As you well know, our church does not allow people to join our church if they are already believers. We do this to demonstrate our commitment to reaching out only to non-believers. Article 2 of the House Church Manifesto states: we do not pursue church growth as the ultimate goal, but the saving of souls, because we believe that this pleases our Lord. Other house churches also forbid people who have already received Christ as their Savior to join their churches. Many house churches list this policy on their church bulletin as we do: "If you have received Jesus as your personal Savior and have assurance of salvation, we ask you to join a small church ...

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Liberal Theology once dominated seminaries and churches. Liberal theologians denied supernatural elements such as miracles and prophecies. They brushed aside miracles as legends and attributed the fulfillment of Scriptural prophecies to the prophecies being written after the events they foretold actually occurred. They did this because they interpreted the Bible with the a priori assumption that anything contrary to natural laws simply did not happen. This faulty conviction came from their overconfidence in science. They had this overconfidence because they didn't know the limits of the science. And they didn't know these limits because they were ...

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I will be out of town for the next 5 weeks. My original plan was to finish the upcoming House Church Seminar for Laypeople in Jacksonville, go to San Diego for the House Church Conference for Pastors, come back to Houston and preach on Sunday, and then depart for Korea on Sunday afternoon. But I could not get a ticket to LA, where Korean Air Line flights depart. The only ticket available on that day was for a flight departing in the morning. If I take that flight, I can't preach on Sunday morning, so there is no point in coming back to Houston. So I decided to go to Korea directly from San Diego. That way I can worship at a church in Korea instead of ...

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When I started house churches in 1993, our current practice of having each house church support a missionary family wasn't in place. But I adopted this soon after we started to help house church members be more missions-minded. At first, I asked house church members to find their own missionary families. Most of our house churches chose missionaries they already knew. So there was a personal relationship between house churches and the missionaries they supported. But as house churches multiplied, the number of shepherds who didn't know any missionary families started to increase. So our Mission Department began to recommend missionaries to house ...

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When our family fled south to escape the invading North Koreans during the Korean War, our family consisted of 6 people: my grandmother (who at the time was younger than my wife is now), my uncle (who was in 8th grade), my brother (who was 4), myself (7 years old), and twin aunts, who were high school seniors at the time. My grandfather was exposed to Western culture early in his life. In fact, he attended the same language school as the first president of South Korea, who earned a Ph. D at Princeton before becoming president. Because of this, our family members started coming to the States early. My oldest uncle and aunt came to the U.S. to study ...

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I am writing this from San Jose. My wife turned sixty on March 13. My son Danny and his daughter Abby's birthdays are also in March. For Korean-Americans, a baby's first birthday means something special. So all of our families, including Sunju and Peter, are here to celebrate three birthdays; one celebration every day for three days. I can't believe that my wife is now sixty years old and that we've lived together for 36 years. How true it is that time flies like an arrow! Speaking of my wife, as some of you may know, she started working again part time last January at the clinic she used to work for. They asked whether she would be willing to work ...

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A while back, I received an email from a church member. He had returned from a long trip abroad and had not yet recovered from jet lag. When he found himself awake in the middle of the night, he decided to attend an early morning prayer meeting at a nearby Korean-American church instead of trying to go back to sleep. During the sermon, the pastor of the church said in passing how a member of a growing church in the area asked a member of his church: "Why are you still attending a spiritually dead church?" Our member surmised that the pastor was talking about our church and sent me an email suggesting that our church members should be more careful in ...

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