| | July 1, 2008
Dear Family and Friends,
From the middle of April until now we have been living out what the experience of simple church can be with five leaders from the community that have been in our Fire and Maneuver training. We decided to do this because church is better caught than taught, and also because for most of us, the classroom is not where our best comprehension comes. In order to fortify what was happening in our weekly formal teaching times going through the five elements of a church plant movement, we decided to open up our World Impact-only simple church to these five leaders as well, with the intention of commissioning them out at the end of the time to start (or continue, as is the case for some) a simple church themselves in their own neighborhood.
As we began to do this, the Spirit brought to our attention a few lessons that we had been slow in understanding. One of these lessons was that simple church is not just a traditional church service in a smaller room. We really wanted to get back to the heart and spirit of what the early church experienced when they met together, and the Apostle Paul’s writings really helped us along. I Corinthians 14:26 is especially enlightening in that we want there to be a freedom and an expectation that the Lord will work through everyone present, from the oldest to the youngest, the most mature to the least, female and male, middle-class and poor, formally-educated and street-educated. We wanted the Spirit to guide our time together instead of pre-assigning set leaders and times for the opening prayer, twenty minutes of worship, a sermon, etcetera. You know the drill. We had been guilty of trying to simply bring the old wineskin in for this new wine. Now we allow what is going on in each participant’s life and what the Lord is teaching them to speak into our time, and the Lord brings songs, burdens for prayer, and His Word to our hearts as we all share. This was an admittedly awkward process at times, and still is occasionally, but it is so cool to see when the Spirit moves us as a group when we trust Him. We are like a livelier version of the Quakers.
Recently, one man in our group began to share after we all arrived about some family struggles he was enduring, and we spent an elongated period of time interceding for him and encouraging him. This led to another young woman sharing out of her own pain, and we in turn lifted her up in prayer. It became clear when three more people after this shared their own battles that we had all been under severe spiritual attack, but had thought we were alone in that. We now recognized our common struggles, and the Lord in turn gave at least four different people very specific and appropriate passages of Scripture that perfectly spoke into our lives. We transitioned very naturally from this to the Lord’s Supper, where the theme we resonated with this time was identifying with the suffering of Christ. That was our time. It was not anything earth shattering or new, but it brought us closer as a group to each other and to the Lord, and it was such a beautiful and spontaneous worship experience.
Please continue to pray for us as we pursue being the Church in the structure of simple churches here in the city. Pray that we will be faithful to God’s Word and a radical force of love in action for our immediate community. Pray that these five young leaders we are training will continue to pursue the vision of being a part of this simple-church-multiplying-movement here in Los Angeles.
In His Service,
Bryan Cullison
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| | Posted 8/20/2008 2:50 AM - 2 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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