Video Transcript: House To House - Chapter 2 Learning the Hard Way

We need to write down what God's given us. I want to read you a scripture that's really helped us over the years, before I finish our story, before we actually get into lot of the actual teaching and training as to how you start a house church, how you maintain house church, how you multiply house churches, how you work with the rest of the body of Christ, and all those important things. 

The Scripture is in Habakkuk chapter 2. And I love Habakkuk because of the way he speaks to me personally, because the way he heard from God. And the scripture says, says it like this, Habakkuk, chapter 2, starting in verse 1, I'll stand up my watch, and I'll station myself on the ramparts, and I'll look to see what he'll say to me. And when answer I am to give to this complaint so havoc. He says this. 

Now I keep looking, I'm going to look to see what God will say. Say, Do I start a house church, or a daughter, or do I not start a house church? Well, look to see what God's saying. In other words, says, Look around you. Are there people who need care? Are there people who need a house church? Are the people who are looking to you for spiritual leadership, and maybe you're just called to disciple them as part of a church you're in right now. 

That's wonderful, but maybe you're called by God to start a new kind of church. And they and you, most people that I couldn't sell a church. My I need a building, and I need a sound system. I need worship teams and all that, not necessarily, if you go back to the basics of the New Testament, the churches didn't have all that. What they had. They had the life of God. They the power of the Holy Spirit. They had family. There were no needs among them. People come to Christ every day. They didn't have all the other trappings, necessarily. You know, I say trappings for some it is. Some it isn't. But what they did have is they had life. And so look to see. Often God speaks to me about what I see. 

If I see there's a certain need, certain places, people need help in certain areas. Well, maybe sometimes, that's God speaking to me. But then he says this in verse 2, chapter 2, verse 2, from Habakkuk, he says. Then the Lord replied, write down the vision. Write down the Revelation, he said, and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it. Here's why. When you hear from God, write it down. You can change it, but write it down. 

When I write down the revelation God gives it does a few things. 

Number one, helps me understand it, because when I write it down, a big, well, that's not quite it, and I can tweak it.

Number two, it helps other people understand it. So in other words, I can say it some people, you may learn by hearing. Others learn by pictures. Others learn by reading it. So you write the vision down. Remember, you cannot do this alone. 

First thing you do is we get a get one or two people who share the vision with us. We can be in the prey and say, what would this look like? So you write it down. You make it plain and tablets so that a herald may run with it. So and then, so then that's just your run with this vision. Others run with the vision. It's so important to write it down for the revelation a waste and appointed time it speaks of the end. It will not prove false, though it linger, wait for it. It will certainly come and will not delay. You know, God, I had visions of things to do years ago, and it took a long time for to be fulfilled, but we used to be obey Jesus, step by step. Allow God to tweak the vision, make the vision, change the vision, whatever. But if you write it down, it helps others run with you. That's really, really an important thing. 

Now, God speaks to me in pictures, and when I got this revelation of the underground church, here's the picture the Lord gave me, and really he gave it to me. I was talking to a friend in England, and he mentioned it all once became clear to me again, we all learn differently. That's how I learn. I learn through pictures. I think I love to draw charts, and my team give me a hard time, because I always drawn charts, but it helps me. I can see things as I draw it. I can see it and make sense even spiritually. 

Here's what the Lord showed me. He showed me the church is like a big tree. If you take a tree, you say, what do you see? Well, I see branches. I see leaves of an apple tree. I see apples. I see twigs. That's only half the tree. The other half of the tree is underground. And the Lord spoke to me, are you willing to be involved in my underground church? He was speaking about the part of the church says underground, and whether or not you apply some of this teaching in these sessions to your own local, mega church, Community Church and have strong small group, subgroup, that's fine, even though the focus of this whole course is how to start house churches. Who network together and how search networks. I want you to know that the vision of the tree will help you. 

The root system is half of the tree. If the root system is strong and healthy, the tree above the ground is healthy. And that's what we found. The most important thing 15 years I served as a pastor, and you know something, the most important thing we did. We train house church leaders, House Fellowship leaders through all those years, and called we call them many different names. Well, I'll use for the purpose of this teaching, I'll use House Fellowship the first season. That's what we use. And you know, that's where most of the ministry happened. We had all these people on our staff and all these things. But you know the reality, the reality is that 95% of all of the ministry in this mega church that I pastor. Do you know what happened? It happened not by paid staff. Happened by people who were trained to be House Fellowship leaders, and they were serving people. They were helping people in all warrants, the believers truly became the ministers. 

Today I talk to people say, tell me about your minister. They talk about a preacher who preaches, no, we're all ministers. You know, the saints, the Bible says Ephesians 4 do the work of ministry. So let me finish our story. Let me just finish out for this session as they finish it up, until where we're at today. So I never asked in my wife one day, you know our church, who was? We started with 25 people, and by the way, we had three house fellowships. After six months, we grew to two House fellowships. We grew backwards. It was not easy. I mean, one of the huge mistakes we made was we didn't understand Christian leadership. 

