Encountering the Gospel

Wow, Perspectives offers a lot of learning. There are so many different things I've pondered lately. One thing is about church planting. The speaker last week really got me thinking and the reading has challenged me quite a bit. By these I have learned about a number of different people groups to whom the gospel has been shared and taken root. It's quite exciting to see how each group learns of Christ and how the gospel spreads throughout each people group. It's also very neat to see how each group worships God differently. And this has really struck me.

The reading encourages the idea of having a people group be self-operating as much as possible from the beginning. So, they form their own groups as they see need and they will meet regularly as large groups, but maybe not weekly or on Sunday. They're all focused on prayer, Scripture reading and teaching, fasting, accountability, etc. When there's a problem, missionaries encourage the group to search the Scriptures for answers and come up with their own decision with the guidance from the missionaries. Also, each group (that I've seen) naturally decides there's a need for a leader and so some are appointed.

I find it so intriguing to think of how people naturally respond to the gospel and Scripture without appointed guidelines on "how to do church." In some respects, I think it's better. They are not "culturally Christian" where we have to separate ourselves from what is said to be Christian by our culture and what is really of Christ Himself. And these short articles and talks are not enough to see all of their cultural blunders so I don't want to lift up all the other people groups and bash our own culture. But it makes me wonder...what would our churches look like if we were without the gospel and it came to us today? Would we have the clean-cut specific doctrinal statements? Would we be more focused on living out the gospel than trying to figure it all out? Would our services look the same? Would we need such specific liturgy? Would our worship songs be so focused on sounding nice so they move our hearts or would they focus more on God? As I've gone throughout the last few days, these questions and more have flooded my mind. Really, what would our churches look like if they didn't have the history that they have from the reformation, or even earlier?

I see why they named this course the way they did.