SID: Hello, Sid Roth here with Jim Rutz and we’re talking about a mega trend, it is something that is bigger than all of us and it has got to do with the new, which was really
the old system called the house congregation. Now Jim, we were talking about the leader, and tell me who is the leader in a home church?
JIM: There are several leaders, we have distributed leadership, because if you put everything into one person then pretty soon the authority, the thought, everything is flowing down from the top. In the New Testament leaders are supposed to be at the
bottom of that pyramid, supporting everybody else. If you go around the traditional churches and ask people, “Are you there in that church to support the vision and
ministry of the pastor, or is the pastor there to support you in your own personal ministry?” Everyone would say the same thing.
SID: But how could a large church, how in the world can the pastor support the individual vision, he may have the heart to do it, but unless they are supporting
his vision it’s just not going to happen.
JIM: Bingo. That’s it!
SID: So what would you say the real difference is between the house church and the traditional church?
JIM: It’s your identity, it’s your relationship, Sid if you and I were in a house church we would belong to each other, it’s really kind of a 24-7 thing rather than a Sunday go to meeting thing, not that there is anything wrong at all with meeting on Sundays but if you’ve got a problem, I’ve got a problem, and I don’t rest until your problem is solved, and if somebody is after SID Roth or trying to put you down or attack you in some way, they are going to have to get past me first, because I am there to cover you and you are there to cover me, we belong to each other. You know you can’t buy that kind of loyalty these days. And so that is why house churches are growing, people are really hungry for that kind of belonging and responsibility and accountability, if I see you slipping off the track and starting to do some things that are wrong, I am going to take you aside and say, “Sid, this is not good in your life.”
SID: What goes on in a house church?
JIM: Almost everything, the fun thing is you can never know what is happening, when you open it up and the Holy Spirit is in charge, Yeshua is there, Jesus is there, and you might kind of have a habit of say starting off with some singing, but beyond that there is hardly any time, people don’t plan these things
SID: How long have you been going to house churches?
JIM: Various things that look like house churches for several decades, it’s evolving.
SID: How long have you been researching this whole subject?
JIM: Oh, fifteen years or something like that.
SID: It’s, you know this book MegaShift, that tells exactly how they can establish this kind of a house church, but how can you be different every week, I mean everyone falls into patterns.
JIM: Well, I’m a creative guy, but if I had to create fifty-two different programs for fifty-two different meetings, I couldn’t do it, but the Holy Spirit somehow manages to take all the threads of what people have been thinking about and doing all week and drawing it together like a conductor waving a baton, things weave together and you say a scripture verse and that reminds me of something in my life which inspires somebody else to pray something and somebody else thinks of a song out of that and it just flows
SID: But who gives the message?
JIM: The message, the message
SID: Yes.
JIM: Okay, there’s the problem Sid, a sermon arose, over a couple of hundred years or so it became a…I stand up and I talk and you set there and you listen.
SID: Just a couple of hundred years ago?
JIM: Well no, through the first two hundred years of the church service developed, we don’t have that, we have a lot of people bringing a lot of messages, and so even if you are a new Christian you are going to learn to open up your Bible and say, “You know I was reading in this book called Galatians, Galatians, and God spoke to me and said this verse here last week, you know.” and so even new Christians are able to start ministering.
We had a meeting just south of Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Colorado, years ago, a friend of my had fallen and broken her ankle into a million pieces, it was terrible, and so they
gathered around, “Let’s pray for Jeanie,” and so they all came around and put hands on Jeanie and here is this two year old boy named Moses, from across the room walks over, puts his little two-year-old hands around her ankle and everybody in the room hears all these bones snapping back into place, two-years-old. So everybody gets involved, it is not longer a case of who brings “the message” or who is the leader?
SID: So no one could be hidden, no one could be behind the back of someone is what you’re saying.
JIM: It’s pretty hard with ten or twelve or fifteen.
SID: Now the ennis, the truth, you’ve been going to these meeting for many, many, years, is there a sense of excitement before you go to a meeting really and truly? It’s not the same old, same old, it’s not routine as usual.
JIM: Not even close to same old, same old, if you have a bunch of people who know how to listen to the Holy Spirit then it is going to be different every time. The Holy Spirit doesn’t deal in cookie cutter programs. Programs, we say are for people who don’t know how to listen to God.
SID: Say that statement again.
JIM: Programs are for people who don’t know how to listen to the Holy Spirit.
SID: Jim, as you know God has had me teaching on the one new man, and the one new man if I had to come up with a word to describe it, there are many things, but the one word, if they forced me to come up with the one word of what it is, it’s freedom, and I did an experiment recently, went into my own home town, I rented a hotel room, I just put the chairs in a circular, with concentric circles, one time I did a rectangle, one time with
Concentric rectangles, we had anywhere from a hundred and fifty to two hundred people at both of these meetings and I said the hardest things that I am going to do is to keep quiet, I don’t know if you can relate.
JIM: That’s hard.
SID: But it was very, very difficult for me, now the hardest thing that you are going to do
is to talk, because you are so used to being a spectator.
JIM: Yes, yes.
SID: Well, it started out a little rough, but then one person had courage to stand up and so you know that it was so wonderful, I mean a man gets up, someone I don’t even know, should I give him permission, should I not give him permission, and he says he was in a mental institution and God gave him some songs and Jesus came in and He became real to him and He took over his life and he sits down. So I said, he didn’t have a guitar, I said, someone hand him a guitar, talk about risk taking, so he takes this guitar, and I have to tell you Jim, the Spirit of God just flowed into that auditorium, wasn’t even an auditorium, that hotel room, like a river. The leaders didn’t sit together, the worship team wasn’t there because the worship team were the people with the guitars and violins and banners and tambourines and shofars, and at one point the Spirit of God moved into that
meeting in such a tangible fashion that has never happened in my life, my hands literally started burning and Jim I knew that I could lay hands on people and they would be healed, but I knew God didn’t want me to, it was like a sign to tell me that God was ready
to heal Himself, no one laid hands on anyone, I said to someone who I didn’t even know, “Stand up and pray a blanket prayer over everyone.” And they prayed that prayer and guess what, there were half a dozen miracles, I mean genuine miracles, I mean someone who had parachuted from a plane and landed badly with broken everything got instantly healed. And then the next meeting we had we expected the same thing, no, God had an entirely different plan and this wasn’t a house meeting, this was a larger meeting, I mean it is so exciting because you don’t know what God is going to do.
JIM: Yes it’s an open meeting; He is the God of surprises.
SID: What will happen if someone reads Mega Shift?
JIM: Well hopefully his life will get changed and he will realize who he really is, he will have a new identity, or she will be able to do things that they have never done before.
It doesn’t mean that tomorrow morning you step out the door and heal everybody in sight but it gives you a great starting point and you learn to grow, and you are not doing it alone anymore, because you will have people around you that are praying for you, supporting you, and helping you.
SID: Listen, this is another significant, mentoring tool for the next, for the greatest, and I believe for the last move of God’s Spirit before the Messiah returns. You have been wondering what am I going to do, I would like to have a house congregation, I don’t know how to do it, this book will show you how to do it, and then just do the stuff, it’s that simple, but listen, you could go to another country with this principle and probably start a thousand congregations, women over eighty years of age are doing this in other countries, read it in this book. Jim Rutz, thank you for writing this, thank you for your years of research in this, but I really believe that this is a “how to” manual.
JIM: It is.
SID: So just take it in their hands and get a baby. It’s that simple, and get right with God.
