I will ask the reader to read the following very carefully. There are so many assumptions about Christian meetings and such, that it is easy to line ourselves up in two groups: status quo, and anarchist. There is a third way, and yes, it is radical, but... well, just read on:
We must break the “scheduled weekly meeting” paradigm. This is a profound step for the religious, the sacrificial killing of the Christian Sabbath. This reality was pointed out to me some years ago, and I spent ten years arguing that our existing weekly meetings were not a bad thing in and of themselves, and could be reformed, renewed, and made to work. I am now convinced that I was wrong, and that I was hanging on simply because of tradition and a lack of any alternative vision. Changing the day of the week for the meeting does not help. If we decide to meet on Tuesday night, we will adapt—but not escape—our past patterns. Believers can accept almost any other change of activity: we can stop doing sermons, passing the plate, and meeting on Sunday morning. We can handle meeting in a house, not having a “pastor”, even having our group have no name. But discarding the scheduled weekly group meeting is so beyond the pale to most Christians that it begs the question: Who made the scheduled weekly meeting the linchpin of our Christian existence? How did we move from being identified by Jesus to being identified by our meetings? How did we move from being part of “the church” to being part of “our church”?
What challenges can we expect when we discard the regular weekly meeting? We can expect this move to be very revealing… and likely traumatic. When the Gospel came to the Jews, there was a backlash in some of them. Paul had to correct those who would turn their liberty to license, or who would feel free to sin “that grace may abound”. Other believers received the grace of Jesus with overpowering gratitude and the Spirit led them into lives of dedication and sacrifice that could never have been imagined under the character of law. In a very real way, our modern weekly meeting is rooted in the character of law to such a degree that we will not see its fruit until we get a safe viewing distance. Expect the abandonment of scheduled meetings to do several things:
It will reveal our hearts. If we were touching one another because of our love for one another, we will morph into new paradigms of connecting. If our participation in regular meetings is rooted in something else, we will find ourselves isolated, or at the least seeing much of our current fellowship wither. Too often, believers are together because of religious habit, a desire for doctrinal reinforcement, a sense of duty to the organization, or a need to be validated as Christians by their activities. Even positive things like the need to be fed and encouraged, or the desire to minister, if they are the primary reason for our attendance, will be revealed as a centering on self, and a dependence upon men, rather than Jesus.
It will expose the nature of our relationships. If our connection to other believers is grounded in common activity, losing that activity will break the connection. And we will soon look for others to whom we can relate on this shallow level. But if we have—or desire to have—actual relationship with our brothers and sisters, we will reorder our lives to pursue this. Relationship takes time and effort, far more time and effort than organizing and attending meetings.
It will create a time vacuum that begs to be filled, and will be filled by something. There is a strong temptation to fill that “meeting time”-- either to replace it with another “good” activity or to resist doing anything with it at all, and thus allowing the cares of this world to expand even further in our lives. It is a golden opportunity to be led by the Spirit instead of the schedule, but this must be pursued intentionally.
Can we even have a healthy “regularly-scheduled meeting”? I think the answer is a qualified “Yes”, but with a number of important observations:
I think meetings are to most Christians like a bar is to most alcoholics. And before you become too offended, consider the parallel. Once an addict realizes his dependency on alcohol to help manage his life, he finds that the first thing he must do is to put down the bottle. But this is only the beginning. Of primary importance is that he now sets his purpose to reordering his life. Remember, it is not so much the alcohol use itself that he must deal with, but the facets of his life that he managed with its assistance. During this period of reorientation, one keeps alcohol completely away from the addict. There is a shrieking void in the addict’s life that could be easily filled with a shot and a beer, so we shield the addict from that path. We essentially set a guardrail between him and this self-destructive answer to his life’s issues. And that guardrail is valuable until such a time as he strongly rejects alcohol as a valid life-management tool. When the now-former addict reaches this point, the guardrail can be safely replaced with simple markers, which do not bar the man from properly using alcohol, but which clearly remind him of its hazards.
The Christian can find himself in much the same paradigm. When I awake to the reality that I have ordered my spiritual life around meetings rather than around Christ himself, I know I have to back away from the meetings. But, while some Christian meetings do more harm than good, the quality of the meeting itself is not generally the issue. The Holy Spirit must reveal to me what I have been seeking from the meeting instead of seeking from Him. Identity, teaching, validity of our gifts and callings, worship or a devotional life—all these are facets of our spirit life that we may seek in meetings rather than in Christ.
So, I seek to reorder my life in the pursuit of God. And in this reorientation process, I avoid that to which I had addicted myself as I allow the Holy Spirit to fill the voids in my life as he wills. At this point, I avoid a commitment to meetings as the drunk shuns the honky-tonk. I press into Him who is my life to meet the needs of my heart. When my life is redirected in this path, I reject the very idea that men or their activities can validate my identity in Christ. I am a believer based on nothing more than him upon whom I have believed. This position in the Spirit frees me to touch meetings of the brothers in a pure way, to give and receive wholly of the Spirit. I can come and go among the church as freely as the resurrected Jesus passed through the walls of the upper room.
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