eklektos

I’ve decided that I’m going to start the process to begin a home church. I have decided to do this for the fol­low­ing rea­sons: (1) I bet­ter learn how to do it before I go out into the field, (2) it would pro­vide a good envi­ron­ment for oth­ers my age to work out doc­tri­nal issues, (3) and it can be a church that actu­ally does bal­ance between striv­ing for good, God-glorifying doc­trine while keep­ing the Com­mis­sion at mind.

I like the name for the church: “eklek­tos” which is the Greek word trans­lated “elect.” In fact, the Greek word for church is “ekkleÌ?sia” which lit­er­ally is an assem­bly of “called out” or “elect” ones (church and elect are rough syn­onyms in Greek). I believe it encap­su­lates the com­mis­sion of the church which is the meet­ing of the elect or saints of God. The fol­low­ing are doc­tri­nal dis­tinc­tives of the church:

  1. Sov­er­eign Grace. We hold fast to the truth that the nat­ural man is inca­pable of com­ing to Christ. There­fore, God’s divine decree of elec­tion is what avails the oppor­tu­nity for sal­va­tion, and Christ specif­i­cally died for those given to Him by the Father. This oper­at­ing grace is irre­sistible, and once God has regen­er­ated the believer he will never be lost.
  2. Inde­pen­dent. The church is not to be a part of any hier­ar­chy but only respon­si­ble to the Lord Jesus and the con­gre­ga­tion. The church is not to be affil­i­ated with a con­ven­tion or eccle­si­as­ti­cal hierarchy.
  3. Bap­tist. By this, I mean that we hold to the believ­ers bap­tism. All other dis­tinc­tives of Bap­tist eccle­si­ol­ogy are still to be decided (sep­a­ra­tion of church/state, mem­ber­ship, decid­ing who can par­take of the Lord’s Supper).
  4. Missional/Evangelical. We teach soundly the call of Christ to reach all of the nations (peo­ple groups) while prac­tic­ing evan­ge­lism any­where we might be.
  5. Covenen­tal. The church holds to the view that there remains no dis­tinc­tion between Old Tes­ta­ment Israel and the New Tes­ta­ment Church. We would hold that the Church has com­pleted Old Tes­ta­ment Judaism and now has the bear­ing of “true Israel” or peo­ple of God.
  6. Tra­di­tional. The church would favor a tra­di­tional or hymn-based mode of wor­ship through song.

I just need to see who is interested.