Walking in the Light and the "Modern" Church

Walking in the light (I John 1:5-7): “God is light; in him is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus , his Son, purfifies us from all sin.”
This reminds of the eye-opening message that we heard from Jack Frost several years ago at Life Center. Our enemy loves the darkness, and never operates in the “light”. He loses his power over us when we confess our sins and bring them into the light, but as long as we walk in the darkness he will continue to have power over our lives. Not only will the sin still have power over us, but the enemy will also bring guilt because of the sin. We need not live this way because Christ has died for our sins. “There is therefore no condemnation to those are in Christ Jesus…” The guilt is another lie of the devil to try to make us believe that we are not free from the old self.
So what should this look like in the church? TRANSPARENCY. We need to begin sharing with each other instead of all walking around acting like we have it all together. The church is filled with actors and phonies. The enemy has convinced us that everyone else has it together and that we are the only ones who struggle. Therefore, we feel like we cannot share our struggles. Also, it is a lie from the devil that we can live independently. To share from one of our experiences; we have been part of various ‘small groups’ over the years, but one experience stands out vividly. We were trying to foster a deeper level of sharing in a group and had shared some of the struggles that we battle. When we finished sharing we asked if there were others who would like to share. One of the other members spoke up and said, “We don’t really have any problems to share”. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? This is one of the major problems in the church, we do not share with each other, and therefore the enemy continues to have power over our lives.
This leads into one of my other themes that I have been mulling for some time, the paradigm of the modern church. In my view it is broken, and needs to be completely replaced with an old paradigm, the model of the early church. I have been studying the workings of the early church throughout the NT and I don’t read anything about huge edifices, endless activities, and countless committees. Instead I read about small groups of believers gathering in their homes, sharing from their lives, breaking bread together, encouraging each other, laying on hands and praying for each other, preaching from the Word, exhorting and admonishing each other.
There are several things that I think are fantastic about this model.
1. The small groups allow for intimacy and transparency. They also give space for each member to grow in his/her gifts and use those gifts to edify the body.
2. There is no need for a giant, expensive church building. An incredible amount of money is wasted in church buildings; money that could be put to a better use. Perhaps a building could be rented to meet together corporately once or twice a month.