Let me explain to you what I mean by that? We just didn't understand that there, yes, there's God calls teams of leaders who lead together. Always does, but there's always someone who gives leadership among the team. And we started with we called it. We called a co-equal plurality of leadership. And I'm the one that brought that in. I said, let’s have six of us be equal leaders. Now look back now, and I know why I did that. I did that because I had so much insecurity in my own life, and I had I thought, if this doesn't work, what if this fails? Because if it fails, I'll be left holding the bag myself, so to speak. I'll be responsible because of his security. I asked for that. Well, it was crazy. 

We had three house fellowships, then two House fellowships coming together Sunday morning. A few people. We met a little barn then, and some, sometimes, you know, we always have different people preach, and sometimes, one time nobody preached because we couldn't figure out what to do. It was just crazy. Our friend, his name is Harold Eberly. Harold Eberly, A teacher in the body of Christ, and he wrote a book called The Complete wine skin. Here's what he says. I agree with him 100% he said, After observing many, many, many churches, I can personally tell you that no matter what form of government a church claims to have, there's always one person who openly or quietly holds the greatest influence over the church. 

Setting up the proper government is never a matter of keeping out of the hands of one person, but putting it into the hands of God's person. And I realized that God had called me to give leadership of this church, but the bottom line was I wasn't willing to do it, and so we went to these Mennonite bishops back when we still had these mentors, and they helped us work through that. So we've always believed in teamwork, always will. But Paul and Silas and Timothy, they were a team. They work together. Now, did someone give leadership to that team? Of course, Paul did. Jesus had a team, Peter and James and John and Peter and the rest of the 12 and then the 70. 

There were levels of leadership there. Yes, there were. But Jesus obviously led that team. So it was interesting, when we got that clear, and leadership was clear, then we begin to grow. As I say, we grow 300, 300, 300 in all these house fellowships for many years, until we do it over 2300 people in 130 of these house fellowships. And then when we do it, because for us, what was important was House Fellowship. There's times we closed down the rest of the meetings. 

The big means we closed them down for a month just meeting house fellowships. And you know, we'd always add people whenever we do that, because people realize that that's where the life was. It was in these house fellowships. But after I was in pastoral leadership, I really open with you and honest with you. About 10 years I began to struggle, and the struggle that I had, honestly, I didn't have at that point. I didn't have any kind of theological training. I mean, I did get a master's degree in ministry from Southwestern Christian University when I was age 60. I did that, but I just didn't have the training. 

But also, I didn't have any fathers, because when, after three years of ministry, the Mennonite bishops, we had to part our ways with the Mennonite bishops. When that happened, I thought, we're gonna be fine. God's our Father. We don't need accountability. We don't need help. But we really did, and I started to have personality conflicts with people on our team, really good leaders, and wonderful men. Of God, but I and, and I had no one to go to, and they had no one to go to. And we started to, we started to have these conflicts. I remember coming home one day, and I said to my wife, Laverne, said, Honey, if I could kick in the head one more time. I'm out of here. I just, I just want to go back to business. 

You know, I left the farming operation. I left the chicken operation. I was doing this, you know, I was being paid to do this full time with so many people were giving and tithing and I said, I just want to go back and do something else, but I went to the mountains to pray, and my wife will run with me. And you know what God showed us? What God showed us was this, he had called us, and we didn't have an option, because unless we were uncalled we had to do what he's called us to do. And maybe you're in that situation right now. You just need to obey the call of God. We do it with humility, but we do it with confidence that God has called us. 

And I said, Lord, I need a spiritual father. I'm the one to be a father in the LORD to me, and we're going to later on in these, in this course, we're going to talk a lot more about your need to be a spiritual father, spiritual mother, how you owe spiritual fathers. Mother, in their life. I didn't have that. And the Lord spoke to me, so you cast your bread upon the waters in a return in many days. And that's Ecclesiastes 11, one. In other words, you continue to be a spiritual father to others, and I'll provide spiritual fathers for you. I knew that God was the ultimate spiritual father. No one could ever take his place and make a long story short, God began to give me spiritual fathers. An older man came into my life who was a man of God, and he began to speak into my life. He believed in me where I didn't believe in myself. 

And as we went through the whole process, I realized that to really do what God's called me to do and us to do. I wasn't called just to be pastoring one church. I was called to be involved in apostolic ministry where I was helping and serving as a servant leader, many around the world are doing the same thing. And so we started planting churches. We've had already planted, done some work in different nations of the world, like New Zealand and and Kenya and Uganda and some other parts of the world. And so we realized that God was calling us to really give the church away. 

So a few years later, in 1996 we trained eight senior pastors. We call them senior albums. We use that term. And in Pennsylvania, where we this whole first church started, and we gave everyone the option, they could join any denomination movement they want, or they could join with us. We're starting a new family of churches called dove International. And by the grace of God. 

