HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

One of the most telling statistics against holding church in public buildings is the fact that most boys abandon their faith by the time they are 20 or go to college or university.

This is brought about because home and church are two different things and they compete with each other for your attention and time. One is essential, life giving, warm and connected and the other is irrelevant, boring, cold and disjointed by comparison.

One allows you to be yourself and you are loved and accepted with all your faults and failings and where you can let it all hang out and the other is formalised ritual which demands an artificial persona that hides most of the realities of your life and where the keeping of rules is more important than hugging and caring and loving and being.

Unlike the Jewish religion which places family at the centre and unlike the New Testament Church which places family at the centre of life because they meet in homes, in both cases, children were fully integrated into what happened as opposed to cold, meaningless Christian meetings in public buildings and where they are shunted off into a separate room so as not to bother the adults.

Unlike Judaism and the New Testament Church, the church today caters for individual faith. Judaism and the New Testament Church are and was a corporate experience based on the whole family where the father, the head of the house included all the family in what was happening.

Children were loved and wanted by their parents and were able to share the religious side of life because it was not separated from family. The fact that the church is moving back into homes is an indication that God has not changed his mind.

The fact that Satan through society and government wants to legislate perversion and question the validity of family is an indication how essential it is to civilisation and the understanding of who God is.

If the church shut up all its public meeting houses and reverted back to expressing their faith via the home what would be the end result?

It would bring the family into sharp relief and back into the centre of everything. Instead of Christianity being something you do in private inside four walls, it would be integral to every facet of life. The life of the church would revolve around the family, hospitality and relationship, not ritual and irrelevance.

It would deal a fatal blow to those who want to challenge the family as ordained by God and who want to impose a family experience that can be legitimised by any Tom, Dick and homosexual living together.

One thing that would not happen if the church shut up shop and moved back into homes and that is die a death. Just the opposite would happen. Like the New Testament Church, in all probability we would have new converts added to us daily.

Tradition can be a rigid, implacable master if it isn’t allowed to develop and grow to meet contemporary needs. Today we need more than anything to re-establish the family as the core of our faith and live it out through it if we are to prevent society destroying the very thing that it needs more than anything else.

The only thing that will stop us doing this is not the world but…implacable tradition which is brought about by witchcraft.