After talking with Amy and hearing from a few people about their opinion of “devos,” I have the following thoughts:
-The term “devo” has connotations of being for kids rather than adults
-Some people have had bad experiences with being “devo-ed out” - particularly at Christian colleges, where it’s not hard to find three a week, in addition to regular church services
-The devo incorporates too many bad elements of the worship service, such as: one person leading, with everyone else as passive participants; the potential to view one’s own spirituality passively or consumeristically rather than taking personal initiative and responsibility for spiritual growth; the tendency to constantly sing a short list of “Jesus is my boyfriend” songs that are facile and dull; the inherent limitations of a “devo talk” (mini-sermon) format; the lack of generativity; the subculture feel - if you don’t like devos, too bad for you.
-It has become clear that we need spiritual gatherings that are more than just discussion. It has also become clear that some planning benefits the gathering tremendously, as does having someone keep us on track when having a business discussion.
-On a practical level, there has to be a leader, or everyone will look around wondering what happens next, and a lot of time and impact will be wasted. The leader doesn’t have to “deliver” the gathering, though, just facilitate it.
-We need to incorporate more generativity - eliciting the creativity of the Body
-I didn’t think music would be a problem if we chose good devo songs. That’s probably wishful thinking, assuming everyone can tolerate what I like. I do think, though, that a small church group should be able to find some music they like and can sing together. That’s not too much to ask, and hopefully there will be enough diversity between groups to accomodate everyone well. Liturgical elements can help bridge the gaps because it’s foreign to everyone, so that’s not an issue.
-We need a new word for our gatherings that doesn’t have the connotations of existing terms.
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I’m starting to like the term “house church” more and more, because the old connotations are not really all that common, and even where people have preconceived ideas, “housechurch” implies doing things differently, so people don’t expect a mini-worship service.
So in the model as it currently stands, we have:
-House churches
-Cell groups - this is the most problematic term, as we’re presently using it for evangelistic, not-really-churchy groups that are designed to build community and get people talking about spiritual things. Perhaps “community groups” would be a better term.
-Bible studies, of various sizes and types, from personal to medium-group
-Larger gatherings such as workshops and seminars, where the whole church comes together to learn and grow together. We haven’t done any actual planning on this, since, well, we don’t have a large group yet.
-For more information, see “Metro Model” in the sidebar of the main page.