Table of Contents

- Special Copyright Notice

- Foreword

- Preface: A Vision Too Good to Be True?

- 15 Theses toward a Re-Incarnation of Church

- Introduction: People with Principles, Not Methods

- 1: The Reinvention of Church

- 2: House Churches in History

- 3: The Nature of House Churches

- 4: The Fivefold Ministry

- 5: House Church or Cell Church?

- 6: No Progress without Change

- 7: All Change Is Practical

- 8: QSQ

- 9: Fathering the Next Generation

- 10: Models of Church Multiplication

- 11: Starfish Church Planting

- About the Author

- Recommended Reading

- Notes

THE HOUSE CHURCH BOOK

by

WOLFGANG SIMSON

Foreword by George Barna

Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Carol Stream, Illinois

Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site at www.tyndale.com

Visit the author’s Web site at http://www.starfishportal.net

TYNDALE is a registered trademark of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Barna and the Barna logo are trademarks of George Barna.

BarnaBooks is an imprint of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

The House Church Book: Rediscover the Dynamic, Organic, Relational, Viral Community Jesus Started

Copyright © 2009 by Wolfgang Simson. All rights reserved.

Cover photo copyright © by Steve Goodwin/iStockphoto. All rights reserved.

Author photo copyright © by Mercy Simson. All rights reserved.

Designed by Ron Kaufmann

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. NKJV is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simson, Wolfgang.

The house church book : rediscover the dynamic, organic, relational, viral community Jesus started / Wolfgang Simson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4143-2552-1 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-4143-3544-5 (eReader)

ISBN 978-1-4143-3543-8 (Mobipocket)

ISBN 978-1-4143-3545-2 (Sony Reader)

1.  House churches.  I. Title.

BV601.85.S56 2009

262’.26—dc22     2009013141

Special Copyright Notice

The text of this book is an eBook file intended for one reader only. It may be used by that reader on computers and devices that he or she owns and uses. It may not be transmitted in whole or part to others except as stated above.

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There are three movements to which I dedicate this book:

The revolution, led by people who, inspired by the Kingdom, start fresh fires and are bringing the presence of Christ where the church currently is not—and rightly doing so without asking anyone’s permission other than the King’s. Do something unheard of for your King, but remember, church history did not start with you.

The reformation, led by people who find themselves within existing church and mission structures. You have heard from the same Holy Spirit that it is absolutely time to press on, rediscover fascinating aspects of a viral church that you never knew, and intentionally align yourselves with the Kingdom, no matter where you started your journey. Some of your heritages are pure gold, others may need to fade away; so pass on the divine legacy and walk together with the revolutionaries, hand in hand.

The retirement, led by people who don’t fit into either of the two groups above. Maybe you long ago stopped asking questions and simply do what you do because that’s the way it’s always been done. But what if God is not finished with you? What if there is still an unsung song in you, an unfinished job waiting for you, an orphaned generation that remains unparented without you? What would happen if you asked God for His strength to help you fly like an eagle once more and add your wisdom to the two movements above?

Foreword

It is exciting to meet someone who is both a solid thinker and a fearless follower of Christ. Wolfgang Simson is such a person. And the book you are holding in your hands is further evidence of both of those qualities.

It’s not often that you get a book whose cost can be justified by the content in the pages before you even get to the introduction! The House Church Book is one of those unusual resources. I found the “15 Theses toward a Re-Incarnation of Church” to be such a section. I suppose you could consider the bulk of the book a bonus. No matter how you look at it, Wolfgang has provided us with an outstanding resource that, like his earlier book (Houses That Change the World), pushes us to rethink some of our foundational assumptions about who we are in Christ and what it means to be part of the body of Christ.

This is a book that will either excite you or disturb you—or maybe both. Wolfgang is a provocateur with a heart dedicated to Jesus. As such, he does not settle for simplistic blather. Consequently, he has written a book that implores us to think about the church in terms of faith rather than formulas, people rather than programs and professionals, biblical principles rather than cultural pragmatism, humility rather than hubris, and simplicity rather than superficiality. Even if you cheer everything he describes and prescribes, you should also find yourself uncomfortable given the state of the church today. It is my prayer that such an emotion is a holy discomfort in which God’s Spirit is nudging you to new realizations that enable you to be a healthy contributor to His ever-developing church.

Wolfgang’s work is hopeful and honest. It is also aggressive in its pursuit of biblical authenticity. Toward that end, this new work describes various components of the house church movement—its scriptural basis, advantages, dangers, challenges, and opportunities. If you read the book with an open mind, I think you will find it to be a volume that is biblically sound, culturally relevant, and individually challenging.

