Meeting Daily
This morning, I wrote the following as my facebook status:
Meeting with the church yesterday = talk with people, sing some songs together, teach one another, eat together, help out a brother and sister, have fun together… I could do this every day.
This led to a good discussion of the benefits and/or disadvantages of meeting together as the church.
I was wondering what my readers here thought about this topic. Under what conditions would believers meeting together daily be a good things, and under what conditions would it be a bad thing?
Having lived for two years where I not only met together with other believers, but also worked, ate, and lived them, I’d have to admit I am decidedly biased against living in such “bubbles”…
But there are probably other circumstances where it might not be such an unhealthy thing…
Alan,
I saw your FB thread this morning, and I am not sure whether meeting daily is really the issue. It has been just over a year since we started our home fellowship. We started out meeting weekly, to get used to coming together on a regular basis. Most were attending other “churches”.
Since then, we try to get together as much as possible, in addition to our regular gatherings on Thur, Fri or Sat. For most of us, getting together daily would be an impossibility given the nature of our work schedules and just life.
We have not made it a goal to meet daily, but to make contact with each other as much as possible to be a blessing to one another. However, I believe there is someone in our group making contact with someone else in our group on a daily basis, via meeting for lunch, email, text or phone call.
The motivation is not to see how many days we can meet together. There is just this desire to get to know one another, provoking one another to love and encouraging one another. I have found that we just want to spend time together.
I have had some in our “Sunday morning church” wonder how we do it. I think you have to understand church is more than a “Sunday” morning service and listening to a sermon. What got me meditating on it was Acts 2, observing that the early church met daily in some form or fashion. I don’t want to go to another meeting. But when you meet with the brethren and your motivation is to be a blessing, how can you tire of that?
Daniel,
I think it would be unhealthy for a believer to only spend time with other believers. Thus, I don’t think “meeting daily” means that every person in a church should meet with every other person in a church every day of the week.
Jack,
Yes! I like your description very much.
-Alan
For us it is not an “official” thing. We get together at least once a week to eat, pray, learn, encourage, share life, like a family. Most of the time there are things going in our lives where it is natural to get together. For example, in two weeks we are going on a 16 mile overnight backpacking trip in Zion National Park. We are going with people from 4 families. So we have been getting together at least once a week, now two times a week to train for our adventure.
Because church is family to us we operate like a family. We play together, work together, and enjoy just hanging out together. Like Jack wrote we are always texting, calling or emailing each other on a daily basis.
We only “officially” plan to meet once a week. The rest of our time together is just part of life.
One gal who enjoys being part of the family just found out that a class she is taking switched nights and for the next 10 weeks she can’t make the “official” family gathering. So my wife and her are going to get together for coffee once a week while this class is in conflict. We will make an extra effort to get together with this family…because we love this family and we are family. It is not a mandated thing, it is a love thing.
It is natural, its normal, it is life.
Darrell, that’s powerful!
Darrell,
I agree with Jack! I love the idea of making special arrangements to spend time with the sister who’s work schedule changed.
-Alan