Bournagain

I put “house church” in inverted commas as we are still not sure what to officially call this gathering we have weekly – not having a name doesn’ t seem to have been detrimental up till now so we’re going with the flow.

Tonight was a meeting just as I like them. We all arrived a bit late, and everything was a bit disorganised. We discovered nobody had eaten but the soup we had made for dinner just stretched as each person turned up and joined us at the table – not that this had been planned. Had a great time just sharing news around a bowl of soup – catching up on some issues people in the group are facing related to their homes, their jobs etc. – things that we had already been praying about.

We then moved to the comfortable seats and opened the Scriptures where we had left off last time (we’re in Revelation at the moment), and although nobody had had the time to prepare a “study” as such, we drew out all kinds of insights which led into some very worthwhile learning. I think we could have all gone on much longer, but we try to respect the one and a half hours we agreed on – seeing that we meet weekly, and some have to get up early to work.

One great story we heard tonight was about an original way of starting a church. The parents of one of our house-groupies started a house church, and the way the group really took off was when they decided to have baptisms in their garden and invite all the neighbours. Many of the onlookers were that surprised to meet Christians so ingenious as to have a baptism in their garden that they asked all kinds of questions, and this process morphed into an Alpha Course which now has many of them making definite steps toward faith. This is FRANCE, folks – not India, Guatemala, or some other place where you just need to put a church sign up and they get a crowd. Who says that people aren’t interested in the gospel in “post-Christian” Europe?

Complete change of subject: this poor blog suffered from such neglect for such a long time – I hadn’t updated WordPress for ages, and when I finally did I lost all the bells and whistles in the sidebars. So we’re going for a kind of pared down, minimalist look until I get a moment to fix it.