Why do I encourage you to retain an “open mind” while reading The House Church Book? Because so many people these days seem to be closed minded about the revolution of faith and form that we are experiencing around us. Wolfgang helps us to understand the history of the church, its practices and structure, and its implications for individuals, families, and communities. He calls us back to the biblical commands for the family to be a center of faith development and practice, the deployment of our God-given gifts, and the experience of growth through genuine spiritual community.

Who wouldn’t want to participate in and benefit from these things? But how many of us are able to hear a message that invites us to reexamine our current practices and assumptions in order to experience the best that God has for us and His Kingdom?

I am grateful to Wolfgang for his single-minded pursuit of God and truth, and for the fruit of that journey that appears on these pages. May you find this book to be every bit as stimulating, upsetting, uplifting, insightful, and freeing as I have.

George Barna

Ventura, California

April 2009

Preface: A Vision Too Good to Be True?

Being brought up in “Christian” Germany with churches everywhere, I always felt that there must be something exciting about the community that Jesus started in the New Testament—but somehow I could never discover what that was. Together with many friends and colleagues, I dreamed of a community that would be as simple as one–two–three, yet would also be dynamic, explosive, and able to turn a neighborhood and the world upside down. We saw the church as a supernatural invention, endowed with God’s gift of immortality—a means to disciple each other, and to make the life of Jesus rub off on each other. We saw it as an experience of grace and grapes, love and laughter, joy and jellybeans, forgiveness and fun, power and—yes, why not?—paper. Notes, books, sheets—we knew that could not be all there is to church.

We dreamed of a church that wouldn’t need huge amounts of money, or rhetoric, or control, or manipulation. A church that was nonreligious at heart, thrilled people to the core, and made them lose their tongues out of sheer joy and astonishment. A church that would simply teach us The Way to live. A church that not only had a message, but was the message.

We knew a church like this could spread like an unstoppable virus, infecting whatever it touched, and ultimately covering the earth with the glory and knowledge of God. This church’s power would stem from its inventor and be equipped with the most ingenious spiritual genetic code, a sort of heavenly DNA, which would enable it to transfer Kingdom values from heaven to earth and to reproduce them here. In the process it would transform not only water into wine, but atheists into apostles, policewomen into prophetesses, terrorists into teachers, electricians into evangelists, and plumbers into pastors.

The church we dreamed of would be like a spiritual extended family—organic, not organized; relational, not formal. It would have a persecution-proof structure. It would mature under tears, multiply under pressure, and breathe under water. It would flourish in the desert, see in the darkness, and thrive in the midst of chaos. A church like this would multiply like five loaves and two fish in the hands of Jesus, and its people would become its resources, with one name to boast about, the Lamb of God.

15 Theses toward a Re-Incarnation of Church

I believe that God is changing the church today, which in turn will change the world. Millions of Christians around the world are already aware of an imminent reformation of global proportions. They are saying, in effect: “Church as we know it is preventing church as God wants it.” There is a new collective awareness of an age-old revelation, a corporate spiritual echo. In the following 15 theses I will summarize a part of this reformation of the church, and I am convinced that these ideas reflect a part of what the Spirit of God is saying to the church today. For some, this information might be the proverbial fist-sized cloud in Elijah’s sky. Others already feel the pouring rain.

1. Christianity is a way of life, not a series of religious meetings.

Before they were called Christians, followers of Christ were called “The Way.” One of the reasons for this title was that these believers had literally found the way to live. The nature of church is not reflected in a constant series of religious meetings led by professional clergy in holy places especially reserved to experience Jesus. Rather, it is mirrored in the prophetic way followers of Christ live their everyday lives in spiritual extended families, as vivid answers to the questions that society asks, and in the place where it counts most—in their homes.

2. Time to change the “cathegogue system.”

The historic Orthodox and Catholic Church—that existed after Constantine in the fourth century—developed and adopted a religious system based on two elements: a Christian version of the Old Testament Temple—the cathedral—and a worship pattern styled after the Jewish synagogue. They thus adopted, as the foundational pattern for the times to follow, a blueprint for Christian meetings and worship that was neither expressly revealed, nor ever endorsed by God in New Testament times: the “cathegogue,” linking the house-of-God mentality and the synagogue. Baptized with the Greek pagan philosophy of separating the sacred from the secular, the cathegogue system became the black hole of Christianity, swallowing most of its society-transforming energies and inducing the church to become self-absorbed for centuries to come. The Roman Catholic Church went on to canonize the system. Luther reformed the theology surrounding the gospel, but left the outer forms of “church” remarkably untouched. The Free Churches freed the system from the state, the Baptists then baptized it, the Quakers dry-cleaned it, the Salvation Army put it in uniform, the Pentecostals anointed it, and the charismatics renewed it, but until today nobody has really changed the system. The time to do that has now arrived.

