I want to start this out by stating what I have said before: my wife, Patricia, [the human love of my life] and I started a church like this in 1993. BUT, we had no idea what we were doing and I certainly did not know what I know now. In that first attempt, the sheep rebelled and demanded a Sunday service, with Patricia preaching. That was fine with me. She had the pastor’s anointing in our family. We called the church, New Sabbath, meeting on Friday night originally and based it on the only scriptures which talk about how to run a church service in the scriptures:
What then, brethren? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson,
a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification.
If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn;
and let one interpret. But if there is no one to interpret,
let each of them keep silence in church and speak to himself and to God.
Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said.
If a revelation is made to another sitting by, let the first be silent.
For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged;
and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets.
For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.
1 Corinthians 14: 26–33 RSV
At this point, in this millennium, I now believe there are several other things which must be done. My plan is to share them here with you. I am extrapolating from my experience. First of all, we must confront the spectator-style worship service with the paid holy person on the podium, backed up by professional musicians.
The spectator event needs to be clearly designed and specified, on Sunday
To make myself clear, there is NO scriptural basis for a spectator-style church service. AND, a professional musical presentation is NOT a worship service. But to start with, the public spectator event should be somewhat similar to the current megachurch liturgy [as poorly written as that is]. You can do better. God will provide people who can design and put things together.
BUT, it needs to be stated out loud that it is only an evangelistic public consumer event staged to encourage people into coming to the real church services happening during the week. No altar calls are allowed—they have no scriptural basis either. Some of these Sunday events could be superstar-type musical events or whatever the Lord leads you to put together.
These are NOT evangelical or Pentecostal services. They are marketing and publicity ventures. They are free. The actual ekklesical meetings are the Berean studies which take place during the week. That’s where people meet the Lord.
People should be told that if anyone want to meet Jesus outside of that, he or she should go home and ask Jesus to talk with him or her and show him or her how to be born again. That varies for everyone, and will probably start with asking Yeshua to show you all of your sin. That excellent start gives the process a cathartic beginning, and a high probability of success. Jesus will talk to them.
The focus of the Sunday event is encouraging people about the true nature of the Lord, presenting high quality praise of our God, and inviting people to the real church services
They are held during the week. There may be many of them growing out of the one weekly spectator event. The Sabbath is a good time. They are actually Berean Bible studies. I will explain that process shortly. But they can be as large as 3-4 dozen people. Or they might all be small home Bible studies of 2 dozen or less. They are all separate gatherings of a portion of the ekklesia. Ideally they will be led by an experienced couple—trained elders, hopefully. With experience, the Berean study could potentially be several hundred people meeting on a Shabbat. But I’ve never seen one that large. However, the spectator event remains the recruitment process.
A new millennial Berean Bible Study
This is all based on over fifty years of leading and teaching Bible studies like this. The Lord has taught me a lot more about this since Patricia’s body failed her and we had to shut down the church in Albuquerque in 2005. Since she got to go home early in December 2019, the Lord has had me on an intensive discipline and discipleship training regimen. It has been the best time of my life. He took Pat out before she had to deal with the liars. Our current culture of liars would have been a horrendous trial for her to experience. I have trouble with it, but nothing like she did.
As you have probably guessed it is loosely based on the passage in 1 Corinthians 14 that I quoted at the beginning. But one of the real blessings of our new device-based culture is all the digital study helps we have available online to us for Bible studies. In my studio, for example, I am sitting here working on my Mac Mini M4 with a 27” Studio Display. I have a large TV in the bookshelves in back of me where I can share my screen when I have people in the studio, teaching them the Bible.
Some of these study helps have been available for quite a while like BibleGateway.com and BlueLetterbible.org. Some are brand new like Sergio’s Hebraic Bible study tool here on bereantable.com. What these sites do is enable the people to study excellent resources together during the bible study [tablets and laptops work best]. Something like this is essential for the larger groups like 3-4 dozen people. Actually, I’m fairly sure you could have a Berean Bible study group like this with several hundred people. I showed that regularly in my Christian living saga, Fortresses of the Messiah. I have a lot more advice on these things in the novels, as well. There I just called the study Meeting with Jesus.
Some preparations for the study
Personally, the leadership should be prayed up and cleaned up before the meeting begins.
[Each person should ask the Holy Spirit to show them any sin(s)
which need to be cleaned up by repentance and forgiveness.
Then they should give the Lord control and ask Him for an anointing.]
A Berean study really needs the power of the Holy Spirit to work well. Without the Ruach HaKodesh you’re going to be swimming upstream, at best. You need to prepare some handouts on how the Holy Spirit works in groups. You’ll need to provide teachings about the gifts of the Spirit listed in 1 Corinthans 12. People will need to know how they work, and how to recognize their manifestation in the group. You should provide a teaching on the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and how to receive it.
