Organic church ≠ format-less church
Why house churches should decide together on their meeting format.
Is “organic church” synonymous with “amorphous church” or “casual church”? No. Here are three reasons house churches do best to deliberately choose their format rather than shy away from structure:
Participants in any activity, from office work to backyard lawn games, perform best and enjoy it most when they know what’s expected of them. Heck, the same is true of individual parts of the human body. It’s no different for church.
If you’re going to call your gathering “church,” then a format you purposely set will be more welcoming to newcomers than a purely social gathering or a gathering with a format nobody’s sure about. This is related to the first reason above. It’s also related to the point Paul is making in 1 Corinthians 14:6-11.
If you don’t decide on a format, your meeting will default to one anyway—one that nobody chooses that kinda just settles in uninvited and likely ends up occasioning frustration, apathy, and boredom.
On an adjacent note, if decision-making in your house church tends to fall to a single person, here are two reasons house churches ought rather to set their format using input and sign-off from the whole group instead of letting a leader decide:
Involving the whole church elicits investment and engagement from everyone, which is excellent practice for one of the non-negotiable guiding principles of healthy church life: the priesthood of all believers (cf. Acts 2:17, Revelation 1:6, 1 Peter 2:9). “All of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a part of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27, NLT).
It also raises the probability that you’ll use a format that befits everyone’s gifts, your micro- and macroculture, and what God is doing among and around you in that season, rather than a format based on one person’s pet ideas about how church should go.
Speaking of seasonality, I should note that just because a church sets a format once doesn’t they can’t change it later to correct something that isn’t working or adjust to new circumstances. In fact, the format probably should change from time to time. But it should only change by the same process that brought about the original format: thoughtful, purposeful consensus. No sliding into squishy, blah semi-formats because no one was willing to speak up while things drifted away from the plan. (Please note this is different from the Holy Spirit commandeering a meeting unexpectedly, which He is always more than welcome to do!)
Don’t worry: Frameworks don’t quench the Holy Spirit. It’s true that some frameworks in some contexts might. But it’s not the rule. On the contrary, a format selected on purpose by the whole group discerning in love what “seems good to the Holy Spirit and to [them]” (Acts 15:28), “having become of one mind” (v. 25) will often kindle Him.