3. The third Reformation.

In rediscovering the gospel of salvation by faith and grace alone, Luther started to reform the church through reforming theology. In the seventeenth century, through movements in the pietistic renewal, Christians recovered a new intimacy with God, which led to a reformation of spirituality, the second reformation. Now God is touching the wineskins, initiating a third reformation, a reformation of structure.

4. From church houses to house churches.

From the time of the New Testament there has been no such thing as “a house of God.” At the cost of his life, Stephen reminded us that God does not live in temples made by human hands. The church is the people of God. The church, therefore, was and is at home where people are at home: in ordinary houses. There the people of God share their lives in the power of the Holy Spirit and have “meatings,” i.e., they eat when they meet. They often do not even hesitate to sell private property and share material and spiritual blessings; they teach each other in real-life situations how to obey God’s Word—not with professorial lectures, but dynamically, with dialogue and questions and answers. There they pray and prophesy with each other and baptize one another. There they can let their masks drop and confess their sins, regaining a new corporate identity through love, acceptance, and forgiveness.

5. The church has to become small in order to grow large.

The New Testament church was made up of small groups, typically between ten and fifteen people. It grew, but not by forming big congregations of three hundred people who filled cathedrals and lost fellowship. Instead it multiplied “sideways,” dividing like organic cells once these groups reached around fifteen or twenty people. This then made it possible for all the Christians to get together in citywide celebrations, as in Solomon’s Temple Colonnade in Jerusalem. The traditional congregational church is by comparison a sad compromise. Most churches of today are simply too big to provide real fellowship. They have too often become “fellowships without fellowship.”

6. A church is led by more than a pastor.

The local church is not led by a pastor, but fathered by an elder, a man of wisdom who is engaged with reality. The local house churches are then networked into a movement by the combination of elders and members of the so-called fivefold ministries (apostles, prophets, pastors, evangelists, and teachers) circulating from house to house, like blood circulating in a human body. The apostolic and prophetic ministries play a special foundational role (Ephesians 2:20; 4:11-12). A pastor (shepherd) is an important member of the whole team, but he cannot fulfill more than part of the task of equipping the saints for the ministry. He has to be complemented synergistically by the other four ministries in order to function properly.

7. The right pieces—fit together in the wrong way.

To do a jigsaw puzzle, we have to put the pieces together according to the original pattern, otherwise the individual pieces do not make any sense and the whole picture turns out wrong. In the Christian world, we have all the right pieces, but we have fit them together in the wrong way because of fear, tradition, religious jealousy, and a power-and-control mentality. Just as water is found in three forms—ice, liquid, and steam—so, too, the five ministries mentioned in Ephesians 4:11-12—the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers—are found today, but not always in the right forms and in the right places. They are either frozen ice in the rigid system of institutionalized Christianity, exist as clear liquid, or vanish like steam into the thin air of free-flying ministries and “independent” churches accountable to no one. Just as it is best to hydrate plants and flowers with the liquid version of water, so these five equipping ministries will have to be transformed back into new—and at the same time, age-old—forms, so that the whole spiritual organism can flourish and the individual “ministers” can find their proper role and place in the whole.

8. Out of the hands of bureaucratic clergy and on toward the priesthood of all believers.

According to the New Testament, “there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). God simply does not want religious professionals to force themselves between Himself and His people. The veil is torn, and God allows people to access Himself directly through Jesus Christ, the only Way. No expression of a New Testament church was ever led by just one professional “holy man” doing the business of communicating with God and then feeding some relatively passive, religious consumers, Moses-style. Christianity has adopted this method from pagan religions, or at best from the Old Testament.

The heavy professionalization of the church since Constantine has been a pervasive influence long enough, dividing the people of God artificially into an infantilized laity and a professional clergy, and developing power-based mentalities and pyramid structures.

To enable the priesthood of all believers, the present system will have to change completely. Bureaucracy is the most dubious of all administrative systems because it basically allows only yes or no answers. There is no room for spontaneity and humanity, no room for real life. This may be all right in politics and business, but not the church. Today God seems to be in the business of delivering His church from a Babylonian-like captivity of religious bureaucrats and controlling spirits and bringing it into the public domain. He is putting it into the hands of ordinary people whom God has made extraordinary and who, as in the old days, may still smell of fish, perfume, or revolution.

