Stepping Out in Faith by Mark Gilbert

Author:Mark Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: God, Jesus, Roman Catholicism, Religion and Spirituality, Christianity
Publisher: Matthias Media
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

7. Authentic church

Alex Purnomo

As far as I can remember, it all started in 1994 in Munich, Germany, when a girl gave me a non-threatening invitation: “There’s this Christian group meeting in a house on Saturday nights. The host invited me to come and she seemed quite nice. Maybe we should check it out?”

Like many others in Germany at the time, I called myself Catholic but had stopped going to mass. Matters relating to church or God were the furthest things from my mind. I held no animosity against church. I simply found it completely boring and irrelevant for my life. I had many other things with which to occupy myself, being a foreign student from Jakarta, Indonesia, in post-wall Germany in my mid-20s without any parental supervision.

So the girl’s suggestion was a long shot. But other things had been going on in the background. For one, I had just finished reading a book that made such an impression on me that I felt compelled to at least take another look at the Bible. It wasn’t a religious book, but a self-help book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by a leadership guru named Stephen Covey. In ‘A Personal Note’ at the end of the book Covey writes about his personal conviction that the source of the principles in his book is “God, the Creator and Father of us all”. Because of my Catholic upbringing, I assumed that he was referring to the Bible.[1] I didn’t know I could learn such useful things from the Bible and decided I should take another look at it. Maybe, I thought, it’s not that useless after all.

It was also around that time that my younger brother, who was studying on the other side of the world in Perth, Western Australia, told me that he was beginning to read the Bible with a Christian group at his university.

So the Stephen Covey book and my brother’s inspiration had both created a renewed interest in me to take another look at the Bible. I had a bit of time on my hands. And the invitation came from my girlfriend. So I went along.

My first impression of this Christian group, which they called a ‘house church’, was that they chose a rather bizarre location. It met in what used to be an indoor swimming pool in the basement of a house. The host told us that, years before, when they became committed followers of Jesus Christ, they had decided to empty the pool and furnish it with chairs, carpet and a couple of musical instruments so that people could have their ‘church’ there.

Having been brought up as a Roman Catholic, I had come to associate ‘church’ with a specific kind of building with certain architectural characteristics, along with lots of pomp, yawn-inducing rituals, stiff formalities and other religious trappings. The house church was as different as it could be from all of that.

The second thing that struck me was that there was something really liberating, refreshing and disarmingly authentic about the way this house church ‘did’ church.

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