Preface to "Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer" (vol 2)

From The Author

Welcome to the second installment of our Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer series of books on what God is doing today in and through organic house churches. This book is a  continuation of the conversation we began in our earlier book, “River Houses Rising”. You will be at somewhat of a disadvantage if you have not already read that book, so I would encourage you to do so. The present book will make a lot more sense if you have read that book, especially when we refer back to key principles we discussed in detail there, but do not have the time to repeat here (principles like the difference between a religion-shaped spirituality and a Jesus-shaped spirituality). For our part we will proceed on the assumption that you are familiar with that book.

In our previous book we laid down what we believe to be some of the basic foundations for a spiritual revolution, NOT a religious reorganization. Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer is NOT a re-organization of your current religious church activities - a movement from big religious boxes to smaller religious boxes (what we fondly refer to as “Honey, I Shrunk The Church”). Safe Houses of Hope And Prayer is NOT another religious program of Christian activities designed to give bored believers something to do and get excited about, and then to abandon when they get bored and the marketing campaign wears off (“40 Days Of Purpose Driven Whatever . . . followed by eleven months of boredom”).

The Greatest Challenge to the Church

The greatest challenge to the Church in any age is NOT to create programs which will attract the masses. Rather, the greatest challenge to the Church in our day is to discover what God is doing and to follow. The old theologians used to say that “God is prevenient”. Simply put, this means that God always acts first. It also means that we are to be a responsive people. God initiates and we respond. How we respond to what God is doing determines our usefulness and effectiveness for our generation.  Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer is our  attempt to keep pace with what God is already doing in our generation. Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer is our practical answer to a simple but profound question: “How do we as believers prepare for and respond to what God wants to do in our generation?”

Our hope is that by learning from the teachings of Scripture as well as from the past mistakes of the Church during previous times of historic revival, we can begin to respond to God’s promptings today and to prepare for the coming move of His Spirit by asking and answering new questions. For example, if you knew that God was going to soon sweep tens of thousands of new believers into the Kingdom of God, where would you put them, who would disciple them, and what would you teach them? (One historical answer to this question is found in the example of John Wesley and the Evangelical Awaking in England, which we will examine in Chapter 3).

Or if you knew that Jesus was going to visit your organic house church, what would you do to prepare? Would you spend more time in prayer seeking the Lord? Would you spend more time fasting as an act of personal repentance and sacrificial worship? Would you spend time examining your own life and the life of your Church? And are there things that Jesus might be looking for that you should pay special attention to as you prepare for His visitation?

A Church In Search of A Mission?

Some people seem to think that God has an idle church in need of a mission. To such people the news that their lives should be “purpose driven” comes as a surprise and a revelation. But the biblical truth is that God already has a mission - the same mission that sent Jesus to earth the first time - but He is in search of a church that is willing to follow and obey Him. God’s Church doesn’t need a mission. God’s mission needs an obedient Church. The goal of Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer is to become an organic church responding in obedience to God’s mission in our generation.

Our generation is witnessing profound, if not historic, spiritual changes which are confronting the Church of Jesus with new spiritual realities and new personal challenges of how to respond. Many people will look at these changes like religious square pegs staring at spiritual round holes, hoping against hope that the hole will somehow adjust itself to accommodate them unchanged. People who walk in religion-shaped spiritualities do not adjust well to new spiritual realities. That’s where many professing believers find themselves today as this new move of God unfolds.

A Distant Mirror

History is often a mirror in which we see our own reflections in the faces and lives of those who have walked a similar path. That’s why I’ve included a couple of stories from church history. The first is the story of Samuel and Susanna Wesley. When the Spirit of God began to move in Samuel’s ministry it pushed his religion-shaped spirituality close to its breaking point. Samuel Wesley was a religious square peg staring at a spiritual round hole, unable to understand or adjust by letting go of his religion-shaped spirituality. That incident left us with a lesson that we all need to learn. You’ll find it in Chapter 2.

