Living Room Discipleship

A Lifestyle of Church 

During my earliest (and, perhaps, most formative) years in the Christian faith, I attended a mega-church. The whole church was made up of something like nine thousand attendees spread across three campuses, and even included a Christian grade school. It was massive and easy to get lost in, which is a common story with large churches.  

Despite that, I worked hard not to get lost in the crowd.  

I served faithfully in a few different ministries, attended multiple small groups, and eventually was selected for the church’s pastoral training program. From the early stages of my faith in Jesus through to the first major steps of maturity, this church and its leaders heavily influenced me. It was there where I first heard the gospel, first gave a tithe, and first sang a Chris Tomlin song (a staple in those early 2000s). My wife and I were married at that church, even had our reception there. It was even at this massive church where I first taught the Bible, initially in small groups with other men and eventually weekly to a massive group of 5th graders. 

For ten years, I attended and contributed to this church and some of my sweetest memories of fellowship and love come from those years.  

Yet, many (if not all) of us understand the severe limitations of the large church format. The impersonal nature of any corporate structure means that much about the Way of Jesus can get lost in translation. I hope it isn’t controversial to say that it’s incredibly difficult (probably impossible) to accurately convey the life and nature of Jesus exclusively in a corporate church setting.  

From a practical perspective, Jesus’s life of ministry was one of traveling about with a small group of disciples, bringing healing and the good news of the Kingdom to the towns around Galilee. It was a tough life, I imagine, with ministry mostly done on hillsides, city streets, and in small homes. It was also an intimate life; one in which Jesus saw his best friends daily, and participated in every activity with them. There was no leaving one another at the end of a long day, as far as I understand it. They slept near one another, ate beside one another, and shared everything. They were, frankly, closer to one another than most families are today.  

Our modern way of participating in a corporate church structure doesn’t communicate those elements of Jesus’s life and ministry.  

And church leaders know this, which is why nearly every church encourages its congregants to attend some form of small group (connection group, life group, home group, discipleship group, etc.). It is because it’s in those small group settings that community and love can truly demonstrate themselves. In the gathering of just a few people, there is the space to meet needs, whether spiritual, physical, or emotional.  

In my life today, I’ve deeply internalized this concept of small community. 

Back in May of 2022, my wife and I decided to begin leading a Home Church alongside one of our dear friends. Each Sunday night, a small group of people come and spend time around our dinner table and in our living room getting to know us and our children over a hot meal, and getting to know Jesus as we open the Scriptures. Every week we sing hymns to remind us of the core of our faith and take communion to remind us of Christ’s work on the cross.  

After all those “church” things, we just talk. In the context of a loving church family, we share about our lives and struggles, and it’s during that time (probably two or three hours into the evening) that true fellowship and relationship begin to form.   

Right there, in our family’s kitchen or living room, our little part of the Church Body most looks like the lives of those earliest disciples.  

And it is beautiful. 

Teaching in Life’s Contexts 

Let me be clear that I am not against, or in any way “anti” large church. My wife and I specifically host our Home Church on Sunday evenings so that others can attend a larger church that morning. In fact, my wife and I also attend a larger church on Sunday mornings because we do see that there is real benefit there. There’s a reason the Lord ordained large celebrations for the Jewish people̶: we are designed for it.  

The thing is, I genuinely believe I could still continue to grow and develop as an apprentice of Jesus if I didn’t attend a more corporate style church, but I don’t believe the reverse is possible. I believe that, for myself and for many believers, our spiritual growth is stunted when we are absent from an intimate group of followers of Jesus.  

There are a plethora of reasons for this, but for now I just want to focus on one idea that can give you a broader sense of what I mean.  

Take the spiritual gift of teaching, for instance.  

In a large corporatized church structure, where the number of congregants can range from twenty to twenty thousand, the teacher must teach general Biblical principles to the masses. By God’s grace and power, this can be powerful and wonderful, but it carries with it natural downsides.  

The first downside is that spiritual gift of teaching and the human gift of public speaking can often become confused. In the corporate context, there is a pressure to speak not only truth but also with at least some form of eloquence. Let’s be honest, if you are listening to a preacher and you feel bored or confused, we tend to assume that perhaps they aren’t a “good” teacher. We don’t naturally look to ourselves and wonder if we don’t have “ears to hear” but instead assume the person on the stage isn’t gifted.  

This makes me wonder if Paul the Apostle would have been able to gain a following in a modern day, western, form of Christianity.  