9. Return from organized to organic forms of Christianity.

The body of Christ is a vivid description of an organic being, not an organized mechanism. At the local level, church consists of a multitude of extended spiritual families, which are organically related to each other as a network. The way these communities function together is an integral part of the message of the whole body. What has become a maximum of organization with a minimum of organism, has to be changed into a minimum of organization to allow a maximum of organism. Like a straitjacket, too much organization has the potential of restricting and choking the organism simply out of fear that something might go wrong. Fear is the opposite of faith—not exactly a Christian virtue. Fear wants to control; faith can trust. God has entrusted the body of Christ into the hands of stewardship-minded people who believe that He is still in control even if they are not. Today we need to develop regional and national networks based on trust if we want to see organic forms of Christianity reemerge.

10. From worshiping our worship to worshiping God.

The image of much of contemporary Christianity could be described as holy people coming regularly to a holy place on a holy day at a holy hour to participate in a holy ritual led by a holy man dressed in holy clothes for a holy fee. Since this regular performance-oriented enterprise, called a “worship service,” requires a lot of organizational talent and administrative bureaucracy, formalized and institutionalized patterns develop quickly into rigid traditions. Statistically, a traditional one- or two-hour worship service is very resource-hungry but produces very little fruit in terms of discipling people and changing lives. Economically, it is a high-input, low-output structure. Traditionally, the desire to worship “in the right way” has led to denominationalism, confessionalism, and nominalism. This ignores the fact that Christians are called to worship “in spirit and in truth” rather than in cathedrals holding songbooks. It also ignores the fact that most of life is informal, and so, too, is Christianity as “the Way of Life.” We need to change from being powerful actors to people who act powerfully.

11. Stop bringing people to church, and start bringing the church to the people.

The church is moving from being a come-structure to being a go-structure. As a result, Christians need to stop trying to bring people to church, and start bringing the church to the people. The mission of the church will never be accomplished just by adding to the existing structure. It will take nothing less than a mushrooming of the church through spontaneous multiplication into areas of the world where Christ is not yet known.

12. Rediscovering the Lord’s Supper as a real supper with real food.

Church tradition has managed to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a homeopathic and deeply religious form, characteristically with a few drops of wine, a tasteless cookie, and a sad face. However, the Lord’s Supper was actually more a substantial supper with a symbolic meaning than a symbolic supper with a substantial meaning. God is restoring eating back into our meetings.

13. From denominations to the city church.

Jesus called us to a universal movement, and what resulted instead was a series of religious corporations with global chains marketing their special brands of Christianity and competing with each other. Through this branding of Christianity, most of Protestantism has lost its voice in the world and become politically insignificant—more concerned with traditional distinctives and religious infighting than with developing a collective testimony before the world. Jesus simply never asked people to organize themselves into factions and denominations, and Paul even spoke of it as “worldly,” a sign of baby Christians.

In the early days of the church, Christians had a dual identity: They were truly His church, vertically belonging to God. They then organized themselves according to geography, relating horizontally to each other on earth as well. This means that not only should Christian neighbors organize themselves into neighborhood or house churches where they share their lives locally, they should also come together as a collective identity as much as they can to express the unity of the city church, in citywide or regional celebrations expressing the corporate nature of the church. Authenticity in the neighborhoods connected with a regional or citywide corporate identity will make the church not only politically significant and spiritually convincing, but it will also allow a return to the biblical model of the city church, the sum total of all born-again Christians of a city or an area.

14. Developing a persecution-proof spirit.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted,” Jesus said in Matthew 5:10. Unfortunately, contemporary Christianity is often too harmless and polite to be worth persecuting. Many of Christ’s followers today are more into titles, medals, and social respectability—or worse, they remain silent and are not worth being noticed at all—to be targets of persecution. But as Christians again begin to live out New Testament standards of life, the natural reaction of the world will be as it always has been: conversion or persecution. Instead of nesting comfortably in temporary zones of religious liberty, Christians can expect to again be called out as the main culprits standing in the way of global humanism. That is why Christians will and must feel the “repressive tolerance” of a world that has lost its absolutes and therefore refuses to recognize and obey its creator God with His absolute standards. Coupled with the growing privatization and spiritualization of politics and economics, Christians will—sooner than most think—have their chance to stand happily accused in the company of Jesus. We need to prepare now for the future by developing a persecution-proof spirit and an even more persecution-proof structure.