The eight churches are locally said, yes, we want to be part of this new movement. And then in the nations of the world, there were, there were a few churches that said, we're not sure we want to do that. We're going to wait on that. But three churches said they want to. So we began, began. Became this family of 11 churches with dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of house fellowships in Pennsylvania, USA, in the nations. And I became, was asked to be the international director of this new thing. It was a huge step of faith for us. 

See, you have to remember when we were had just a few people, and we had this couple house fellowships. When I look at my wife one day and said, how many people do you think will be in this church in the future? Do you think we could really grow? And we said, Yeah, we think by the time we're 80 years of age, and maybe we go to 200 total with all the house fellowships. That's how big our vision was. But God began to expand it and expand it. And today, by the grace of God, we're planting house fellowships in 20 nations, and there will soon be in the 21st nation, probably in a few months, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, between four and 500 churches of house fellowships and house fellowships all over the world. 

We're talking 1000s of small groups and house fellowships all over the world. It's truly by the grace of God that has happened, but I share all that with you so that you can know that God would desire to use you in the same way to see his kingdom built. And we love the body of Christ. We serve in the body of Christ. I've had the privilege of having close friends of many different denominations. They come and help us, and we come and help them. It's all about God's kingdom. That's what's important. But here's what happened the last 15 years. We've kind of gone back to the future, as I said in another session, and what has happened is this, we had a younger generation who were coming to us, and they were saying, we love you. We love the churches that are here now. But there's something new God wants to do. 

There's a new wineskin that God wants to form. And now we're helping many, especially of younger generation at all. Some are older, but start house fellowships all over the United States of America, throughout Canada. We're seeing this happen in parts of Africa. We're seeing it happen in Asia, the Caribbean and South America is happening. Literally in Europe is happening. And it's these new wineskins, these new house churches. So I feel honoured to be with you and to impart anything that God's given me, and I'll be sharing with you many mistakes that we made, and I'll be sharing with you ways that I wish you would have done, ways you can tweak it, that it can help you as you obey God and you become the man or woman of God He's called you to be. One final story in this session, when I was at the midst of feeling. 

Being beat up and you know, guess God is healing, by the way, when I went through that really hard time after 10 years, should I tell you what I learned? I learned that Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. I learned that all that really matters isn't how many books I write, it's not how many house fellowships or house churches I start, but all that matters is I'm loved by the Father. He loves me. Jesus loves me. And you know, when that happened, something changed in my heart. I no longer was performance driven. I was realizing, no, I'm just obeying Jesus. I'm doing what he's called me to do. You know what really happened? I went to the mountains to pray. I took a walk one day, and when I got on this walk, I went to a place I'd never been before. 

I got to this like river. And I got to the river, and I felt like the Holy Spirit said, take your shoes off. You're in holy ground, and take your shoes off and walk across this river. I took my shoes, held on my arms, I began to walk across this river. And when I got to the other side of the river, I'll never forget it got almost the other side, and I thought this cleansing was happening. I felt like this is the most amazing thing. God was healing me, the insecurities and fears and all the things I was dealing with was being healed by God. I got the other side, stood on the riverbank, and I thought, where I go do now? I want to go back so I could meet a walk. There's a place I was never at before I began to walk. I remember I came to a place where these two large dogs, and they were, they were right next to a house, and there's a bank on the left side my I couldn't get away from them, and they came lunging at me, and they got that close, and they were chained. And all once I realized that they couldn't touch me because they were chained. Their Holy Spirit spoke to me. Said, many will say negative things about you. There'll be many dogs that are bark, but they're chains. They can't touch you. 

And I kept walking. I remember I came with the word, this is Methodist church building, and right next is old Methodist church building. Was a new Methodist church building, and on the new they're building it. And I remember there were young people, all age, people, men, women, up in the roof, having the time of their lives, and Holy Spirit spoke to me. Said, there'll be a whole generation planning new kinds of churches, because, see, I learned so much from a Methodist. I read the books of John Wesley in his journey, in his journals, the founder of Methodist Church, and realized that when Methodism started, their method was house fellowships. 

Their method was house churches. They called them class meetings, and they gathered in society. That's how that's how the industrial revolution happened. That's when Frances-bury came to America. That's what they were doing. They came to our county planning house churches. And I realized that God was using this analogy of this, this house and show me there's gonna be new kinds of churches being planted. And so I came back from that, just so healed and so set free. And over these last years now, as we see Governor Nasser continue to grow, and I'm so blessed with CLI that CLI has a heart to help anyone fulfil the calls in their lives, including starting new house churches in your nation, in your village, in your part of the world, for the glory of God. 

And I look back now, and I'm so grateful that God has to walk us through all those things, because I want you to know that the God that we serve is faithful, and you can trust Him, and He will use you to change your world as you trust him to do it through you. And you develop spiritual families, and often in the form of house churches. So God bless you. I look forward to coming back with you for more in this course you.