Needed: A New Way to Meet #1: History of Church Meetings – Why Do We Meet This Way?

Well, I’m bringing this up all to tell you that one day a guy by the name of John Calvin, who wrote something about that long called the Institutes, Calvin’s Institutes, one day sat down and penned a little doohickey…it’s about 1540 A.D…and he called it the common order of worship service. On that sheet of paper, John Calvin passed on to you and to me the most boring, the most horrendously inept, unbelievable, outrageous thing that has ever been perpetrated on the Christian. We have willingly and obediently obeyed that sheet of paper like sheep going to slaughter, for he is the gentleman who gave Protestant Christianity the Sunday morning order of service.

The Scots picked it up and took it down into England, brought it over on the Mayflower, or the Puritans brought it over in whatever way they came over, actually. You and I picked it up and never blinked an eye. It is scattered throughout Europe and every place where every missionary has ever gone. I will tell you some memories I have. I drove into a compound…I was 19 years old…I drove into a compound in a town called Aijalon, Jordan. All the Christians lived within the French compound—really great concept. With the church building in there and all these converted Arabs, mostly Christians, saved on their deathbed in the hospital or something like that. It’s all where you went, Arabs. I’m not criticizing that.

Here we are in the middle of Aijalon, Jordan. Do you know what happened in the Old Testament in Aijalon, Jordan? That’s where the sun stood still. Well, that’s where the Christian gathering still stands. We walked into that thing, and we sat down in these little pews, and there was that pulpit, and this guy got up, and we sang three songs, had a prayer, two songs, passed the offering plate, had another song, he got up and preached, had the benediction, and we went home. John Calvin strikes again.

I’ve told you this story, and I’m going to tell it again. I went into the jungles of Thailand to bring out a tribe of Christians out of the land of Laos, where these people, who are called Hmong, have lived in the jungles for 5,000 years. In fact, they have the oldest recorded history in the world. The oldest slip of paper that ever mentions any human beings is the jungle people of Laos, who migrate to the jungles and live in the mountains. John Dooley wrote The Night They Burned the Mountain. He was talking about the Hmong.

Well, this tribe of Hmong had been led to the Lord something like 50 or 75 years ago, but the missionary had left, and they’d never seen a white man. When Vietnam fell to the Communists, they had to walk through the jungle for days and days, 4,000 of them, in a line, a single line, through the jungle, hacking their way through, and finally came to a refugee camp in northern Thailand. I went there based on the rumor that they existed. I went to try to get as many of them out as I could. I got out 29, and they got out the rest. As they said, they had a string that ran from Santa Barbara, California, to the jungles of Laos. They brought in…they were all kin to one another…over 4,000 of them. They brought one another over based on kinship.

Anyway, I sat down in their tribal meeting to talk with them. We went over to the refugee camps, and I want you to imagine plastic, rolls of plastic 12 feet wide, 100 feet long, 1,000 feet long, and brought into that place by the American military. They cut it up and built huts out of this translucent plastic. And right in the middle of this refugee camp, the Hmong, who had not seen another Christian in somewhere between 50 and 75 years, had built a plastic hut about two feet higher than any other hut with a pitched roof. They had not seen a Christian in 75 years, other than themselves, or 50 or whatever, and I walked into that tent, a plastic tent. There they had put stakes in the ground and put a bamboo rod over the stakes in neat little rows, two rows, a row on that side, and in the front, they had set a table with an open Bible. And they gathered together at 11 a.m.

The power of men’s traditions is in the marrow of your blood and bone, in your bloodstream, and in mine. The first Sunday morning I didn’t go to church, Helen, my two children, and I all felt like we’d sinned away our day of grace. The children sat at home and cried. Have you done that? Do you remember that? Have you had a day like that? I can see absolutely no reason to go to church, and if anybody can give me one good reason on this earth that is based upon the Bible, I stand with Luther. Unless you give me a good reason soundly based on the Scripture, I will not go. I’ve been to church twice, I think, in the last 26 years…and I am still a Christian. God be my helper; I’m never going to go again.

Well… let me tell you something. We again tend to institutionalize what belongs to a particular day when a new tradition is born. So we institutionalized the classical music that existed that day. Now, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about Beethoven and Bach. Bach, isn’t he the Christian gentleman? Yes. Beethoven, Bach, and a few others. That kind of music was institutionalized. Then, of course, it went to England, changed a little in the 1700s, and we got our classical English music. John Wesley gave us evangelistic singing, and he gave us our own classical music. Well, things are getting better today, aren’t they?

I don’t think the Lord Jesus liked going to the synagogue. I really don’t think he was any more excited about that than he was about obeying the Sabbath. Let me do this really quickly. Jesus is eight years old. They take him into a building where it’s about 20 degrees hotter inside than outside. People don’t take baths. They all smell and stink. The room has very little light. He sits there with his feet hanging off of a bench. They read something, and they go through a ritual. It’s all in Hebrew, which nobody can understand. I don’t know if you understand that, but the peasant people didn’t understand Hebrew; they understood their local Nazareth dialect of Aramaic.

He sits there for two hours listening to these people going through this ritual. By the way, it is translated into Aramaic, and he hears the same old stuff every week; they sing everything in one tone. It’s dark. It’s dank. It’s smelly. It’s boring. There’s no life in it. He walks out of there; he’s eight, nine years old, and he says, “Boy, I enjoyed that so much, I think when I get grown, I’ll start a religion like that.” I don’t believe that. I think when he got outside that building, he went, “Whew, if I ever have a chance to take a whack at that, I’m going to.

The Christian church, and this can be proven historically, met in homes starting with Pentecost, and it met without ritual, and it met without clergy. And it met without form. He said (to the woman at the well), “Yes, little lady, you people in Samaria are worshiping in the wrong place. The people in Jerusalem are worshiping in the right place, but the day is coming, and now has arrived at this very moment that I’m standing here talking to you. My Father is seeking those who worship inside themselves, in reality and in truth. Amen, in spirit and in reality…and that was the curtain call for the temple and for the synagogue. You could not have put that off on the Gentiles anyway. The Gentile Christians weren’t about to take up a Jewish…this whole thing of circumcision was tied up in concepts of which way the Christian faith was going to go. Was it going to go with form, or was it going to go free?

I’m going to do a real quick one. Evangelistic singing came in and loosened up what is called the independent churches. Now, an independent church is sometimes called a free church. In Europe, they call them free churches. Do you know why they call them free churches in Europe? It’s because they do not receive any money from the government. They’re free of the government, and everything they do is free. They don’t get any money. The Baptists, the Congregationalists, and the Methodists in America, at least for the Methodists, are free churches. They have no tradition of their denomination ever receiving money from state churches. That has never been part of their history. They don’t even believe in it. So they got loosened up a little bit from the Presbyterian-Lutheran way of meeting by evangelistic singing, but we’re still reporting in at Sunday morning with their church service.