Churched Christians

In my view, starting a house church with Churched Christians does not work. Trying to gather people who have left their church because they were dissatisfied (I call them Churched Christians) is an exhausting and impossible task that will wear out the leaders for very little benefit.

• Christians who have been in a church for many years have been trained to be useless, so they struggle when the support programmes that they are used to are not there. For the leaders, meeting their unrealistic needs is an impossibly exhausting task. There is usually very little fruit because the problems are too deeply ingrained, and the people are unlikely to change. Meeting all these needs is beyond the capability of a house church.

• Churched Christians who leave their church often carry spiritual baggage that they have not dealt with. They tend to blame their problems on the church that they have left, so they find it hard to handle them honestly.

• Churched Christians often have a critical spirit that they developed by critiquing sermons, pastors and worship. They bring a tendency to watch the leaders of their house church to check if they are up to their standard. This is exhausting and debilitating for the leaders.

• Churched Christians have high expectations of what a house church will deliver for them. They expect exciting worship, deep teaching, and solutions for their problems when things go wrong. They are intolerant of a performance that does not meet their expectations. Unrealistic expectations push the house church into attempting to do everything that the megachurch does, but on a smaller scale. This is impossible. A house church has a different ethos, and it should operate in a different way. Churched Christians struggle to understand and adjust to this new way.

• House churches often struggle to share the gospel because Churched Christians have never learnt how to do it. This means that the house church tends to grow by attracting more and more disillusioned Churched Christians. This is a recipe for disaster because it just aggravates the burden of the house church leaders.

• Most Churched Christians cannot get beyond the idea of having a single pastor who will serve them. They push the leaders of the house church into becoming a one-man band leadership style, even if they are trying to avoid it. This leaves the leaders exhausted because they are trying to do everything that a megachurch pastor does, but without the same resources. Worse still, they are usually trying to do it in their spare time, because they are also working for their financial support.

The following are essential for the functioning of a house church.

• Plurality of leadership with balanced giftings is absolutely essential. It is hard to achieve, but it is better to wait until you find the right people to work with than to be exhausted by being pushed into the one-man-band-leadership role. Given human nature, this will inevitably happen, if it is not built into the DNA of the group.

• Most members of a house church should be new Christians. They are much easier to disciple because they do not carry church baggage. If they are discipled effectively, they will grow quickly, and will soon be able to disciple others who have chosen to follow Jesus, so leadership in the church will grow.

• New Christians will have lots of friends and family who are not. They will be easy to reach with the gospel because they will see the change in the friend/family member. Churched Christians usually have no non-Christian friends, so their reaching out with the gospel tends to be artificial.

• Understand that worship and preaching/teaching does not add much value to the Kingdom of God. If people want teaching, plenty of good teaching is available online (just help them to find it). If they want corporate worship, they should go where it is done well, but they should understand that it is not essential for the advance of the gospel. Trying to provide these in a house church is exhausting and achieves very little value. The focus of the house church should be on discipling the people who have chosen to follow Jesus; teaching them to hear the voice of the Spirit and how to follow his leadership; teaching them to work with others, especially in pairs and to connect with others. If a leader of the house church has a need to preach, they should get out into the marketplaces and do it there where preaching the gospel belongs (the experience will probably kill the desire).

• House churches should grow by sending out the best leaders as apostles to establish a new house church in a different place – most will not want to go, because it is hard. Those who stay will have opportunities to step up into leadership roles that will stretch them. I describe how this works in Apostolic Way. When a house church divides in two, divisions and criticism are inevitable, especially if many of the people are Churched Christians, because they will expect a decline in the services that they receive and feel dissatisfied.

• We need to get beyond the Sunday meeting model, as it is exhausting for the woman who hosts it. I think we need to move towards working more with people who live near to us and doing their discipling with them in our daily lives.

No one has been honest about this, but the house church model practised in the western world is flawed. Although the motivation is good, trying to do everything that a megachurch does in a house church is exhausting for dedicated leaders. I think it is better to wait for some people who want to do something really radically different than trying to run a mini house church that is trying to do everything that a megachurch does, as it does not work.

More at Twelve Steps.

House Church

I sense that the house church movement in New Zealand has peaked. My experience is that most house churches were started by people frustrated with existing churches. They knew what they did not like, but they did not have a clear vision of what God wanted to establish. Many brought baggage with them.

