My Feet Catch the Pulse and the Purposeful Stride

We put our home group on pause before Christmas, to reassess and recommit. Home Groups are a key multiplication tool, and you have to be clear about not letting it be a group that you get too comfortable with. It needs to be ready to invite and accept new people… and be ready to reproduce into two groups and keep on doing that.

We came back together tonight for the first time since we took a break. It was powerful. We had a new guy, a Muslim background agnostic who has a ton of awesome questions and who had a key insight…

Home groups are very simple. Anyone can lead one.

We meet… in a home. Ours, in this case.

We spend some time hanging out.

We share where we have seen God at work.

We pray for each other.

We read a passage of Scripture. We don’t ask questions, don’t relate it back to other passages. It is a relentless focus on the text at hand. I try really hard to make sure we don’t let questions become our excuses to avoid obedience to what the Word says.

After reading it and meditating on it, we ask two questions:

What is the Spirit saying to me?

What am I going to do about it?

So tonight, we read Matthew 28:16-20, The Great Commission. I have been riffing on “I am with you always” since yesterday. So what I was going to do about it was to be ready to explicitly share the Gospel with someone this week, trusting that if Jesus is with me, that is what He has in mind!

The new fellow—a non-believer with no Christian background— added a thought. He said it was interesting that Jesus says He is with us, not that He is “in” us or imparting His spirit. It hit me hard! Another Great Commission blessing… because Jesus is still alive! He is not a thought or a feeling, an inspiration, or a reminder. He is alive. And with us.

My church member from my post yesterday said she has been struck by my prayers on my deck, when I see 1100 houses and no way can I reach them all…. But multiplying home groups can. They can saturate the city— the world— with the Gospel. If our home groups multiply, they could plant countless churches. What if a church were born out of 3 or 4 home groups that came from 1 home group? And the home groups in the new church multiplied and planted new churches… and the cycle kept repeating?