Starting a House Church
 

Introduction

Why House Churches?

There are over three billion people on our planet who have never heard the name of Jesus one time. There remain thousands of people groups that have not been reached with the good news of God’s love. Poverty, corruption, preventable diseases, and famine have turned whole countries and continents to ruin. We are stirred to face these challenges with faith in God’s goodness and obedience to his commands.

We believe the church of Jesus Christ is the hope of the world. Some would say that leaves out Jesus, that he alone is the hope of the world. Not at all! Jesus himself chose the church to be his answer to the world’s needs. 

We also believe the church has been commissioned to respond with Jesus’ compassion to the physical challenges and the good news of the cross to the spiritual challenges. We believe in sharing God’s love with two hands, one hand with food, medicine and clean water, and the other hand with the message of God’s love.

Because we love the church and have served the church for a total of seventy years, we are in no way prepared to give up on the church. She has needs. She has weaknesses. And yes, she is hopeless without Jesus. But she is his bride, his family, and we love her because of that. We love the whole church, big and small, black and white, rich and poor, young and old. So neither one of us is writing this book to present the one answer to the church’s problems. We are excited about house churches, but not to the exclusion of the rest of the body of Christ. If you are looking for a book that hammers and criticizes the institutional church, or denominations, or mega-churches, this is the wrong book for you.

We are excited about house churches because God’s spirit is moving through them to touch our planet. Those are not just words. What is happening around the world right now through house church movements is spectacular. The tremendous growth of house churches worldwide has caught our attention. There is probably no more significant factor in the growth of the church worldwide than the re-discovery of the power of small, simple, easily reproducible churches.

We are not saying there are a few thousand house churches worldwide, and therefore we would like to see the same thing happen in North America or Europe. We are saying that tens of millions of people are coming to Christ through hundreds of thousands of small, simple churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We are jealous that our own nation and the nations of the developing world experience the same blessing.

The principles that make small, simple churches work well also help people grow spiritually. They produce ownership, accountability, spontaneity, involvement, responsibility and growth. We will explain more about these principles in the book itself.

We believe God has a big dream, but he builds his church one life, one family and one small church community at a time. We, too, should dream big dreams, but we must “build small.” The maturity and effectiveness of any movement of lasting impact can be measured by how effective it is in fostering a culture of small groups that effectively function as church for the people.

We are excited about the house church model because that is where God’s spirit is moving around the world today. And no wonder. Most of those who have never heard the good news about Jesus live in countries closed to traditional expressions of Sunday oriented, building driven churches. If we are going to reach the three billion poor people of our planet who live in small villages and crowded cities, it will not be through program driven, professional clergy models of western church.

It is not a model of church that motivates us, but what the Spirit of God does in people’s lives when they discover the New Testament principles of doing church in small communities. It is those principles that are the engine that powers the house church model, not the model itself. These principles are not complicated, and they don’t require a seminary education to figure them out. They are woven all through the story of the church in the book of Acts. And they permeate the house church movement worldwide.

With this in mind, we offer you our stories, our experiences and the lessons we have learned with the hope they will guide and inspire you to open your home, your office, or your classroom to a few other people and see what God does.