A growing number of Christians across Washington and around the country are moving to home churches -- both as a way to create personal connections in the age of the megachurch and as a return to the blueprint of the Christian church spelled out in the New Testament, which describes Jesus and the apostles teaching small groups in people's homes.
Estimates vary widely for a movement that is by design informal and decentralized, but the consensus among home-churchers is that they are part of a growing trend.
George Barna, a religion pollster, estimates that since 2000, more than 20 million Americans have begun exploring alternative forms of worship, including home churches, workplace ministries and online faith communities. Barna based that figure on surveys of the religious practices and attitudes of American adults that he has conducted over the past 25 years.
To read the full article:Going to Church by Staying at Home...a Growing Trend By Michael Alison Chandler and Arianne Aryanpur Washington Post Staff Writers, Sunday, June 4, 2006; Page A12.
And this from a New York Times Article...
"We've gotten so far away from the believers who met in the first three centuries, when they were sharing one another's lives on a daily basis," said Michael Wroblewski, who started a house church in Portsmouth, R.I., where he is a mechanical engineer for the Navy. "You need to be interactive with the other believers, not just staring at the back of someone's head listening to a single pastor speak..
Prof. Nancy T. Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, said: "These are for the most part people who want to strip faith down to its bare minimum. They don't want to have to support a big building and staff and insurance policies and advertising campaigns and fixing the roof, because all of that seems to them to be extraneous to what they understand a life of faith to be." (giving instead to charities, to each one who has need...)
To read full article: housechurch.org
2 comments:
The inference is that a home group is interchangable or preferable to the organized church - that the organized church is a modern "copy of a copy". The early church appointed deacons to free the preachers to preach while they organized the caring for the people's needs. That was not a home group, that was an organization structured to answer the need referred to as "what to do when the group grows too large." Paul said they had a right to be supported by believers. Jesus preached to thousands at a time. I think He was full time and not building houses in the day time. I think he was burdened by the logistics of feeding the masses too, It seems logical that they were likely looking at Him and not the back of someone's head (or front for that matter). It didn't seem to matter to Peter that the thousands he preached to didn't even speak the same language much less know each other well. Persecution probably had more influence on the manner of assembling together in the early church as well as in China, etc. than ease of scheduling and relaxed surroundings. As for interaction, you can't ask questions of books, but you don't replace them with chat rooms. Well, many do, but to their peril.
Schools are expensive - administrative nightmares - and some people do fine without them. Lots of kids would be more comfortable and less stressed if they went to play group instead of school.
I don't think so.
In fact, on another day, I might like to make a case for the home group being like loving your friends and family and even the heathens do that. It's good, it's necessary, it's not enough.
Not today though. Then there is the whole question of my singing without a sound system and lots of loud musicians...
This is a quote that i found on the blog of a a really great theologian i know, yes, he has his own blog now...
http://dwbrothers.blogspot.com/ I think it may enter into the conversation well....
There is a real danger of letting the "postmodern culture" set the stage for the gospel; in other words, just trying to update the church in postmodern form instead of modern form. "Our understanding of what it means to be the church," Smith writes, "must be shaped by the priority of revelation and the Christian tradition, not what (even) a postmodern culture needs or is looking for" (p. 126). Instead, the church needs a recovery of new ways of thinking, living, practicing the faith, basically by going behind modernism and finding the rich resources of the pre-modern church.
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