15. The church comes home.

Where is the easiest place for people to be outwardly spiritual? Is it, perhaps, hiding behind a big pulpit, dressed in holy robes, preaching holy words to a faceless crowd, and then disappearing into an office? And where is the most difficult—and therefore most meaningful—place to be spiritual? At home, in the presence of our spouses and children, where everything we do and say is automatically put through a spiritual litmus test against reality, where hypocrisy can be effectively weeded out and authenticity can grow. Much of Christianity has fled the family and instead organized artificial performances in sacred buildings far from the atmosphere of real life. As God is in the business of recapturing the homes, the church turns back to its roots—back to where it came from. It literally comes home, completing the circle of church history at the end of world history.

As Christians of all walks of life, from all denominations and backgrounds, feel a clear echo in their spirit to what God is saying to the church and start to hear globally in order to act locally, they begin to function again as one body. They stop asking God to bless what they are doing, and start doing what God is blessing. They organize themselves into neighborhood house churches and meet in regional or city celebrations. You are invited to become part of this movement and make your own contribution. Maybe your home, too, will become a house that changes the world.

Introduction: People with Principles, Not Methods

Jesus has given us the commission to go and make disciples of all nations, and it is the growing conviction of many Christians around the world that this will only ever be achieved by having a church within walking distance of every person on the globe. The church, the secret and powerful society of the redeemed, must again become the place where people can literally see the body of Christ and where His glory is revealed in the most practical terms: hands-on, down to earth, right next door, unable to be overlooked or ignored, living among us every day.

This book focuses on the question: what type of church will it take to be just that? Pragmatism is not really a virtue of God. I have therefore resisted the temptation of describing a multitude of models that could be used as blueprints for house-church planting. Neither have I set out “six easy steps to start a house-church movement,” because it is neither easy nor advisable to take formulas and existing models and try to photocopy them. I simply do not believe in the copycat mentality. For one reason, it is more important for spiritually significant principles to sink in and be grasped than for a five-step outline to be copied and followed. Instead of importing other people’s spiritual success stories, I would find it more natural for us all to search for the ways that God has ordained for each one of us to put into practice in our own time and place what we feel He has revealed to us. I do not want to spare any one of us this creative tension.

A second reason I do not believe in the copycat mentality is that many are looking for a proven truth, a foolproof method and model before they take a leap of faith and go and do likewise. Although this play-it-safe mentality sounds very reasonable, I believe it is a spiritual way of hiding fear: we might leap, but it won’t really be out of faith. The core followers of Christ have found that following Him is not about having sufficient academic and statistical proof before they act; rather, it is about having the faithful and obedient desire to follow God’s Word and do what He said, no matter what, when, where, or who has gone before.

Some, when they hear the term house church, think of a Chinese church model. Let me therefore make clear for readers in Western countries that house churches have never been an exotic foreign model of church, and will not be a strange new foreign import. After all, the first church to be planted in the West was started in the home of Lydia in Philippi, Macedonia. It was a house church. House churches are a good old European tradition. After the Greek and Roman house churches of the first two centuries and many sporadic “lay-led” movements after the time of Constantine, it was the Celtic movement that first evangelized Europe, even before Patrick, Columba, Gallus, or Boniface were alive. The Celts (or Galli, as they were known in Latin) were the same race as the Gauls, who invaded Rome around 280 BC, many of whom then settled down in Asia Minor, or Galatia, the area to which Paul directed his letter. The holistic concept of early Celtic Christianity is very close to New Testament (Galatian) house churches as I describe them here.

Organic house churches have therefore been an early part of European history and are not at all foreign or new. The fact is that between the sixth and ninth centuries, the Celtic movement was almost completely assimilated into the Catholic church—including the structures that go with it. I believe this is one of the bigger tragedies of European church history. Even today, almost all contemporary church plants in the West go through an organic house-church phase in their early days. Many western Christians still look back with fond memories at the spontaneous early months or the “good old times when we still had our church in homes.” The problem is not so much that there are no house churches in the West, but that this form of church has neither been consciously acknowledged nor actively pursued.

This book is intended to inspire, encourage, and celebrate those Christians who will be God’s instruments for gathering the harvest in this latest leg of history. As many prophets tell us, it will be a generation of somebodies and nobodies, people with or without titles, who will lead God’s movement on earth to fulfill its calling. They will do it under all sorts of conditions: in the midst of persecution or celebrated in talk shows, under unspeakable difficulties or walking on red carpets. They may be despised or adored, ridiculed or consulted, cheated or honored, scorned or quoted, tortured or pampered, unknown or known. In other words, this book is a battle cry for ordinary followers of Christ who will be made extraordinary in purpose and power to flood this earth with house churches. And through their humble, self-denying, and obedient lives, the presence, knowledge, and glory of Christ will spread as the waters that cover the sea.