History offers up another mirror for our potential benefit in the story of Samuel Wesley’s son, John Wesley. Here  we learn a similar lesson with a very different outcome. In the story of John Wesley we have an example of what happens when the Holy Spirit chooses to go around existing religious structures in search of new channels through which to flow. John Wesley began his “religious career” as a “high churchman” ordained in the Church of England. His religion-shaped spirituality was so strong that, looking back on his days as a “religious square peg”, Wesley later confessed to doubting whether a person could even be saved unless it was inside the four walls of a Church.

There were many “religious square pegs” in Wesley’s day who stared at the “spiritual round holes” of Revival in stunned disbelief, unable to comprehend that the Spirit of God would choose to flow through such unlikely channels. Religious square pegs often face a genuine spiritual crisis when God confronts them with the reality of a spiritual round hole such as an “outside the box” spiritual awakening. But history records that the Holy Spirit did, indeed, flow and therein lies a lesson for us today as we prepare for the coming spiritual outpouring. We’ll unfold this story and this lesson in Chapter 3.

Not a “How To” Book

By now it should be obvious that if you are looking for another “How To” book on organic house church, this really isn’t it. I don’t mean to offend you, but people walking in a religion-shaped spirituality typically want “A Ten Step ‘How To’ Guide To A Successful Whatever”. And unfortunately, there are always people out there willing to sell to that perceived need. But the quest for such a “How To” guide reveals some fundamental mis-understandings regarding the nature of organic house church and Safe Houses of Hope And Prayer (which may be the result of having NOT read our earlier book, “River Houses Rising”).

For example,  the request for a “How To” guide could be based on the false assumption that all pegs are both spiritual and round and that there are no religious square pegs in need of a fundamental spiritual transformation. There are only “religious round pegs” in need of proper instruction on the correct structure and technique of this “house church thing”.

In addition, questions regarding a “How To” guide may assume that the change to organic house church is simply a matter of changing structures, rather than a fundamental change in values from a religion-shaped spirituality to a Jesus-shaped spirituality. But that would be wrong, too. If you try to change a behavior or a structure (“going to church”) before you change a value (“being the Church”) the result will nearly always be a frustrated square peg and a failed house church experience (“It just didn’t work out for me/us”).

This need for a fundamental change in values from a religion-shaped spirituality to a Jesus-shaped spirituality (see Chapter 8 of “River Houses Rising”) is why I have included the Chapter entitled “Honey, I Shrunk The Church!”  This Chapter is all about spiritual “detoxing” and shedding spiritual baggage. This is important because we do not want to duplicate failure by attempting to drive religious square pegs into spiritual round holes. Your journey into organic house church and Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer will be short and frustrating if you do not come to terms with your spiritual baggage left over from the days of your religion-shaped spirituality. Detoxing and shedding baggage functions as a two-edge sword. It weeds out the “square pegs” who either cannot or will not change, or it  transforms them so they can successfully adjust to the new reality of spiritual round holes.

The “Messiness” of Life and Revival

O.K., one last “chapter review” before we let you go to explore the rest of the book on your own. Perhaps you remember my all-time favorite movie - “Casablanca” (if not, rent a copy, pop some popcorn and enjoy one of the best movies ever made). In one scene, when the Nazis demand that Rick’s “Café Americain” be closed, the Prefect of Police (Captain Renault, played by Claude Rains) must trump up a reason for the closure. The result is a classic scene that has become part of movie lore:

Rick: “How can you close me up? On what grounds?”
Captain Renault: “I am shocked, shocked, to find gambling going on in this establishment!”
Emile: “Your winnings, sir”.
Captain Renault: (in a soft voice, to Emile) “Thank you. Thank you very much. Everybody out!”

Harumph! Gambling in a casino? How shocking!

Some of you reading this book won’t survive Chapter 4 on detoxing, but if you do, we’ll catch you in Chapter 5. It’s our “casino-in-Casablanca” moment. One of the quickest ways to spot a religion-shaped spirituality is to watch how people respond to “the messiness of life”, especially when it manifests in their living room. Their response is often akin to Captain Renault’s, “I am shocked, shocked, to find that there is sin in your life (as opposed to mine, which is pure as the wind-riven snow)!” Shock and self-righteousness are frequent traveling companions in a religion-shaped spirituality.

