Designing a Home
With the Church in Mind
by Nic Samojluk
Following the funeral of my brother-in-law, who had devoted his entire life to the work of a literature evangelist, I began to reminisce about the time, many decades ago, when my sister asked my dad to design their future home. They had acquired the building lot, and my dad accepted the unusual challenge of designing a home with the church in mind. How do you do that? Dad was a builder, and he had designed and built not only homes, but churches as well, but this particular assignment was different: My sister asked him to do this with the needs of the church in mind.
*Can you give me some specifics? my father asked my sister.
*Yes, she responded. Make the living room the largest room in the house.
*And why do you want me to make the living room the largest room of the house? he inquired.
*Because I am planning to use our home for sharing our faith in the soon coming of the Lord with our future neighbors, she responded.
*And how are you going to do this? My dad insisted.
*I am going to invite the neighborhood children for a children's story time and singing. Children always like that, she explained.
And that is exactly what she did. She was a nurse, and in a short time she became known as the neighborhood nurse. On one occasion I stopped by her place for a short visit. It was dark and rainy, and my sister asked me whether I would be willing to accompany her for a nurse visit. One of the neighbors was sick and needed some medications the physician had prescribed to be administered, and she did not want to be out in the street alone in the dark. I accepted the invitation. The family was poor, and they had no money to pay her for her services, and promised to pay her later. She did not mind doing this because there was a need, and she was willing to supply it.
One day, she invited some of the neighbors' children to her home for a story time followed by singing. The children came, and the group kept growing, and soon the parents wanted to know why their children were so motivated by the stories and the singing. To make the story short, this is how the Villa Adelina SDA Church, in Buenos Aires, Argentina was born. When the group of children and their parents could no longer fit inside my sister's living room, they decided to secure a building site, and eventually a church building was in place.
Can you imagine how the church would grow if every SDA family would try this church growth concept? Of course, this idea was not new with my sister. She drank this with her mother's milk. We were born in Privitne, Ukraine, and during the Communist hegemony in Eastern Europe, it was impossible to get a permit to build churches. The solution? House churches. For half a century, an SDA house church functioned at one of my cousin's home in that small town. My cousin removed a partition between two of the bedrooms, and that became the local house church.
As you can see, there is a way of designing your home with the soon coming of our Lord in mind. Perhaps someone reading this might be inspired to take into consideration the needs of the church while planning for their own comfort as they build or buy their next home.
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