This Sunday our Ancient Paths Church network gathered for an early Thanksgiving dinner. It was like a little slice of heaven with people of every age, race, and economic status gathered together. We prayed, laughed, and celebrated God’s work in our midst.

House Church Networks are like extended family. They are people who aren’t necessarily in your lives everyday but are there in times of need and times of celebration. Recently I was in a gnarly car accident, and the support I received at this Sunday’s gathering was beautiful. Our network is intentional about getting together at least every couple months, and they are joyful times of togetherness.

I will leave the “how-to” of church networks to another article, and simply focus here on the fact that they are essential. A few reasons off the top of my head why network gatherings are beneficial:

• They encourage diversity: incarnational churches reflect their neighborhoods. One of our churches is majority African-American, another White and Hispanic, another mainly White. While we should encourage diversity in every church Read the rest of this entry »
  

• Who is converting who?

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  November 9th, 2008Brian RantsMain, Why House Church?

  I am making my way through “Pagan Christianity” by Frank Viola and George Barna. Sadly, I am struck by the myriad of ways that the world converted Christianity, instead of the opposite.

  We have absorbed the values and practices of our world. PG quoted Will Durant (page 119), Christianity “grew by the absorbtion of pagan faith and ritual; it became a triumphant church by inheriting the organizing patterns and genius of Rome…When Christianity conquered Rome the ecclesiastical structure of the pagan church, the title and vestments of the pontifex maximus…and the pageantry of immemorial ceremony, passed like maternal blood into the new religion, and captive Rome captured her conqueror.”

  We are getting converted by the world still today; church constitutions, pastors as CEO’s, churches as political campaigning places, billions in building budgets, and missions as western cultural conversion.

  What now? Where do we go from here to regain the purity of Jesus’ mission of healing the brokenhearted and saving those crushed in spirit?

  First off I believe books like Pagan Christianity remove centuries of film from the glasses we wear and allow us to look properly at the New Testament church Read the rest of this entry »