House-Churching

The church took some four centuries to move from persecuted back rooms and catacombs to build a magnificent Christendom (contrary to most ignorant moderns, it wasn’t all bad) that lasted 1500 years in the West. This included a glorious structure that contained a level of institution and encompassed the arts and architecture. Now at the beginning of the 20th Century in the West, people are returning to house churches. Most of these have little structure and possess none of the horrid “institutionalism” the Bible itself sets forth: officers, sacraments, and connectionalism.

So, if the church spent its first four centuries, under intense persecution, moving from back rooms to front rooms, from basilicas to cathedrals, why is moving back to square one, under intense prosperity and individualism, considered a good thing?

Comments

[Mike Spreng]

Those are my thoughts, exactly. Many Christians do not understand the eschatology of the gospel, and how we are growing into the majesty of Christ as time goes by.

[Pastor TA]

One word: Defeatism.

If we assume we've lost the culture war, if we assume that the institutional Church is just filled with problems that cannot be fixed (why else would we split our churches and denominations if we thought they could be fixed?), and if we assume that the only thing that will make our world (and the Church) better is Jesus' Second Coming, we have not only given up on the Church, but on God himself, who said he would never suffer his Church to be defeated by the Gates of Hell.

Of course, this goes along with lots of different factors: disdain for any kind of authority, especially spiritual authority; sectarian mindset that prioritizes my view of all things religious such that those who disagree with me must be wrong, which means i can't fellowship or worship with them; and a mindset that assumes that there is no growth or advancement of truth beyond the first century, and so what they want most is a repristination of the persecuted, backroom Church.

That's just off the top of my head, but i'd say that sectarian Protestantism, along with Dispensationalism (which is the logical end of a continuing drive to make one's Protestantism consistent with itself) are the two things at the heart of the issue.

[Garrett]

Defeatism. Seems so but I wonder how the Rushdoony strand fits into that or if that was an anomoly. Also, there seems to be a weird strand of romanticism running through it all. Particularly in the emerging church movement (note the cool dangerous name) there is a desire to do cool, edgy, dangerous things...like meet in homes. It just doesn't work w/out Romans searching from house-to-house. I wonder what Iranian or Vietnamese Christians think of this American phenomenon. Something tells me they'd say, "What?!? You have the opportunity to meet in a church building, out in the open, with elders and deacons, and you want meet in your living room?"

[Are Karlsen]

I think house churching is about discovering what a biblical christian community is:

Preach the gospel to the poor - do not entertain the rich ones
Mutual submission - not hierarchy
Servanthood - not leadership
Body - not institution
Serving gifts - not offices
dialogue - not monologue
carry the weak ones - not idolize the stars
compassion - not moralism
fellowship - not rhetorics
mutual testing - not muting
relations - not organisation
transperancy - not secretiveness
tolerance - not conformity
house church - not corporate church