How to Start a Lay Church, Principle II: Establish that Sunday is not the Main Service

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Getting together for Sunday worship is so fundamental to westerners that we’ve made that gathering synonymous with the word “church.” It’s hard for us to conceive of a way of being Christian that’s not centered around 11AM Sunday morning.

But the early church and today’s persecuted church would have an equally hard time conceiving a way of being Christian that is centered around 11AM Sunday morning!

For them, church is born in families and households. Worship is centered in families and households. The church meets all together when conditions permit–which in some countries like North Korea these days is literally, well, never.

But far from making them weak and uncommitted, this decision that Sunday morning is not the center makes them stronger Christians than we are. Each family or household has to learn how to be the whole church to its members. As a result, for them, the main service of worship is family (or household) worship.

The lay church follows the same model. There’s still a Sunday gathering. But the purpose is twofold:

  • First, to assign a scripture and a song and a teaching for each family or household to master in their daily worship that week, and
  • Second, to make sure each family or household mastered the material assigned the previous week, by practicing it together.

That’s it. That’s the heart of what happens in a lay church gathering on Sunday.

You might think, “Why do the Sunday gathering at all? It seems like the church could function without it.” And if you find yourself thinking that, you’re on the right track! The lay church has to be able to function fully even when it can’t get together on Sunday—because in countries where Christians are persecuted, that first Sunday gathering may not come until the day Jesus returns.

But when we can gather together on Sundays, we definitely need to, as the author of Hebrews points out in Hebrews 10:24-25. Because when we get together, we can encourage each other and hold each other accountable. But what we’re encouraging and holding each other accountable to is being a comprehensive, tiny church in our own sphere of influence—family, household, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and the strangers God sends our way.

Daily household worship is super simple:

  • Leadership moves from person to person each day (or night), kids included. (How, where, and when else would they learn?)
  • The group (or individual or couple) sings the song that the lay church is learning that week. Same song each night that week—that’s how you learn it.
  • Then the leader for the night shares from memory the Scripture that’s assigned for the week. Everyone else has their Bibles open and keeps the leader on track.
  • Then it’s on into prayer time, where each person prays out loud, with the leader closing by leading everyone in the Lord’s Prayer and inviting everyone to share the peace of Christ (hug time—our youngest son’s favorite part).

The simpler the service, the greater the focus can be on the real purpose: helping each Christian grow to fullness in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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How to Start a Lay Church, Principle I: Don’t Make it Easy to Get In

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Don’t set up silly human preconditions and barriers, either. But do make sure people are joining your lay church for the right reason, which is because they’re serious about growing to fullness in Christ. That’s what Jesus himself did, after all. In Matthew 16:24, he said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

A few weeks ago we had a handyman, Jeff, at our house giving us an estimate on some home repairs. Pretty quickly we learned that he was a Christian looking for a deeper experience of church than what he was used to. I spent more than two hours with Jeff talking about our .W congregation. He was clearly fascinated, and we ended our time with him pledging to come that Sunday.

Of course he never showed up.

What did show up that Sunday, though, was a fascinating excerpt in a book I was reading, a third century document called The Apostolic Tradition by Hippolytus. It sheds light on how the young, underground, persecuted church dealt with guests in the generations shortly after the apostles. This is what Hippolytus wrote:

Let those who will be brought newly to the faith to hear the Word be brought first to the teachers before the people arrive. And let them be asked the reason why they have given their assent to the faith. And let those who have brought them bear witness as to whether they are able to hear the Word. And let them be asked about their life: What sort is it?

It reminded me of how underground North Korean Christians respond even to family members who express an interest in learning more about Christ. In North Korea, as North Korea scholar Marcus Noland notes, “Newlyweds will not be informed about their spouse’s family’s religious practices for some time until sufficient trust has developed.” They’ll even sleep together before they’ll share their commitment to Christ!

What a far cry from how I approached handyman Jeff! Imagine how different our conversation would have been if I had said, “Jeff, in the early church, before individuals were invited to worship with a particular congregation, congregation leaders would visit them and talk about their lives and why they wanted to follow Christ. The goal was to make sure the church consisted only of people who were there to grow because they wanted to grow to fullness in Christ. So if you’re interested in getting involved in our lay church, the first step would be for me to drop by your house to meet you and your family and to learn about your lives and your interest in Christ.”

In a lay church, there’s no need to grow big in order to cover a pastor’s salary or get a building. So instead of begging people to come, we can treat attendance as a precious privilege, and we can personally visit with those who want to join—before they show up at church—in order to make sure they’re really serious about following Christ as part of the congregation.

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Church is for Amateurs, Part III: The Doers of The Word Evangelical Church of the Fourth Order Springs to Life

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Pastor Foley

So for the last several years we’ve been learning, along with North Korean Christians, how to do lay church—and it’s been beyond exciting to watch the results. In the time it takes American Christians to come to understand even the basic principles of the gospel, “amateur” North Korean Christians are teaching others, planting churches and literally laying down their lives for the gospel.

With that in mind, earlier this year we decided to plant our own “church of the fourth order,” or lay church, in the west. Or, perhaps I should say we planted a couple such churches—because literally before we had even planted the one—we call it .W (or Doers of the Word) Lay Church, in Colorado Springs—it had already spread to Korea, to interested “amateur” believers there.

Now that we’ve been underway in .W for a little while, we’re seeing the same things we’ve seen among North Koreans—the same things that Christians in lay churches have seen throughout history all the way back to the New Testament: believers growing to fullness in Christ, surprisingly quickly, without external accoutrements like buildings, paid clergy, or study Bibles for everybody.

In that spirit, we felt there might be interest in the lay church concept among other amateur Christians in the west–people who, upon encountering Jesus, ask, “How can I live like that?”

People, in other words, whose primary interest in being a Christian is growing to be like Christ.

That’s a thought that many Christians dismiss out of hand—growing to be like Christ. But it’s maybe the most common question in the New Testament and across Christian history, so maybe our not wanting our discomfort in asking the question says more about the impotency of our professional church model than it does about the inappropriateness of the question.

Really, “How can I live like Christ?” is the most natural and appropriate question for the Christian. It’s why the world called us Christians (“little Christs”) in the first place: Because, as Jesus said in Luke 6:40, “Everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.” Church is (or is designed to be) the place where the Holy Spirit makes good on that promise.

In the last few years we’ve formulated twelve principles that are necessary and sufficient to enable “fourth order Christian ministers”—laity—to launch lay churches that help members to grow to fullness in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. We’ll be devoting one upcoming post in this blog to each principle. If you put these principles into practice, you should have a fledgling lay church underway before all the posts are complete a few weeks from now.

(A few weeks, by the way, is about how long the lay church in Thessalonica had with the apostle Paul before they were completely on their own. Most of the other churches Paul writes to in the Bible didn’t have much more initial training than that, either.)

So gather your kids, neighbors, co-workers, and strangers in your sphere of influence. It’s time to turn Christianity and church in the west back over to the Ministers of the Fourth Order so that we can return to the task of growing people to full maturity in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Just for the love of it.

Because church is for amateurs.

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