Most still wanted to receive the “services” that they thought traditional churches were not providing adequately.: good teaching, good worship, etc. The list is quite long. Church leaders were soon exhausted trying to provide these services. Members remained frustrated because the level of service did not match their expectations.

The people who joined House Churches had not been reaching out to the lost people of the world from their traditional churches, so they did not do any different when they got into a house church. Consequentially, house churches had very little success in sharing the gospel.
A house church that does not have new believers coming in gets very self-centred. New believers are often disruptive in a good way. Existing members grow by putting their energies into discipling and teaching them. Without this challenge, they get bored and grumpy. Their house church becomes quite inward looking.

I don’t think many people in New Zealand caught the vision I shared in Being Church Where We Live. It has been more popular overseas.
I am not despondent. I still think that the vision I shared is the best way for followers of Jesus to support each other through a season of persecution or economic shaking. I still think it is the only way the Church as a whole could absorb a massive number of people coming to faith in Jesus, if we had revival in New Zealand.

I am not sure which of these two possibilities is most likely.

Starting a House Church

All you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

Here are Twelve Steps to Starting a House Church.

House Church for Dummies

If you feel a bit dumb, when it comes to starting a new church, do not worry because the Holy Spirit is a bit dumb too. A dumb person cannot speak. The Holy Spirit can only speak using the voice of another person or by putting thoughts into a person’s mind. However, he is really smart at starting churches.

If you are dumb enough to stop talking and listen to the Holy Spirit, you are just the person to start a new church. Getting out of the established church is the hard bit, starting a new one is much easier. Just get together with a few other Christians that you trust and listen to what Holy Spirit is saying. Act dumb (listen) until you hear what he is saying, then do it.

Continues at House Church for Dummies.

Teaching Ourselves

The great risk with house groups and house churches is that they become just a microcosm of the Sunday teaching service. A small group of people just meeting for worship and teaching has lost the plot.

Their first aim should be learning to move with the Spirit and experience his gifts. A small group is a safe place to learn about praying for the sick and receiving words of knowledge.

There second aim should be to reach into their world with the gospel. The gifts of the Spirit are gifts for the world, not for the enjoyment of Christians. They were not given so that we can minister to each other and enjoy the fun. Christians are to love each other, but we must not keep the gifts of the Spirit for our own benefit.

God gave the gifts of the Spirit to equip us to preach the gospel and serve the people of the world. If we keep the gifts to ourselves, the Holy Spirit will eventually get bored and leave us to go out into our world. If we do not go with him, we will find ourselves spiritually full, but bored.

Professional Ministry (1)

A correspondent asked me about the role of professional ministers in a house church setting. This question raises many important issues. My attempt to answer is contained in the following couple of posts.

Our house church does not have a paid pastor. There is simply not enough work to keep one busy as the people look after each other. I can conceive of situations where a house church might support someone in full-time ministry. A church with several new Christians with deep needs might need someone working full time to help them get free. An evangelist working in a challenging situation might need to be supported so they could work full-time. However, house churches generally do not need professional leadership, because the members will care for each other and the meetings are led by the Holy Spirit with all members contributing.

Many years ago, I felt that I was called to be “preach the word” and I spent six years employed as a full-time minister/pastor. However, when I did further study of the New Testament, I found that this ministry of preaching to Christians does not exist, but is a leftover from an Old Testament theology. I realized that my calling was different from what I had thought. I was called more to speak prophetically to the church and the world, but I did not need to be a professional minister in the church to fulfil that calling, so I resigned from my position as a full-time minister.

Some people are able to establish a model of financial support for my type of ministry by selling tapes and books, or getting on the conference circuit and that is good if you can do it.

I have chosen to work as an economist. That has had many benefits for me. It provides financial support for my family. It allows me to produce statistics that expose the dishonesty and disobedience of the government. It also means that I am involved in the real world, rubbing shoulders with people who do not care about God or the church, with people dealing with broken marriages or gay marriages, with people trying to buy a home for their families. I now have a much better understanding and empathy for real life and real people than I did when I most of my work contact was with “church people”. I still see myself as being involved in full-time ministry (service) to the Lord.