The Attendance Syndrome and the Consumer-Driven Church, Part 2

(In Part 1 of this article we described how the consumerism mindset has impacted the church, contemporary Christianity’s focus on attendance and how all that contrasted with the way the early believers lived and met as a church.)

The Attendance Syndrome and the Consumer-Driven Church, Part 1

One of Covid-19’s far-reaching changes was the trend towards working from home – an unprecedented and ongoing phenomenon facilitated by the rise of connectivity and communication technologies, according to a paper from Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business.¹

Beyond Rituals

During my early grade school years my grandmother took me with her to attend mass not only during Sundays but sometimes even during weekdays. Most of the time I merely agreed to go. Somehow, religion, and religious rituals in particular, did not appeal to me. Later, my religion teacher in sixth grade would berate me for my lack of interest in the subject.

Church: It’s More Than a Meeting

Do you know that gangs might have more things in common with the church or ekklesia in the first century than with the majority of today’s traditional churches? We don’t mean the crime and violence usually associated with them, but strangely these notorious groups seem to have grasped what it means to be a family than many Christians do today.

House Church Made Simple: The Idiot’s Guide (Part 1)

We’ve been asked a number of times what we do when we meet as house or simple churches with the groups we’ve started since the early 2000’s. To be honest, the way we’ve been meeting has been evolving as we learn more about how ekklesia was practiced back during New Testament times. Too often people focus on the “what” and “how” rather than the principles behind meeting as the Lord’s family. So in this post we’ll attempt to share some of the fundamentals we’ve been learning as we seek to pattern our gatherings on the practice of ekklesia back in those days.

Small is Big: Ekklesia in Today’s World

In our previous post we mentioned about the probable trend towards smaller gatherings of Christians as an offshoot of the Covid-19 pandemic. Such groups or churches have already been around in the last 2 decades in those parts of the world where religious freedom is prevalent. However, in countries that restrict the gathering of believers or the Christian religion in general, believers have been meeting in small groups or house churches for decades. And these countries – China and Iran among the notable examples – are those that have shown the largest growth in numbers of believers.