1: The Reinvention of Church

Discovering a church we never knew

In a research project in Amsterdam in the early 1990s, young people were asked if they were interested in God. One hundred percent of them answered yes. Then they were asked whether they were interested in church: one percent said yes, 99 percent said no.1 Most pastors who heard this story assumed that something must be seriously wrong with the youth of Amsterdam since everything is right with the church. Today I reluctantly have to admit that it is probably the other way around. Maybe the youth of Amsterdam have some lessons to teach the church that we have been unwilling to learn. Maybe we have fallen so in love with our own traditions that we are almost unable to truly hear and feel the world from our safe and “holy” distance.

Imagine a young boy unwrapping a new puzzle and immediately trying to put the pieces together. Out of the puzzle box he pulls a picture of a red race car. (He loves red race cars!) Excited, he tries to assemble the pieces according to the picture. But somehow the pieces do not seem to fit as they should. He tries to make them fit better by bending them or tearing off an edge here and there, but something is still not right. Finally his father comes to the rescue. Dad takes the picture of the red race car and turns it over. Lo and behold, on the other side is a picture of a beautiful tree, the “original” picture depicted in the puzzle. The race car is only an advertisement for another puzzle made by the same company! The boy sighs with relief and starts to put the pieces together according to the new original; within minutes it is done. What was wrong before? He had all the right pieces, but the wrong original. He had unquestionable and honest motives, but quite simply the wrong blueprint.

Is this the situation of a large part of Christendom today? We have all the right pieces: the Word of God, people, houses, prayer, motivation, money. But could it be that we are putting them all together according to a wrong original—our very own beloved red race car? Has the unthinkable happened? Has someone cunningly slipped us an impractical blueprint? Do we stand transfixed in front of our spiritual photocopiers (Bible colleges, publishing houses, seminaries, or leadership programs), continuing to hit that green button in an effort to make copies of what we are convinced is a biblical, canonized, unquestionable, firsthand original? I can imagine that Satan, the enemy of the church, has no problem with even the most fervent evangelistic mission activities or programs, as long as they are all about making copies of red race cars—our traditional pattern of church that makes no serious threat to his claims on humankind.

Maybe the time has come for us to stop bending pieces and tearing them apart in an effort to make them match our picture of what the church should be and instead allow God to recreate church in all of us. It might start with us reexamining our blueprints and turning over our originals.

The Shift from Organized to Organic Church

As any family get-together proves, we can accomplish the goal of fellowship without the need for heavy structure. Families can get along quite well without a master of ceremonies, a word of introduction, a special song, a sermon by Father, and a vote of thanks by Mother. These formalities happen at weddings and on other occasions, but not in everyday life. Church, however, is not to be an artificial performance; it is for everyday life, because it is a way of life.

Within each culture, there is a very important numerical line between the organic and the organized, the informal and the formal, the spontaneous and the liturgical. I call this the twenty-barrier, because in many cultures twenty is the maximum number of people in a group that still feels like “family.” Groups of this size and smaller still feel organic and informal, without the need to become formal or organized.

Organisms are structured too, and I am not advocating a total absence of order and structure. But unlike an organized series of meetings that are typically structured from outside, organisms are usually structured from within. The nature of a meeting defines and therefore limits the size of a meeting. If it’s two families getting together to pray, it’s going to be smaller than if it’s a neighborhood group getting together to do Bible study. If we cross the twenty-barrier, the group stops being organic and starts to become formal, even feeling the need to follow a set agenda. Effectiveness in relationship and mutual communication goes down, and the need for someone to coach and lead the meeting goes up. As a result the house church changes its values and starts to develop totally different dynamics. It often simply stops being independent, spontaneous, and lively, and instead needs to be “run,” organized, and visibly led into a new and organized life-form—if there is such a thing. Though still alive, the original organism becomes trapped in a formal structure that chokes it, conditions it, and ultimately prevents relational and spontaneous fellowship in the name of organized fellowship.

Biblical koinonia means fellowship, sharing, giving generously, and participating with someone. In its original, organic form koinonia is highly contagious and able to reproduce like a virus, as we shall see. One of the fatal aspects of crossing the twenty-barrier is that the original organic form of fellowship usually loses its internal reproduction potential. When the church’s internal potential for growth is ignored or overruled, it can only be cloned, manufactured, or mass-produced. Church history proves that organized religion is only one swift step away from institutionalism and fossilization.