(Any born again person simply asks Jesus for it, specifically.
They receive it immediately whether they feel anything or not.
It’s normally not available if the person is not already born again.)
The leadership (elders) should be experienced in all of this.
Some recommended procedures for this type of study
These concepts are certainly open for discussion. But in practice, what I have written will give you a good starting point and work well.
1—Before you get started, pray publicly for the service and specifically give control of the meeting to Yeshua. Then ask if there are any questions: It’s a good way to start.
2—After they are answered, give a reminder that the Holy Spirit is the true author of the Bible: People need to be reminded of this regularly. If the leader is not convinced of this truth the Bible study will go poorly and not last. The leader’s responsibility is to do what is necessary to keep the Holy Spirit in control of the meetings. Begging the Lord out loud is appropriate when necessary.
3—Questions are always appropriate, at any time: These studies are meant to answer any spiritual question asked by the participants. You stop the study until the question is answered. The final answer may be, “I don’t know [or, I need more time]. But I’ll research it and have an answer for you next week or sooner.” Of course, the answer might be, “You’ll be held under restraint until the police arrive.” Some weeks you’ll cover one or two verses. Sometimes you’ll cover a chapter or more. That’s up to the Lord.
4—If a word definition is necessary, one of the elders should get that info up on the screen: This is where you teach the people how to study on their own. They need to understand how Blue Letter Bible and the Hebraic Tool work. Our task as elders and teachers is to make sure that the people know how to read and research within the scriptures. A lot of that is taking the difficult questions and directly asking the Holy Spirit for the true meaning of what we are reading. With this attitude, the Holy Spirit can work freely and give you revelations which can be talked out in the group to discern what we need to understand.
5—Doctrines are suspect: My best definition of a doctrine is that the gatekeepers take an intellectual understanding from the scriptures and convert it into a rigid unchangeable policy. It normally cannot be understood without a lengthy seminarian explanation. That rigid policy is not part of the scriptures. So, we need to be very careful about doctrines and turn toward the scriptures for the answer about them.
For example, I do not call the doctrine of the Trinity heretical. But, I no longer teach it. I think it confuses people. I teach what the scriptures say about YHWH, Yeshua, and the Ruach HaKodesh.
YHWH—the Great I am is where it all started: the universe was His idea and ongoing design—a place to produce friends and family who freely choose to love Him. A people with whom He can have an intimate relationship—each person one on one.
Yeshua was the first man to be born again with the Ruach HaKodesh within him. LukeLuke 4:1 makes this clear after His baptism from John “And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit 2 for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil.” Then Luke continues by saying “Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee…” He was first in all things. He showed us how to walk out the New Covenant—even before He actually cut the covenant on the cross. Yet, there is no doubt that the scriptures say that all things were created through Yeshua.John 1:3 Earlier, Peter 1 Peter 1:19-20a talking about Yeshua says, “19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. 20 He was destined before the foundation of the world but was made manifest at the end of the times for your sake.”
The Ruach Hakodesh is the breath of YHWH. The Hebraic tool says, "The Ruach HaKodesh is YHWH's own outgoing, set-apart breath-presence in action." But on a practical level, the Spirit is actively working in the lives of all His Believers within His covenant. He is so subtle that you need to ask for discernment to see what He is doing. You won’t be able to feel it. But you can surely notice the results.
You can see that these definitions quickly put me outside of the normal Trinity doctrine. We know that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one. Yet this entire discussion remains a mystery because we are all still in the flesh and blind to the spiritual realm. I trust YHWH completely and am eagerly waiting for when I can talk to Jesus face to face—no matter what His new Name is (as King of Israel). I will not understand this until I get my new body, my new name, and “know as I am known”. Knowing as I am known will be such a relief.
6—Verse by verse: These studies work best verse by verse in dense books filled with concepts and truths of the believer’s walk in the Spirit. The basic plan is to go through an entire book, and then ask the Lord which book you should study next. On a practical level, the studies are all covering the entire scriptures, using cross-references, revelations, and words directly from the Lord. Commentaries are not allowed. This is about studying what the Lord had written for us, and what He wants us studying today.
I recommend books from the New Covenant until the people learn how it all works. The Gospels become a wonderful place to study who Yeshua is and how He walked out His life here among us. I’d start with John. In fact, as you get started, the epistles work better than the Gospels for teaching the practicalities. But you take the path that the Lord leads your group along.
