On House Church - Part 2
If the house church is so great, why aren't there more of them?
This was too long for one post, so I broke it up into two. The first part can be found in my last substack post. In part 1, I covered my experience, freedom, and structures and you can read it by clicking here.
Contextualization
We talk about contextualization in missions a lot. It is how we adjust the message to make it understandable in the context in which we are ministering. In this area, the traditional church fits the Western context better than a house church structure.
When people heard about our house church, they often concluded we were weird. People in the US are simply not used to Christians who meet in homes. With a long and deep history of spiritual abuse, people want to know that the church has some institutional presence. A house church feels too loose and potentially abusive to Americans.
People want to attend church without social pressure. When Rick Warren originally introduced the concept of “Saddleback Sam” (a prototype or persona of a person in Saddleback Church’s geographic footprint) one of the attributes was, “He would rather be in a large group than a small group.” I think he was on to something here. Blame it on individualism if you like, but a small group brings with it small talk, intimacy before familiarity, and a high potential for awkward situations. Americans are wired to avoid these.
On top of all of that is the privacy that people feel surrounding their house/home. We once invited our neighbors directly across the street to our house for dinner. The wife’s response was, “You mean, in your house?” She felt uncomfortable entering our personal space, even though we had been neighbors and chatted many times before over several years. Had we asked to meet for a meal at a restaurant I think they would have said, “Sure,” but in our home felt weird to them. This was years before COVID, by the way, and probably more so since COVID taught us to fear each other.
I have tested this out with numerous people since then. In our culture, “third spaces” are more comfortable for meeting with others. Traditional churches, with their buildings, provide this third space. They make social interaction more likely for new acquaintances to be formed.
This, by the way, is a huge contrast to many of the cultures in which house church movements are flourishing. I like to tell new missionaries that “hospitality is the killer app” for developing relationships. That apparently is not as true in the US context. As far as I know, there is no real “disciple-making movement” (DMM) happening in the US. I am very aware of claims from various sources. For now, I sense that each one is a bit different from the model of DMM taught and practiced in other cultures. This does not invalidate the model. It does mean that we cannot expect what works “there” to work “here.” Since we train missionaries not to take their own culture and ministry assumptions with them when they go cross-cultural, it is only right that it works in reverse.
Affinity Group Recruitment Works Too Well
A principle in movement-oriented missions strategies is that the Gospel moves along existing social lines. In other words, it is spread through word-of-mouth, friend-to-friend, and in other relationships that already exist. We found this to be truer than we desired it to be.
I work in ministry, as does my wife. As a result of this, my closest relationships are also people who work in ministry leadership. In the southeast corner of Orlando where we were doing house church there are many ministries. Thus, we have a wide circle of friends who are all professional Christian workers. Even though the objective that we started with was to make our house church a platform for evangelism, that is not who we attracted. We attracted the people that were in our social circles.
We tried hard to break out of this Christian bubble. We participated in community events, we turned people away who wanted to join our house church who were in Christian ministry, and our group organized events specifically to do outreach. Yet, 75% of the people who participated in our house church network were related in some way or another to a ministry role. So, our evangelism objectives were not met.
To be fair, I do not see traditional churches doing better in this area. Probably worse, in fact. But the same affinity group recruitment principle works for traditional churches. On top of that, they get the
“ChrEaster” boost. These people are not attending church but want to have a church experience on Christmas and Easter. The last few traditional churches I have attended have had huge ChrEaster programs.
I Now Attend a Megachurch
Our house churches observed their lack of evangelism and growing insularity. Even though we were, as a group, loving the fellowship and saw important discipleship happening, it was a partial miss. We also had families with teenagers which can present a special challenge to a “program light” house church network. Our network slowly disbanded. Over time, we amicably pulled the plug and people sought out new church options.
In our case, one of our adult children was attending a megachurch across town. He was struggling with some personal issues. We felt God moving us toward that church because he was there. We needed to be in his life. Since then, we have stuck it out. The worship is powerful, the teaching is good, we lead a small group in our community, and we do our best to participate. Do I like it more than house church? No, I do not. But God has us here for now and this is where we need to be, serving and participating as God leads.
I hope these thoughts might inform yours as you consider church structures. None of this is real research and take it all with a grain of salt. Other people who were in our house church network probably have different views on what I have written about.
What do you think about house church? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Find me on X (twitter) @tedstur
Excellent reflections, Ted. I find myself agreeing with your observations. Our house church experience has also been the highlight of our church journey. I would add that a handful of people "doubled up" by attending both a traditional church and our house church. They appreciated the deeper level of interaction and relationship that the house church afforded. I do think that the teaching in a house church could be as good as in a traditional church if that was the goal, which in our case I'd say it wasn't. The social needs of the young people definitely became a big factor as the years went by. I suspect, too, that many simply don't prefer the deeper level of relationship and accountability that a house church implies. Anonymity facilitates the kind of "freedom" that our culture values.
All the church growth movement needed was two proof-of-concept churches (Saddleback and Willow Creek) and then the model was set: everyone wanted to be like them. But this was a syncretism (not contextualization!) with consumeristic and hyper-individualistic US culture. So we continue to see the Walmartization of American Christianity: there are fewer churches with more and more people in them, and people in bigger churches give less and serve less and grow less. This is contributing to the decline of Evangelicalism. How many more studies do we need?
Recently, both Tim Keller and Russell Moore have proposed helpful solutions about moving on from patriarchy and right-wing politics. That is indeed helpful. But the idol of religious consumerism is still present and only adequately dealt with by an ecclesiology that is NOT predicated on non-discipleship. Alan Hirsch has pointed this out. Everyone wants to get to movement but no one is willing to pay the price. We need to challenge the pastor-centric and sermon-centric church models that make discipleship optional. CPMs in the Global South provide a great conversation partner, but our social structure is different and so translation is needed. I think New Thing and Tampa Underground and Kansas City Underground are working towards a new proof of concept that will put the biblical focus back on disciple-making/discipleship and a refounding/restructuring of the Church upon the Lordship of Jesus. It doesn't need to be house church but it can be microchurch.