One of the most important decisions in terms of the structure and future of a church, therefore, is what to do when person number twenty-one walks through the door. Structurally, that additional person brings the church into the red zone. You can either continue growing upward by becoming organized, and losing your house-church dynamics, or you can divide the house church into two or three units and multiply it, thus growing sideways.

Creation itself teaches us that at some point healthy organisms stop growing and start multiplying. Bigger is not necessarily better or more beautiful. Could it be that, although it is perfectly okay to expect a church to grow, we are generally looking for that growth in the wrong direction? We are often intrigued by those well-publicized and quite exceptional stories of megachurches, but we tend to overlook the fact that these types of churches are usually extraordinary exceptions, due to extraordinary leaders and circumstances.

Has all that talk about “big is beautiful” tricked our thinking? If so, we may have to change our mind-set to realize that an average church would then be just eight, ten, or twelve people; a large church, fifteen; and a “megachurch” would include not thousands of attendees, but twenty-one or twenty-two.

Perhaps then, the average “small church” of twenty-five or forty-five people—one that is trying to rent a hall or sanction a building fund or is still saving for an overhead projector—is not at all too small, but rather, already far too big. The church members probably crossed the organism–organization line long ago, not realizing that they have become quite heavy and inflexible, structurally bloated and deformed. While they’re trying to grow up like all those other churches, they’re only inching forward because of the relentless activities of a busy pastor or leader with his coworkers.

Worldwide, the average size of churches is around one hundred people. Only a very small percentage of churches become bigger than two hundred, and many are in the forty to sixty bracket. The average Sunday morning attendance of the Lutheran churches in Germany, for example, is currently far less than twenty people.2

For many churches it could be quite liberating to be allowed to become what many of them already are: slightly overgrown house churches struggling with their own size and the unspoken blueprint they are trying to follow. Would it not be much more practical for them to head the other way and “grow down” rather than striving to grow up?

The well-known theologian Elton Trueblood once said, “The church must be smaller before it can be substantially stronger.”3 I agree. But if we take this idea one step further, the church will also have to become much smaller before it can become substantially bigger. Statistically, the church will have to shrink in order to grow.

Classical church growth terminology differentiates between three levels of church: cell, congregation, and celebration. I would like to explain briefly what these terms mean.

The cell is typically house based and sociologically small, between three and twenty people. Its purpose is relational fellowship, and its functions are mostly organic, i.e., members are often in direct contact with each other and therefore a natural part of one another’s lives.

The congregation (or cluster) is sociologically medium in size, usually between twenty and two hundred people. It functions more formally, is organized, often has a pastor, and includes a worship service and various programs. Most congregations function in a sanctuary or a building specially used for religious purposes. Members do not have direct or natural contacts with each other because the meeting is often too large or not structured to allow for that.

The celebration is typically a large gathering of two hundred or more Christians from an area, expressing their unity in Christ, celebrating what God has done and will do for them, and anticipating Christ’s return. It is usually led by Christians with apostolic and prophetic ministries. Celebrations can happen in the open air, in stadiums, conference centers, or any other large area. People have no way of being in direct contact with all who are present, and are happily “lost in the crowd.” In many places in history, the cathedral model of church has tried, and sometimes successfully managed, to fulfill this citywide function.

The Small and the Large

In the Bible we find two of these levels, the cell and the celebration. In the New Testament, the church sometimes gathered in large groups in places like Solomon’s Temple Colonnade or simply in the open air. But more commonly, Christians got together in cell-sized units—the house-based church. Once the Jerusalem Temple was declared out of bounds for followers of The Way, believers continued to meet in homes. When the celebration was not possible, the cell lived on.

In order to bring out some of the differences between the congregational churches and the New Testament house churches, consider this selective list of key areas in which they differ.

A Wedding a Week

Life in any culture has two aspects, everyday living and special events. Both aspects of life have their own valid ways of expression. Everyday life is usually expressed within the family, the basic cell unit of every society and culture. Families are usually very organic, informal, and relational. Special events are extraordinary functions for which everyone duly prepares—weddings, festivals, funerals, and traditional celebrations. They are usually formal, need much organization, and are often highly structured.

Imagine if you had to attend a wedding every weekend. Each wedding followed the same basic pattern, had the same bridegroom and bride, and even included the same kind of food. After some weeks the excitement would wear off. You would know what to expect, and you would know what was going to happen next. The wedding would still remain a nice thing, a beautiful tradition, but it would feel odd to have the same type of festival every week.

