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You're tuned into Everyday Theology in Plain English, making sense of God's truth for your everyday life. Here's your host, Charlie Miller.

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Hey there, welcome back to Everyday Theology in Plain English. I am so glad that you're here. We're near the end of the road for these little August bonus episodes. Season two wrapped up a few weeks back, but I've been using these summer weeks to talk about a book that's close to my heart. Strategically small, why a bigger church was never the point. And this week I want to take you back, and I mean way back, to where the church actually started. Here's something I think we forget. When you read the New Testament, the letters of Paul, the book of Acts, all of it, and you picture the churches in these pages, what do you see? A lot of us picture something like the churches we know: a building, rows of seats, a platform up front. But that's not what was there. The first churches met in homes, in living rooms. When Paul writes to the church at Rome, he sends greetings to Priscilla and Aquila and to the church that meets in their house. In their house. When the believers in Corinth or Philippi gathered, they gathered in somebody's home. Thirty people, maybe forty. People who knew each other's names, sitting close enough to pass the bread. Picture that for just a second. When one of Paul's letters arrived, nobody put it up on the screen. Somebody stood up in a living room and read it out loud to a few dozen friends and neighbors who all knew each other. That is the room the New Testament was written for. The church didn't start in a cathedral. It didn't start in an arena or a stadium or a building with its name on a sign out by the highway. It started in a living room. It started small. Now I want you to sit with that for just a minute. And I want you to sit with what it means for your church. Because if your church is small, if you meet in a modest building with old carpet or a rented room with folding chairs, if you're a few dozen people who all know each other's names, then here's the truth. Your church has a 2,000-year pedigree. The size of your room is closer to the original than to the big, well-known churches most of us picture when we think of a successful church. The living room church didn't become obsolete when Christians started building cathedrals. It didn't become irrelevant when megachurches started filling arenas. It just got buried under a few centuries of assumptions about what church is supposed to look like. But it never went away. It's still here. It's where you sit every Sunday morning. So here's what I've come to believe. If you're in a small church, you have been reading about your own church in scripture your entire life. The house in Rome, the believers in Philippi, the living room in Corinth, that's you. You just didn't know it was yours. Let me give you something to try this week. Read the letter to the Philippians. It's it's short, you can do it in one sitting. But as you read it, picture it read aloud in a living room to 30 people who know each other by name, who are going to share a meal together when the reading gets done. And notice how different it sounds. Notice how it stops being a documentary and starts being a letter to a family. That's what you're a part of. Not a lesser version of church, the oldest version of church. And that's one of the ideas in the book, and there are plenty more. If you'd like to read the whole thing, Strategically Small is available now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. And I'll put the link in the show notes for you. And I'd love for you to visit strategiclysmall.com where you'll find more information about the book, information for your small group, free tools to help you walk your whole church through it together. You can sign up for our newsletter and hear more about the Strategically Small idea. Thank you so much for spending these weeks with me. Season three is coming soon. Until then, take care, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.