We live in a fallen, sinful world, which is why Jesus came and died - that we might be reconciled to God and redeemed from the moral and spiritual catastrophe of our own fallenness. As a result of that cosmic catastrophe and our own daily complicity in it, our lives are “messy”. The good news is that God wants to redeem the messiness of our lives and transform us into the very image of His son. Christ-likeness is God’s high calling upon each of us.

Yet, Christians continue to respond to sin and the “messiness” of life much like Captain Renault responded to that gambling in which he, himself, was an active participant, “I’m shocked!”. Right. And “denial” is still a river in Egypt.

As I shared earlier, one of the quickest ways to spot a religion-shaped spirituality is to watch how people respond to “the messiness of life”. A religion-shaped spirituality will typically respond with self-righteous “shock”, followed (in close and fast order) by moral outrage, judgmentalism and condemnation, a heavy dose of “I told you so”, and finally a discourse on “If you would only live your life by the same ten biblical principles that I live by, this wouldn’t happen, you’d be really spiritual and God would love you more.”  The coup de grâce of this response is, of course, an invitation to a weekend seminar on “God’s Paths For Spiritual Blessing”.

Welcome to the world  of religious square pegs and religion-shaped spirituality. If you find yourself in essential agreement with this approach (in other words, you’re so upset with me right now that your head feels like it’s going to explode), then you should probably stop reading right now. It will only get worse. Consider yourself warned!

At this point in the discussion you might conclude (wrongfully) that a Jesus-shaped spirituality is somehow “soft on sin”. Not so. We’re just lite on legalism. Like Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, a Jesus-shaped spirituality weeps at the personal destruction and death that the catastrophe of sin has brought upon the world, and how it continues to ravage the lives of those around us - both inside and outside the Church. But a Jesus-shaped spirituality understands that the catastrophe of sin and its consequences cannot be undone - even in the life of the believer - by any set of rules, principles or guidelines, masquerading as holiness, regardless of how well intended.

Genuine holiness is to legalism what a genuine $100 bill is to a counterfeit. Outwardly they resemble one another in appearance, enough so that an untrained eye might mistake one for the other. But that’s where the similarities end. When the truth is exposed, one will let you shop at WalMart; the other will send you to prison for 20 years. That genuine holiness of a Jesus-shaped spirituality, produced by a personal encounter with a burning coal fresh from God’s altar, will transform the individual and  enable them to obey God with a joyful heart and a clear conscience. The false holiness of legalism and its rules will imprison you in a life of guilt, anger, frustration and self-righteousness. Legalism is the fool’s gold of the domain of darkness. You can’t spend it in the Kingdom of God.

A Jesus-shaped spirituality places its faith and its hope, not in the outward conformity of the individual to a set of religious rules, but in the inward spiritual transformation of the individual by the Holy Spirit. And that, ultimately, is the “scandal” of Chapter 5. I hope you “survive” it. If not, Captain Renault and I will send flowers.

Your Invitation To “The Scandal”

And this leads me to the “scandal” of Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer. The “scandal” of Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer is our firm belief that Jesus wants to visit His Church and to pour out the River of His Spirit which will flow in spiritual power and blessing unknown in the experience of our generation. And in the process of that divine visitation He wants to indelibly imprint a new-but-old  DNA upon her character, a DNA of genuine holiness and the fear of God, genuine personal repentance and renewed intimacy with Himself. Why? So that in the generations of house churches yet to be born we will multiply and reproduce believers and churches where repentance, intimacy and holiness are "the norm," just as the prophet Zechariah foresaw:

"In that day there will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, ‘HOLY TO THE LORD.’ And the cooking pots in the Lord’s house will be like the bowls before the altar. And every cooking pot in Jerusalem and in Judah will be holy to the Lord of hosts; and all who sacrifice will come and take of them. And there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts in that day." (Zechariah 14:20-21)

God is preparing His end-time harvest. And to accommodate that harvest He is raising up tens of thousands of organic, multiplying house churches, Safe Houses of Hope and Prayer, led by believers just like you. These organic house churches, meeting in homes like yours and led by Kingdom-minded disciples like you, will be the new vessels for what God is doing in our day. And He is calling you to be a part of it. The only question remaining is this:  Are you ready to become a part of what God is doing in our day?