House Church

Thinking that we might still be even the slightest bit contagious, we decided to stay home from church yesterday morning. Actually...and don't tell anyone...that's when I took my walk with the little guy to the park and snapped the picture in the next post down. Walking back from the park I began thinking about how we, by not being at church that day, had robbed not only ourselves, but our kiddos as well, from all of the things we do Sunday mornings to develop our walk with Christ. So, I came home and announced we would be having house church last night. The kids were actually excited (Vicki was still in a NyQuil stupor at that time.)

Let me just pause here and address a possible idea that might be floating in your mind. That idea might go something like this: "man those missionaries are something else! They stay home from church but then they do church with their family!!" We are not "something else". Most of the time we feel like we're drowning in this vast sea of parenting and cross-cultural existence. It's difficult beyond belief to balance all of the different aspects of life...learning to raise and discipline three kids in three vary different phases of development while all the time trying to have some kind of great "Kingdom focus" on the world around us AND the world inside our home. It's a killer. We have had so much respect for parents before this last year and a half!!

Honestly we have had a tough time in the past trying to figure out the best way to build into spiritual development of the kids. We have done things like reading Bible stories, we pray together (of course most of this is around meal time or when there are "larger things" that we would like to address together), we've read some stories from a book we have about "Heroes of faith", and certainly we spend a lot of time unpacking different behaviors and experiences the kids go through in order to give them a Christ-centered perspective and worldview. I'm saying all of this because last night felt great and really seemed to bring a lot of these components together in a format that we will definitely do again frequently.

This is how it looked...our "order or worship"

• We opened in prayer. This was actually done by both Maciek and Piotrek. They took turns praying for our time in "church". It was really neat because Piotek too it a step further and prayed for our ability to praise God as well as praying for Him to help aunt Jackie as she's having some tests done right now (I was proud of his perspective).
• Calling on my repertoire of children's camp music we sang some fun songs to get us all moving. You know, fun stuff like "joy joy joy joy down in my heart", etc. And then we actually stopped to talk about what the songs meant and how we can live out even the fun songs that we sing because of the difference Jesus has made in our lives.
• Vicki asked Paulina and Piotrek each to read a different story out of our "Heroes of the faith" book (in Polish so they would be sure to connect 100%) and then we talked about how these heroes lived out their faith when faced with tough times. It was cool to see some light bulbs going on in their heads when we talked about application of these truths in their own lives...at school, at home with family, out on the soccer field, or wherever.
• We read a story that Maciek picked from his children's Bible (he loved to be able to be involved that way). It was the story of the tower of Babel...which led to a few minutes of discussion about God.
• A couple more songs of praise.
• Closing prayer. Interestingly enough I thought that they would be ready to finish up but Paulina asked if we could all go around and pray at the end...which of course we did!

That's it. Everything probably lasted around 20 minutes or so but gave us some awesome opportunities for deeper discussion with the kiddos about the truths of God's Word and our lives in Christ. Vicki and I were really excited that things went the way they did and how the kids really enjoyed it. Again, keep it to yourselves, but everyone seemed to think it would be a good idea to just go to church here at home (except for me of course..hehe).

There's definitely encouragement in this for all of us. If you're out there, like us, trying to figure out what to do with your kids to spend time with them in the Word, working to help them understand what it means to live for Christ, than you might give this kind of thing a shot. It definitely doesn't take any kind of formal training...mostly it just requires a willing heart and some time. Who doesn't have that?!

Looking back over this there was something I forgot...and this is a serious offense as a Southern Baptist. Next time I've got to remember to take the offering!