In a letter to the Church at Corinth, Paul writes, “So even if I boast somewhat freely about the authority the Lord gave us (the Apostles) for building you up rather than tearing you down, I will not be ashamed of it. I do not want to seem to be trying to frighten you with my letters. For some say, ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.’ Such people should realize that what we are in our letters when we are absent, we will be in our actions when we are present.” (2 Corinthians 10: 8-11). It’s interesting here that at least some people thought Paul was a poor speaker, and likely not very charismatic (that’s how I understand “in person he is unimpressive”).  

Paul doesn’t even attempt to refute those claims, but instead draws the correlation that he lives out the truths he writes. For him, teaching is not eloquence of speech but instead the ability to say to others “be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). In other words, he doesn’t attempt to communicate God’s truth with pleasing words and good analogies, but by both stating and living out what he believes to be true of God through the power of the Holy Spirit inside of him. 

The problem is that form of teaching does not scale well to hundreds or thousands of people.  

In my entire decade attending the mega-church I referred to before, I had perhaps four conversations with the senior pastor, and none of them were more than a minute in length. Although I learned from his sermons and acquired Biblical knowledge in abundance, much of my true growth didn’t come until there were individuals in my life who knew me and had the context of my life to draw upon as they discipled me.  

On long walks, around kitchen tables, and in living rooms, individuals who are ahead of me in their walk with Jesus have truly raised me up in the faith and taught me in one afternoon more than I learned in years sitting in a large sanctuary listening to sermons. 

I think of Cindi and Bob, a couple ahead of my wife and me in their walk with the Lord. For some amazing reason, they have chosen to invest in us, both through their words and their life. We were first introduced to them when my wife and I were exploring foster care and a friend connected us because Bob and Cindi had fostered dozens of children (and adopted a few). Bob and Cindi had invited us over for dinner just to get to know us and invest their wisdom in us. That evening started a friendship that I’ve been deeply grateful for.  

Over dinner a few years after we met,  I was discussing my hesitancy concerning applying for a new job which I felt the Lord was calling me to apply. I had my excuses and worries, and in the middle of explaining them Bob looks up from his food and says, “Wait, so you’re telling me that God told you to apply?” 

“Well,” I said, “yeah.” 

He looked right at me and said, “Then do it,” and continued eating.  

Those words hit me, and not because of how simple they were, but because the couple in front of me were people who obeyed the Lord. How could I continue making excuses when I was looking at a couple who had loved the Lord so much that they themselves submitted to God’s will and just did “it” (by which I mean, whatever the Lord commands) even when it was tough.  

I’ve never heard Bob claim to be a teacher, nor have I ever seen him on a stage, and yet few sermons have ever formed me so deeply into the image of Christ as much as Bob’s simple instruction over a plate of pasta. 

In may seem like a long windup, but I hope the picture is becoming clear. This kind of intimacy of life, this sort of expression of the spiritual gifts that transpire when the gathering of believers is so incredibly few, this is what I’ve begun to lovingly think of as “Living Room Discipleship”.  

It’s not that this is the “only way to follow Jesus” or any such silliness like that; that would be a poor takeaway from my story.  

Instead, imagine something like a spiritual diet. A good bowl of rice and chicken isn’t bad for you, but it’s missing nutrients found in fruits and veggies that your body needs. You can survive off rice and chicken, but your body won’t be as healthy as it should be. Instead, imagine a kale salad filled with grilled chicken, fruits, nuts, and such. That may not seem as appetizing to many of us, but it contains a more balanced set of nutrients for our bodies.  

The large church format isn’t bad, but it can miss some of those “spiritual nutrients” that we desperately need. Intimate Christian relationships, however, are more like a kale salad…  

Side note: probably don’t try and take that metaphor too far; it’ll likely break down real quick. I’m just going to hope you get the point. 

Welcome to The Living Room Disciple 

With all that, welcome to the Living Room Disciple column on Patheos. I’m glad you’re here! 

The articles that are published here have really one goal in mind: to bring you into the intimate conversations of discipleship I have in my own living room (or perhaps kitchen) so that you can both learn and (more importantly) use these articles as conversation starters with those believers in your intimate circle.  

My desire (which may be a bit farfetched, I admit) is that each person who reads one of my articles would share them with a brother or sister also following Jesus, and then process them together. Disagree with me for sure, but instead of diving into the comments section, dive into relationship with someone who loves you.  

Share these articles with another believer and, in the context of relationship, ask tough questions like, “Is God calling me to change to be more like Him from what I just read?” and “If I believe ____ about the Lord, how should that change how I live?” 

From this article, maybe even ask, “Is there something missing from my spiritual diet? Am I malnourished, spiritually, in some way?” 

Reflect on it alone, of course, but then invite another believer over to your home and, while sitting within the confines of your cozy living room, start a little conversation by saying, “So I read this article the other day, and…” 

For more content like this, check out the Living Room Disciple Podcast here, or check out our website.