Sid: My guests by way of telephone Tony & Felicity Dale their the heads of “House to House Ministry” in Austin, Texas. I’m interviewing them on Felicities new book “An Army of Ordinary People” and in looking over my notes Tony and Felicity I was reading about these various house groups that you started. The problem you had is you started getting larger and larger and you had to make a decision. Do you go out and rent a building so that you can get larger, or do you multiply smaller church meetings into homes, what direction to go in, what did God show you?
Tony: We had been thinking through this issue through our early years in the United States as we tried to get ourselves involved in you know typical traditional church life here. And we had realized that where we had gone wrong from our perspective in the UK was as we watched God’s blessing we assumed getting bigger was better and yet getting bigger was letting go of so many of the core values; the every member being involved. The flat type of non-hierarchical leadership where everybody in the body was important; where you know 1 Corinthians 14:26 was a reality of when you come together each one has something. Or taking the one another of the New Testament that you really can’t live loving one another or forgiving one another, bearing one another burdens, teaching and admonishing one another. You can’t do that in a context that gets big that’s as if you really have to start reading the New Testament through a filter that says “This only makes sense within a small group context.” So as we were starting something new there in our home and sort of overnight it exploded to 50 plus people we knew the basic decision had already been made. We weren’t getting bigger, we weren’t buying a storefront, I wasn’t going to become a preacher, but we were going to continue exactly what we’d been doing by multiplying out the small.
Sid: And so you pretty much divided down the middle and started two congregations, two house congregations but in retrospect you were sorry you did that why?
Felicity: Well, it didn’t take long until we were getting the reports back and it feels like we’d just been through a divorce, you know you split us down the middle and we lost the closeness of the relationships that we had and it probably took a year before people felt settled into that. And so these days we wouldn’t do it that way but if somebody becomes a Christian or somebody wants to join us we’ll say to them, “Can we start church at your house?” And you know we’ll send one or two people off to start church at their house.
Sid: So in other words, rather than forcing people to go to one group or the other group you send out one or two couples and they start brand new, that sounds like New Testament Christianity than the other way.
Tony: I think your right, I mean Acts chapter 8 of course there was a reason there you know persecution came but it says “That they were scattered all over the place and wherever they went they started preaching Jesus.” To us this is just a part of the philosophy here you know Christianity for the last few centuries at least in the west has been a come to us type of experience, come to my special meeting, come and here this good speaker. But what Jesus actually told us to do was to go and we feel that the challenge of Jesus is that we be willing to cross the cultural divide, we take the difficult step and involve our self in someone else s culture and a new circle of friends. The non- Christians in the office and the factory. I love the way one of our friends “Neil Cole puts it “We Christians need to learn to be comfortable in the smoking section.” And that’s part of what we teach people is the DNA of these new groups, keep reaching out and instead of always bringing the new believer to you now you go and invade the new believers space, their circle of influence and establish a new church there.
Sid: You know I often wonder we have in many of our churches today what are called evangelistic meetings. We actually expect someone that’s a nonbeliever to walk into a church to be saved. I mean there’s got to be a better mousetrap.
Tony: I couldn’t agree more and we don’t see Jesus telling people to meet Him at the synagogue. He was saying to them out in the marketplace where they were living “That the Kingdom of God is invading your space, He demonstrates His presence and power and in the demonstration He says “And now you know the kingdom of God is come near.” And these are the sort of principals that we talk about and you know we have articles about on the housetohouse.com website, and through the house to house magazine and so people are certainly welcome to dig deeper by going to the website.
Sid: Felicity tell me of one of your favorite stories in your book “An Army of Ordinary People.”
Felicity: This is a story e was actually a pastor of a church and he really longed to be able to get involved in seeing new believers, you know disciple, and form churches one day he went to a business meeting that was sort of almost a New Age Meeting it was a meeting for businessman certainly not for Christians. And he got involved in the group of business people and one day they asked him “Would he be willing to share some of things that he was interested in.” It turned out that everybody got a chance to share periodically and so he said “Yes, I would like to share about healing.” Well, it raised a few eyebrows, but when it was his turn he shared about healing. And he said, “Now I would like to give a demonstration.” And he’d been seeking the Lord and the Lord had given him 4 or 5 conditions that were words of knowledge and about 4 or 5 conditions that were going to be there at the meeting. And he called those people out and prayed for them and you know that as he prays and lays hands on them one person might say “Well, I feel such heat in my knees, he’s been praying for my knee and there had been heat running up and down. And another person might sort of find themselves weeping and all the time these businesspeople were looking on with their mouths open just amazed at what God was doing. And from that particular time a group of people got together and that became a church. And what was so interesting for this pastor he had been longing to be able to do this kind of thing and he finally went to his church and he said, “Would you be willing to release me?” And they released him to do what was really on his heart and he used to go back there about every month or two and he said “Whereas before he’d be telling the people that you know this is what you must do, you know you must go out and you must be evangelizing and you must be talking to people.” And people would just sit there in the congregation and just really not understanding what he was doing but when he came back and told them the stories of what he was seeing going on he found that people from the congregation of his original church they would then go out and they would start things you know in their own spheres of influence. Now one of the key when this happens is that you don’t try and bring the new into the old traditional church because experience from many different spheres tells us that if you see people become Christians in a new group like in an Alpha course or a marriage course it’s very very difficult for them to make the transition into the more traditional church. And so if a traditional church does this they need to be willing to release those people into whatever it is that God’s telling them. But you know God will only bless a church that does that He will bless a legacy church that releases the people to go out and start the new.
Sid: You know Felecity in your book you make the point “Simple is reproductive, explain that.”
Felicity: Well if you think about it I mean it just holds true in every sphere of life, something that is simple is easy to reproduce. Something that is complex or complicated is much more difficult to reproduce.
Sid: I mean, when you take a look at a mega church that is a complex, large piece of machinery but a little house meeting being led by the Holy Spirit and just sending couples out all over the map what an exciting vision. And especially if it’s God’s time.
Felicity: Right.
Sid: I have to believe and you know better than me I have to believe this is God’s time to birth millions of these house churches.
Felicity: Absolutely and God is doing something extraordinary. You know there is something that long will characterize what God is doing at the moment. And the Lord some time ago gave us a sort of triple thing that we just long characterizing what goes on and that is that in what He is doing at the moment there is to be no empire building, no control, and no glory. So no empire building is we’re not seeking to build our own empire, we’re building the Kingdom and it’s His Kingdom that counts. This thing is to be under the Holy Spirit’s control, not under man’s control. For too long you know the church has been under man’s control, this time we want it to be under His control; under the control of the Holy Spirit. And the third thing is there is to be no glory, there is really to be only one superstar in this whole thing and that is Jesus.
Sid: And I’ll tell you what you made that really clear in your new book “An Army of Ordinary People.” Let me tell you something there is enough in there for you to get started.
