How to Have a Home Church (Part 2) That Grows – Christ-Centered Church Life

You’ll have to win the trust of the people in your neighborhood. You only have one thing going for you: they’re all hurting. They are all hurting. And the fact of the matter is that we could take a poll right here in this room of some very honest, open people, and we would probably find that most of us are hurting. We have one another. We have the Lord. They don’t have anybody. They’ve got a neighborhood they know who’s got more problems than they have. They don’t have anything else in the world, but what the world can give them on a television set, or a boat, or a sailboat, or Friday night entertainment, or drugs, or anything in the long, long, long list of entertainment.

When I was young, I heard a minister speaking of the fact that they had one of these huge ceiling fans, 48-inch fans that went around that sucked all the air through the house and out (poor air conditioning). And he said, I thought, you know, that’s the most wonderful thing in this world. We’ll never need anything again. And then air conditioning had just come out, and he said, and now we’ve got air conditioning. He said, I predict that we won’t be satisfied with that. We’re going to attempt to air-condition the entire planet so we can always be cool. Now the list goes on and on, and there are new inventions every day, and none of it can fill the void.

There’s a song like that woman at the well. We’re thirsty and cannot be satisfied. Then the Lord said, ” Drink of me, and you will never thirst again.” And that is your community. So that’s the next thing I want to say: you’ve got to start with your neighborhood. The purpose of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ is to reach an entire city. Start where you are and go out from there. God have mercy on you if you lead a lot of people to the Lord. Every person you lead to the Lord, there are two or three things you can absolutely know for certain. One of them is that they’re psychopathic. The second is that they have no idea what you’re doing. They will want to take their mind, put it in this room, and try to make everything change so it fits their understanding, because what they’re about to meet doesn’t fit their understanding. Then there is, of course, the “clutcher”. Finally, we find somebody who can meet our needs, and we clutch on them.

People come in; they talk too much; they don’t talk enough. They talk about themselves. They talk about something else. They have no idea what the spirit, their own spirit, is, although they are saved. They want to teach the Bible because they’ve learned that if the Bible is the Bible and nothing else, we don’t have anything against the Bible. After all, it lifts up Jesus. That’s where we must be. And the only reason you men out there who are teaching the Bible is because you don’t know how to lift up the Lord Jesus Christ with your Scripture. Take a look, mister. What’s coming out of your mouth first? Word of God, Bible, teachers, doctrine. How often is it Jesus? Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. So you’re going to have to turn your head around backward.

Alright, to every one of you who are listening to my voice. We will be the first ones in. We’ll send you ours, and we’ll show you what we did.  Then we’re going to go toward the door until the people are going to walk up on their front doorstep. They’re going to see what’s hanging on their doorknob. And they’ll say, ” Oh, it’s those Christians again.” And we’re going to leave little notes for them. We’re going to let them know when we’re meeting or why we’re meeting, and when we have a guest speaker. Maybe we’re going to bring a doctor in one night, and he’s going to speak to us about health. Let’s hope we can find a Christian doctor who has a different view of how to get well. We’re going to look for any and every opportunity we can to hang something on people’s doors.

And everyone else, one other thing you’re going to have to do back home, which I failed to mention: you’re going to have to learn how not only to sing, but announce songs. There’s nothing more bothersome to the soul or the spirit than when you finish a song—tick, tick, tick, tick, tick—and finally somebody says, can we sing number 227, please? This must not be—a lot of practice. If we can get any empty free space in this town, I believe we have something called The Gathering. Is that right? It’s sort of a city-wide place board for everybody. Yeah, but what’s it got a name, doesn’t it? Meetup. Every one of you hearing my voice now knows that you’ve got a city poster board.

I told you the other night, you have to do things people don’t do anymore. All sorts of things. I’ve done an awful lot of door knocking in my day. Sometimes you meet someone. If you approach them properly, you can see they need help. Then you ask: if it’s a woman, could some of the women in the church come by and say hello, and see if they can help? It’s not quite as easy to do that with men, but you do it anyway. Every once in a while, you will come across the desperate, and you’ll be able to lead them to the Lord.

Now let me tell you something else you’re going to do. You’re going to baptize them. But they don’t know what baptism is; therefore, you’re going to teach them what baptism is. You’ve got ten people, and then you’re going to have to get someone in the fellowship who can articulate, with all meaning and passion, what baptism is. You’re going to have to explain to them the full meaning of it and what they’re getting into when they go into that water and come out. Some of you are going to have to learn how to baptize people, brothers and sisters. We usually have swimming pools because we don’t have a home big enough to put a baptistry in it yet.

Now, I gingerly approach this, but I mean this with all my heart and soul. The church has been very negligent in the subject of healing. I will begin with physical healing. In the early 1900s, a kind of method of healing emerged. As Wesleyans, Methodists had people come forth on the mourner’s bench. They still do this; even in the deadest Methodist churches, people come forward and kneel.

Well, that was a hundred years ago when the sinner’s bench and the mourner’s bench were mourning because he’s lost. They’d come forward, and somebody would talk to him and lead him to the Lord. That’s back in the frontier days. Then the Pentecostal movement took this over and made a very dramatic thing out of personal healing. Oil, people getting healed instantly. Everybody rejoices. They throw their crutches away. That is now dying out. But it had one flaw: some of those people didn’t get healed. Well, every minister can come up with an explanation for just about anything. So that explanation: you weren’t healed because you didn’t have enough faith. Too bad about you. Same if you don’t speak in tongues; something’s wrong with your life.

I will define healing for you all once more. There should be a healer in the church who prays for the sick. Then we will believe he will be healed. If he is not healed, then we will keep on staying with him until he gets well. We do that with all the information we have of things that might help them. I’m going to tell you something. I’ll tell you all and warn you now. Many people would love to be healed by the laying on of hands, but they don’t want to be messed with anywhere else. Now there are people out here dying of malnutrition and don’t know it. Some of them weigh 300 pounds, and they’re dying of malnutrition, and they don’t want to be touched. There’s only one way any of us ever gets help at all: when we admit we have a need and are willing to go along with meeting it. That’s for everybody in the world.

When we go to a doctor, we admit we have a need. But doctors also are limited. God, give us people with the compassion to pray for and heal the sick, and then to stick with those who do not get healed until they are. So we have healing to add to these things. Low-key, not making a hoopla out of it. Interestingly, Jesus Christ healed the multitudes outside, but any time he got in a house, he said, “Tell no one when they were healed.” It is something beautiful to be able not to tell people to broadcast this. Remember that the world will knock at your door and knock the door down if they think you can get them healed and take no more responsibility. This is the church.