tuning in to this episode of How We Do House Church.

00:18:06.040 Just as a reminder, these episodes are available in both podcast and video format across all platforms.

00:18:12.920 Thanks again for tuning in and we will see you guys next time.

00:18:27.240 You

Dale Partridge - September 26, 2022

How Is Sunday Worship Ordered In A House Church？

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