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It’s six o’clock. Work is done, but the day is not over yet. For within an hour you’ll be sitting at the kitchen table with some friends. That’s what you do every week. Sometimes at your house, sometimes at a friend’s. It is the best evening of the week. The meal is always simple but delicious. The best part of it is that you eat together with your friends. Fortunately it’s not always you who has to do the cooking. Most of the time they all bring something to put on the table. Or somebody comes to help with the cooking. Tonight it will be soup with fresh bread.

This meal is different from the other meals of the week. Not only because you are together with friends, but also because every week during the meal somebody breaks the bread and passes around the cup
with some wine in it. There is always somebody who wants to give thanks for that. Sometimes somebody has a word from the Scriptures to remind you all of what Jesus has done for you.

Then there is a lot of chatting and laughter. Meanwhile some helping hands clean the table and make coffee. When everybody is back at the table again you are always curious what will happen this time. There is no plan or a prepared program. And nobody who takes a lead. For every week when you come together like this, everybody has something to share. Maybe what they have read in the Scriptures or what someone has experienced with the Lord. An answer to prayer,
a blessing, a problem. And it’s always amazing how the others add something to what is shared, by reacting with a prayer, an encouraging text, a song or whatever. It’s never the same. And so God can lead your group in the direction that He finds important for you as a group.

When somebody shares a problem, the others immediately ask if there’s something they can do to solve that problem. Maybe somebody tells that he has a transportation problem that coming week and somebody can lend him his car for a while. Maybe another person is in need of some tools to do some practical repair work at home. And when somebody doesn’t have enough money to pay a bill, there is always the will to help out. For the good thing is that your little housechurch doesn’t have to spend any money on a building or on a salary for a
leader. So, there’s always money available that can be used for a sudden need. That way you have a lot of practical things to share.

After about an hour of listening together to what the Lord had to say to the church, most of you stay to share more from their lives in personal
conversations, to play a game or watch a movie together. In the kitchen two ladies are talking together. In the garden some men have a great time together talking about what is on their hearts. They have come up with a plan to go and give some practical help to somebody in the neighborhood.It could be someone from the group itself or even one of their neighbors. One of you owns a good trailer and two weeks ago two of you helped somebody to take a lot of old stuff to the recycling centre. That neighbor asked what kind of group you were!

Of course you didn’t let that opportunity go to tell him that you are a small and simple housechurch that gathers weekly out of love for God and that at the same time wants to be a blessing to the neighborhood as well.

A few miles from your home there is another housechurch like yours. Every sixth week your group always visits that other housechurch on a Saturday afternoon. Or they come to your place. It doesn’t matter where, as long as the house has space enough for about twenty people. These times are always big parties. You eat, talk, sing, share the Lord’s Supper, read from the Scriptures and often the children have prepared something special like a song or a little drama, showing the adults what they learned from Gods Word and from their lives with Him.
Last week you invited a brother who shared some great teachings from the Word. Everybody went home encouraged.

And next week you will watch a good movie together. And next month the whole church will be out on a trip to the zoo and have pancakes afterwards!

Every week you always pray for those who do not know Jesus yet. An answer to those prayers came two weeks ago from the other housechurch. Some of the teenagers there had brought a friend from
school to their meeting. In class he had told his friend about their simple
housechurch meetings and immediately his friend said he would love to come and see that. So, this week he indeed came along. You thanked the Lord together for that great opportunity to show this guy that God’s church can function in a very organic and simple way and that this young guy heard the Gospel for the first time in his life.

Somebody came with a spontaneous idea to give the few teenagers from your two groups a chance to meet in one of the rooms upstairs and have a similar simple meeting as the ones they have been part of for some many times now. They could experiment with all the creativity they have. And if they would need help, they could always ask for that. Everybody liked the idea, especially the teenagers themselves!

And how are the children doing? There are only three in your housechurch now. A baby of only a few months old and two kids of six and eight years old. They love the singing and have no fear praying out loud with the adults. And of course they love eating with so many people around the table. One of you really has a gift of teaching important spiritual truths to the children in many creative ways.

It is amazing to see how much those kids have learned already from the Bible in a few weeks. It might be an idea, that when you will again will be together with the other housechurch, to ask the kids to play a little drama about somebody from the Bible and tell the parents and the others what they have learned from that person’s life.

Often it is great to see how quickly some of your housechurch friends have grown in their faith. Simply by coming together once a week as a group and also meeting informally during the week with others. It is mainly through personal contact that the younger Christians have learned so much in a short time. It is clear that this is because they found all the freedom and trust to discuss their personal questions with somebody else from the group or with the whole church during a meal or a walk. It is easy for these people to then start helping others who have similar questions.

A great illustration of how things function in your group is the story of a younger sister who often has a hard time at work. She works as a nurse in a hospital and she has a real desire to learn how to witness to the other staff and to the patients. But it is not easy. How do you do it? When she shared her desire and frustration during a meal together, immediately the two other sisters from the housechurch agreed with her to come together with her once a week to pray together for wisdom, opportunities to share her faith and boldness.

These hours have meant a great deal to her. She feels that she is no longer alone, knowing that her friends are praying for her while she is doing her daily job in the hospital. An answer to those prayers came when she met another nurse during her lunchbreak who told her she was a Christian as well. You can imagine how excited she was about that! The church even wondered if God wanted to start another church meeting of Christians in that hospital on a regular basis. They are praying about that!

Another ten minutes to go before your friends will come in. The table is set and there is no doubt that everyone will be thinking about what they will find on the table this time. But the greatest joy is always to meet each other again. When you first started these meetings, things didn’t go so smoothly! But over time everybody has realized that coming together is not for being fed – but to feed others. So now there is always enough real food on the table and spiritual food shared around the table.

The greatest dream of your housechurch is that in your town at least ten of such housechurches might be born soon!

(Story by Alex Van Nes, working with simple churches in Belgium)