'Why don't we just do 'house church''?
The allure of escaping organizational structure - and why it doesn't work
’If you had the chance to start church all over again from scratch, how would you do it?’
I often ask this of congregations and clergy. Every time - and I mean every time - someone mentions ‘house church’.
The idea of small, simple gatherings of a few people for worship and prayer. Maybe a meal, some fellowship time. No structure, no rules, no heavy setup. No one gets paid - or has to pay - to participate. Just church as it was meant to be, back in the days of the early church.
It sound wonderful to me!
‘Where two or three are gathered, I will be in the midst of them,’ Jesus promised us. Let’s just get back to basics - the most important parts of practicing and sharing our faith, and none of the other stuff.
The lure of house church aslo reflects the exhaustion many clergy and lay leaders feel: no more meetings! No more building issues or budgets! Just prayer and worship and discipleship and community.
As lovely as this sounds - and as much precedent there is for it in the early church …
House church doesn’t work. At least not for long.
Why not?
Creating community is work.
As soon as two or three are gathered, things need to get sorted out.
Whether it’s a family or a trivia night or a group of friends praying together, the sense of magic and belonging might be incredibly organic.
But in order for it to thrive, and in order to last over time, there has to be what I call the stuff of community: articulating boundaries, purpose, roles, and meaning. At some point someone (or a group of someones) has to be in charge. At some point, something needs to get paid for.
The move from organic ‘house church’ to organized community happened quite quickly in the early church.
In the Acts of the Apostles, everyone was full of the Holy Spirit, sharing everything in common and baptizing thousands at a time.
But it wasn’t that long before Paul and other leaders were visiting and sending letters to churches, giving them theological and leadership guidelines. They were trying to help them do the work of gathering, organizing, and sharing the Gospel. Paul was also directing them on collecting money for ministry and to pay ministers (see 1 Corinthians 16, among other places) .
And of course we all know Paul was constantly teaching - and reprimanding - the early churches for their bad theology, and for having conflict among themselves (oh, those foolish Galatians!).
The organizational church was born within about fifty years of Jesus’ Ascension.
I think the allure of ‘house church’ these days is that we feel overwhelmed by the stuff.
The stuff of today’s institutional church takes up too much time and energy in proportion to the ‘Good Stuff’ : the prayer, worship, fellowship, service, and magic of belonging to a community.
So the idea of not having a building seems like a relief: we’ll just meet in someone’s living room. The idea of not having tons of meetings feels freeing: we’ll just have a meal, then worship, then meaningful conversation. And we won’t have to talk about money at all.
It’s easy to see how so many of us start here with reimagining ministry.
This is where I get excited as a Free Range Priest. Because it seems to me that what we need is new ways to balance our community life so that there’s less stuff, and more Good Stuff.
Whether it’s ‘house church’, traditional congregational life, online religious community, or something else, we really can’t do without some of the stuff. But we can make it less burdensome and more supportive of the Good Stuff.
Not long ago, I met a pastor whose ministry is planting house churches. Jake McGlothin is a pastor at Revive House Church, and he’s also developed a process for planting - and structuring - small religious communities.
It’s a process that started organically - the way good community should - yet also deliberately. There is definitely organizational structure. The house churches are associated with the Methodist Church - and at least one particular Methodist Church - where Jake is on staff. He gets paid for organizing and overseeing the house churches.
This is ‘house church’ that works - because there is stuff that keeps it going, but just enough that it doesn’t choke out the ‘Good Stuff’.
We can start church from scratch. But the place we need to start is re-thinking the organizational and administrative side - including the finances.
It may not be what comes first in our vision of thriving ministry (well, unless you’re me…), but I think it’s what’s holding us back from being the church we do dream about.
I’ve always been struck by how the “parish model” of church (it’s what I call it) seems to be universal and timeless. For hundreds of years, faith communities have gathered at a communal building or location for worship/learning/fellowship, no matter if it is a Christian chapel,a Jewish synagogue, a Muslim mosque, a Buddhist sangha: the community gathered at a place. Even druids gathered at common oak groves. That said, couldn’t ours today be a simple place, a minimalist place, something on the scale of a storefront or a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall? A single, self-contained facility? Yes, let’s also do house church, farm church, yurt church, pavilion at the park church, but let’s look at why parish church has lasted so long - “Why?”
Oooh, thanks for sharing a workable model for this. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Urban Holmes’ assertion that worship needs a sacred time, sacred place and sacred person/shaman — ‘sacred’ as in set apart, to help the process of transcendence. House church is none of those things, but it’s definitely a sacred gathering.