Drunken Mystic

(The following post is partially a reaction to my finishing Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna.

Those dudes read my blog.)

I remember when house churches were not cool. Oh, there were the few die-hards, many of them carry-overs from the 70′s Jesus Movement, but by and large, house churches were conisdered with skepticism or just outright disdain.

I didn’t know much about house chuches until I was in one … and not really by my intention, either. I was invited to a “Bible study.” It was not a Bible study. But I was disillusioned and discouraged with much of the Christian life I was around me, and I heard words like cold water to a dry pallette: “I don’t care who you are, what your denominational background is, or where you come from. We’re gonna love on Jesus tonight. If you’re not okay with that, there’s the door.”

That’s pretty much word for word.

I found a group of people who didn’t care what I believed about speaking in tongues or who I voted for in the last election. They cared about the main stuff: loving God with our whole hearts and loving one another. They just happened to meet in a home.

I tried for years to take what I experienced in that living room to my fellowship and through my ministry to varying degrees of success. It took me a couple years before I finally committed my fellowship time completely to a little house filled with crazy people on Thursday nights.

This was a decade before Barna wrote Revolution and the term Emergent became cool … kinda. I didn’t care about that stuff then, still kinda don’t; I knew I was loved, I was learning mounds of truth, I was allowed to ask scary questions, and I was unencumbered by all the religious crap … another way to say free.

But when I stopped regularly attending a building with a steeple on it on Sunday morning, some were seriously worried about my spirituality. Some people seriously questioned my Christianity … I’m sure some still do.

House churches, however, have kinda become cool. I tell people I fellowship with a couple house churches, and they say, “Cool,” now instead of a long, semi-polite, “Oh …” I also hear a lot about “my small group program at church” that they rarely attend but the pastor decided they needed one so its cool now.

(While small groups have a slight bit of potential, mainly they are different forms of Sunday School without much fruit … which is one of the many reasons participation in most small group programs is poor.)

As my limited knowledge grew, I realized that others haven’t had the same positive experiences with house churches, explaining some skepticism of many.

This could be its own series, but I will quickly try to run down reasons NOT to start a house church, or not to start going to one …

1. You think it’s cool — it’s a new fad.
2. You’re gonna try to do everything an institutional church does, only in a house.
3. You think meeting in a house is more spiritual, like some magic church formula.
4. Your current fellowship kicked you out (which I guess makes them not your current fellowship anymore).
5. Your current fellowship isn’t giving you the pulpit you think you deserve, and you’ve got things to say!
6. You just want to start another meeting.
7. You think your ideas are really the one, true, Church.
8. You think it’s easy.

House (simple, organic, whatever, etc) churches can be an important step to realizing more community, fellowship and discipleship, but it is not an end in and of itself. You haven’t accomplished anything by starting to meet in a home. In fact, if that is your mentality, you’re doing more harm than good because you haven’t actually changed your thinking, just where you think it.

Peace.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under misc messages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.