Needed, A New Way to Meet #4: How Should Christians Meet? A New Experience of Church

Let me tell you about one of the best meetings of all: when the church is tired, you’ve gone through something or other, and you just kick it in. Now, you don’t do this until a relationship is built up among everybody. There’s a tremendous commitment there. You dissolve all kinds of meetings. You say, for the next some odd weeks, we’re not going to meet. You’ll hear from us when you hear from us. There will be a meeting someday; we don’t know when. In about two weeks, you’ll hear about a meeting somewhere. The singles got together with their guitars, sat around, fellowshipped, and had a glorious time. And everybody thinks, “They did. What was this? Tell us about it. What’s going on?” I don’t care how great we are; meetings can take on a meeting atmosphere, but when you cancel all meetings, people can really have meetings.

Did you follow that? They’re totally spontaneous. I don’t even care if they’re cliquish. I don’t care if it’s just the single sisters meeting or just the single brothers and sisters, or if it’s just the married sisters getting together. Still, those things that are put together by people who are just hungry for fellowship are unclassifiable and among the most wonderful meetings, or at least some of the neatest meetings you and I will ever attend. That’s one of the best meetings of all. And nothing is more wonderful than knowing that next Sunday, Saturday, Monday, or Friday, you are totally free of any obligation to meet.

A question arises: how does the church meet its finances when there are no meetings? The answer is that brothers and sisters will go out of their way to find the offering box to give because they love her. They’ve fallen head over heels in love with this girl, and they’re going to take care of her.

Let me tell you how to kill a church: kill its meetings. Have a choir.  Do you want to hear another one? Have an orchestra or band. I’m going to tell a story. They had a band, and they had these huge, great big amplifiers. I spoke, and man, I’ll tell you, that band up there was singing and giving it all. I thought that was the greatest singing church I ever saw or heard in my life. When I got through speaking, I said, ” Let’s stand up and sing.” I said, “What are you going to sing?” We started the song, and I started to lead it, and I made a startling discovery; maybe they did, too. Those people out there in the audience didn’t know how to sing and weren’t singing. It was all coming over that loudspeaker from that band, and the rest of the people had long since ceased singing. They were just opening their mouths and something.

In Portland, one of the brothers in our fellowship attended a Pentecostal church with one of these big bands, and one day the whole amplification system burned out, and he said, “I was astonished to find out that the church did not have the foggiest idea how to sing. We had been listening to a band sing and thought we had been listening to a church sing.”

I’ll say something you may not know about the brothers and sisters from Illinois. They don’t ever get together like that under normal conditions, all in one spot or in a corner. They scatter out throughout the meeting place. It was wonderful to see those people, half of the people in the meetings of their fellowship, with some instrument that they carry in the meetings. You’d say that it must be a tambourine. Listen, they have stuff there I’ve never seen before and will never see again.

Did you see that strange-looking contraption this brother had? It was round. It looked like the inside unit of a thermos bottle. They told me he made this thing. He had a rub board in one place, some little dots in another, and a bigger rub board in another. He had a little thing he raked across different parts, and he’d turn that round bottle and beat on it, or scrape on it, or do something else. He could get more different sounds out of that one thing. He’d sing and do that, and you wouldn’t believe it. Somebody else had sticks. They’d stand there with a stick and beat on it. Somebody else had…I know they didn’t have castanets, did they? What are some of the other things they have? They have the Congo drums. They had all sorts of little things. I had never seen them before, scattered around the room. That’s great. Wonderful…but get rid of bands. I think a church needs to start a cappella; I really do.

Now, I have something to say to you. This is just so simple, so revolutionary. If I ever get to Atlanta, brother, God willing, if I ever get to Atlanta, and if there are actually people here, we’re just going to take a good, easy time about when we start meetings. One thing we’re going to do, and I recommend it to everybody…we’ll do it next summer, if you come…turn the entire church into a choir. Turn the church into a choir. Have a night and let you put the altos and the sopranos and the basses and the, I don’t know how you do this, the baritones and tenors. Break them up and put them in place, and then learn a song together that way.

I’ll tell you exactly what song we’re going to learn next summer together. We’ll start with the Hallelujah Chorus. You don’t sing the Hallelujah Chorus to get to glory; you sing it to express the glory you have touched. I’m going to drive that home again and again. We don’t come to a meeting to get; we come to a meeting to give. Our getting is with the Lord alone or with one or two or three other people sometimes, not in the meeting.

It is a matter of just your imagination from that point on. Get rid of the choir and turn the church into a choir. Have a songbook…and don’t ever have a songbook. Have it to grow, have it to add to, have it to memorize, have it to use at home, have it to learn some of the numbers, but either don’t bring it to a meeting, or if you do, don’t use it in the meeting. One of the most wonderful things about a meeting is that there’s no preaching, no pastors, and no leaders, and when everything depends on what happens outside the meeting, you find out how dead the church is or how alive she is.

A Baptist church, if you graph its meetings, always looks like that. That was the revival in August (laughter). Now then, the church isn’t like that. No Baptist church has ever had a meeting as dead as Christians meeting without any human headship can have. They reach lower, deeper, deadlier depths than anything else known to mankind. That’s when you stop and start taking inventory of what to do about it.

You must spend the rest of your life taking care of meetings. They’ll take up a large part of the church’s energy. You don’t know what I’m talking about, and this is the lesson you have to learn. Hey, listen, if you have 12, 15, or 20 meetings per year, that’s good enough. You should spend the rest of the time preparing for them, but you won’t. You’ll say, boy, it’s glorious, and you’ll have about 10 in a row, and I wouldn’t give you 10 cents for the 10th one, and you wouldn’t either. But you’ll go ahead and have the 11th and the 12th, and I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why you don’t blow the whistle and stop and say, ” It’s time we took a different direction and took a whole new way of meeting?” Why don’t you stop when your meetings all start to feel the same? Why do you think a church has to meet? What addiction, what angel told you that a church has to keep meeting when death has arrived? Why not stop and start over again?