In the Tanakh, you’ll find that Isaiah works much better than 2 Kings. The Torah works well. For newbies, the Torah is a tough place to start because they just do not know enough to understand what is going on. The ancient agrarian culture is virtually incomprehensible to many. For example, I still do not have a good explanation of why Abram handed his wife over to the Pharaoh—a horrid fleshly action.
The only real answer I know is that Abram, Isaac, and Jacob did not have the Torah. Without the scriptures, they were running in the dark a lot of the time. I find it necessary to remind myself that throughout the Tanakh, no one had the Spirit within them like we do in the New Covenant. New church attendees these days, often barely know who Jesus is (until they are born again and meet Him). Plus the New Covenant is full of quotes from the Tanakh to bring that into the study from the beginning [100s to several thousands of quotes].
7—Group participation is required: If necessary the elders need to be able to ask solid, leading questions to get people going. They can be close to outrageous. Things like, “What are you usually doing when you fall into sin?” [The most common answer is “watching TV or a movie”.] If you ask the Lord for good questions, He’ll provide anointed rhemas that will get people involved.
The elders should be reminding everyone to share, and teaching them how to ask the Lord to provide a place and time when they are to do that. The goal is to allow Yeshua to take control of the meeting. That takes practice, but it is worth any effort expended. All of us are in service to Him. This is a place where He can talk to all of us. He is wise enough to keep the meeting in good order—if we’ll turn to Him and ask Him to do that.
8—A counselor/pastor should be available: I said nothing about ordained clergy. They normally won’t allow anything like this type of service. But the Lord will provide you with someone who can fulfill this role if you ask Him for it. This is for people who want to meet the Lord, or who want direct ministry and counseling. Make sure you have people as backup to keep men from counseling women or women from counseling men alone. A demon would love to get someone to scream “Rape!” …or whatever.
In my fiction I allowed the elders to let people meet the Lord in the meeting. I had them suggest that the person start by asking out loud, “Lord, please show me all my sin.” [This is an excellent way to start.] That brought about cathartic repentance, and then the Lord would tell them to ask for forgiveness. After that, a little repartee between the Lord and the seeker resulted in the seeker confessing that Yeshua [Jesus] is the Messiah and Lord, and that he or she wanted to serve Him. The resulting rebirth brought about joyful worship that ended with the seeker running out of words and praying in his or her new prayer language.
In real life there are many variations of this scenario and it will take an experienced pair or group of elders to pull it off well. Other people may well want to do the same thing at the same time. That suggests that there will need to be others to help with the process. It’s a major learning process for everyone.
9—There should be regular reminders of the Lord’s participation in the meeting: It helps if the elders point out when the Spirit gives a word of knowledge or wisdom or prophecy, for example. New believers are not used to seeing things like supernatural discernment. Just a simple supernatural word of knowledge will blow many minds these days. A simple comment like, “Have you noticed how the Lord has brought us all into focus on this one thread tonight?” can really help the people understand what is going on.
You need to be reminding people to ask the Holy Spirit to show them what they are supposed to add to the conversation. That’s one of the things the First Cor. 12 gifts are designed to be used for. Remember, the opening verses about an ekklesia meeting from First Cor. 14 tell us everyone is expected to bring something to share. The Lord will give everyone that IF they are looking. One might get a testimony during the week to bring to the table. The Spirit can show anyone where to find that verse you are looking for. He’s done that while I was writing this piece. The Father gave His Spirit within us to enable us to do things like this—as well as minister to people in need.
10 —The desire to fall into worship should be encouraged: If you are given the confidence to lead them into singing in the Spirit, it will be amazing. That level of worship is life-changing.
The Berean Table’s idea of a couple of people or a small group studying seriously together is good
I am truly grateful to have found a table like this to participate in. I pray it builds well. There have been quite a few good articles recently. I’ve heard Sergio muttering about a forum. It’s gradually coming out of his mind and into code.
My goal here has been to propose what a real gathering of an ekklesia might look like in the US now. The closest we have is home churches and even most of them are built off the institutional model and not an ekklesial development.
But, my practical experience is that what I have just shared has worked well for me for decades. I’m just offering it up for discussion now during the Great Falling Away. The Great Delusion hasn’t arrived yet, as far as I have seen—though there have been hints about what might be coming soon.
Originally, Pat and I had side tables around the room with Strong’s, Vine’s, dictionaries, and maps to help us study. The new digital aids are very good. However, you may have trouble with people who remain focused on their device. You may need to formulate a digital time-out procedure. A dunce hat with the guilty party shoved in a corner at the front of the room may help. But they’ll probably just try to whip out their phone again. >grin<
Pre-digitally, we used this with up to a couple dozen people, normally about a dozen. It produced believers who knew how to study for themselves. This level of study never provided large numbers. But if the Lord gives you the numbers, I am convinced that this process will still work for you.
