Church meeting implications

From blogger:

After reading many of the quotes on this site and considering the New Testament, I would offer these thoughts for consideration as implications for church meetings in our time:
1. It seems clear that God's idea for the church when it met was to strengthen, encourage, and enable each other to grow stronger, face the world about them and reach out to the lost.
2. It seems clear that the concept of community building was paramount in God's mind -- not just preaching and singing.
3. Obviously, preaching / teaching is necessary and a part of the meeting, but it seems it was not the primary purpose. Today it seems everything focuses around the preacher and his sermon. In fact, it looks like the communion remembrance was more important than the sermon back then.
4. It looks clearly like everyone was to have an opportunity to participate as lead by the Spirit, not just when the song leader and the preacher said stand, sit, or give.
5. A serious implication for today's leaders seems to be, at a bare minimum, to work in times and opportunities for the church family to interact, share, offer words of wisdom and encouragement, share what God is doing in and through them. A small group offers that on a "small" scale, but, at least in my church, the church body is largely kept in the dark about anyone outside its small group.
6. Singing is not necessarily worship -- it seems more natural and likely a natural outcome of the worship of the early church gathering and sharing. Isn't there a song about worshipping without music? Our church has never tried that, but some other church has.

That should be enough to get some of the readers thinking. Maybe more later.