The Gathering

We had a great day yesterday with our fledgling house church called "The Gathering". We usually meet at our place, but our friends Harry and Diane invited us to use their place, and then provided a wonderful BBQ lunch by the sea. Bucking the trend of many expats who move here and never really get to know the DR, Harry and Diane have a real heart for this country and have a desire to make life better.

It has been neat to see the way this group has bonded over the past few months. We are mainly missionaries, but we always have other friends from the community join us for some worship, a message, and once-a-month communion. Lynn provides a kids program based on our "virtue of the month". During the month of February we made "cooperation" our focus - we can accomplish more together than we can on our own - and looked at the biblical stories of Nehemiah, Moses and the Four Guys who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus. Those that visit our website can subscribe to a weekly "e-votional" which they can use to prepare for Sunday. In a cool twist, we've had inquiries from others who want to use our bible studies as a track for their own house churches to run on!

Our goal is to provide an authentic Christian community that is unique to our environment - missionaries in a needy country, tourists, up-and-outers. If you visit our website and click on "why?", you'll see this explained more fully, and you can watch a video clip from Mark Driscoll where he talks about his church planting rationale in Seattle. He makes alot of sense. He makes the comment that when Hudson Taylor went to China, he wore chinese clothes, learned the chinese language, got a chinese haircut, and people said "there's a great missionary." When we try to take Jesus to our culture by using the same methods, people say we are capitulating. That, Drsicoll says, is hypocrisy.

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