House Church and Cross-Cultural Worship

Have you ever shared living quarters with three other families? Well, during our time at FPO that is exactly what we are doing. We live in a "quad" which is basicilly four two or three-bedroom apartments that share a common living room. As you can imagine, after two weeks we have started to become rather close with our neighbors. So, I explained all of that so that I can tell you about house church. In many parts of the world Christians worship in small groups in apartments, huts and housees rather than in fancy multi-million church buildings like we do here in the United States, so while at FPO we are encouraged (nay, required) to learn how to study the Bible and worship in small groups. So, every Sunday morning at 9am we gather together in our living room for "house church." I love house church. The setting is intimate and we take turns each week leading the "service" and the music (rest assured, I will not be leading the singing.) One of our rules is that the "facilitator" asks the questions, but is not allowed to answer any of them, so our Bible study is just that. It really is a wonderful way to worship. I am sure I will write more on this in the next few weeks. We have been working our way through the book of Acts chapter by chapter. Because we have such a diverse group in our quad, it is interesting to hear what each other have to say and what we each get out of the passages we are studying. This week we will start meeting for worship every Tuesday through Friday morning as well as on Sundays. I think it will be a great way to start the day!

One of the goals of our time here at FPO is to get ourselves used to worshiping in different cultures and languages. So on Sunday evenings we all gather in the large meeting room for cross-cultural worship time. Last week we Indian (the country, not Native Americans) worship and this week we worshiped as they do in Korea. Now, I could spend a lot of time telling you how moving this experience is, but I am not sure that I have the words. We have an unusually large contingency of native Koreans here at FPO and I cannot tell you how moving it was to hear them give testimony and lead us in familiar hymns in their native tongue. I think the highlight of the evening was when one of the women sang "The Holy City" for us in Korean. There were many wet eyes when she was finished.

It is easy to fall into familar worship patterns and to totally miss meeting with God when we go to church. I challenge each of you to find new ways of approaching the throne of God in worship. For some of you, you may have the opportunity to attend a worship service in a different language. For others it might mean going to the "contemporary" service instead of the traditional service and for others it might mean going to church on Sunday night for the first time. I can assure you, that no matter what you do or what the language, if your heart is open you will be touched by His spirit.

Continue to pray this week. While our family always enjoys the benefits of specific prayer, I would encourage you this week to pray for two things: First, pray for the missionaries here at the International Learning Center. Making this transition from "regular life" to "missionary life" is not always an easy one. I have watched many families struggle with many different issues over the past few weeks. So, pray for the missionaries here as we meet with God and prepare our hearts, minds, bodies and spirits for the task that we have before us. Pray also for the lost people of the world. I will ask you this week that you pray specifically for the people of Central and Eastern Europe. All of the missionaries in our house church will be serving in this area of the world and the work will not be easy. Many of these countries are less than 1-percent evangelical Christians. The work there has been described as "plowing concrete." Many of the people in these areas proclaim themselves to be athiestic. Pray that the the Holy Spirit will begin working on each person that our group will come into contact with over the next three years. Pray that their hearts will be softened and they will be receptive to hear us tell our story about how having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ has changed our lives.

Know that each of you who reads these blogs are special to us and we love and miss you very much. We have not even left the States yet and I can tell you that missionary life is not an easy one. However, I cannot imagine a life outside of what God has called us to do. The temprature in Moscow is dropping this week, but our excitement continues to grow as we head into week four of our training.

Blessings,
Marc