We need to be careful not to do this with church. Jesus has shown us not only a way to celebrate, but also a way to live. Both aspects are necessary and both are good. But everyday life is not like a wedding, as any married couple will attest. If church takes on only celebration structures, it will be like celebrating a wedding a week, and our behavior will soon be so far removed from real life that it will cease to make sense to ordinary people. It will become an artificial, weekly performance. If church is a God-given way of community life, and if life takes place in the basic unit of a family, there is nothing more appropriate than for the church to be based in simple, ordinary, everyday homes. House churches are not only a way for us to express community; they are also one of God’s means to achieve community.

I see at least twelve advantages of a house-church movement over a traditional congregational-style church.

1. Discipled multiplication

House church is centered on multiplication and discipleship, and it has huge growth potential because the “cell” is the multipliable unit itself. Mentoring, multiplication, and discipleship are at the heart of this concept. By definition, congregation is not a discipleship model because its structure tends to prevent mentoring. Discipleship was never really meant to be one to one; it is a function of community. Next to the Holy Spirit, peer pressure may be the strongest teacher on earth, as any parent of teenagers will agree. The house church allows for a redeemed use of peer pressure: living out a healthy and loving accountability with each other, learning new Kingdom values from each other, and helping each other to live out this new lifestyle. No one is left to handle individual and secret struggles alone, and each therefore quickly matures.

2. Persecution-proof structure

Through a small and flexible way of life, the house church can develop an almost persecution-proof spirit—or at least persecution-resistant—as opposed to the very visible and immovable traditional church with a cross on its steeple. We will discuss this important issue later at a deeper level.

3. Freedom from church growth barriers

Once careful attention is given to prevent an organic house church from becoming a structured organization, the house church can then be multiplied through mitosis, an organic cell-reproduction process, and the overall growth of a movement is virtually free from church growth barriers, such as space limitations.

4. More efficient involvement of a higher percentage of people

Congregations are often program based. But programs have proven to be quite inefficient and resource hungry, usually involving an exhausted 20 percent of the church doing the work for the other, more passive, 80 percent. In a house church, almost everyone can be easily and naturally involved, and dead wood is cut out. Since involved people are fulfilled—and therefore happy—the overall quality and efficiency of the church grows.

5. A break from the pastoral care dilemma

The house-church model breaks the pastoral care dilemma, a known and self-defeating problem of the congregational church: as numbers grow, the pastoral quality usually goes down because the pastor can no longer tend all the sheep.

6. A place of life transformation and accountability

An analysis of the Western church shows that the congregational model is almost totally ineffective at changing basic values and lifestyles. Many Christians demonstrably end up with the same lifestyle of the not-yet-Christians around them, becoming indistinguishable from society and losing their prophetic edge. The house church provides a far more effective place for the radical transformation of values and the reordering of life, offering mutual and organic accountability (this was addressed under point 1).

7. A better place of growth for new Christians

Much has been written about the inward-looking mentality of the congregational model, which has the church and its programs at the center, with everything else rotating around this hub. This structure is, statistically speaking, a most unfriendly zone for new Christians. In contrast, the house church is a more effective, natural, and welcoming zone for new people to come and stay in touch with the Christian community. It provides spiritual fathers and mothers, not just teachers and notebooks. It also reverses the general direction of the perspective of Christians: instead of getting people to church, it gets church to the people.

8. A solution for the leadership crisis

House churches are led by elders, and they are just that: older but not necessarily elderly. Elders do not have to be skilled masters of ceremonies or learned teachers; modest and authentic parents with obedient children will do nicely to start with. Rather than being seminary graduates, elders have passed the test of time and are living mature lives. Easy to find and develop, this kind of leadership depends on initial and ongoing apostolic and prophetic input and support, and leads to ministries that can be multiplied and grown exponentially. Traditional Sunday schools, Bible schools, and seminaries are mostly static, addition-based leadership development systems that grow, at best, linearly rather than exponentially. Because they are informational systems and not transformational systems, they cannot match a multiplying movement of house churches with an exponentially growing need for elders.

9. A way to eliminate the clergy-laity division

“Nowhere in the New Testament do we find references to a pastor leading a congregation,” says English church planter Barney Coombs in his book Apostles Today. The house church does not need a pastor in the traditional sense at all, because elders who are functioning together with the corporate giftedness of the house church maintain and multiply the life of the church. This therefore breaks the curse of the clergy-laity division, which the congregational system reinforces.

10. A biblically based pattern

We cannot afford to ignore biblical revelation for too long and expect to get away with it. Tradition is a strong teacher, but God’s Word is simply better and more reliable. Even in an age of postmodernism and relativity, the Bible still teaches absolutes. But it absolutely does not teach us that an event on Sundays, where a passive crowd watches a religious performance, is a New Testament church. God’s work done God’s way still attracts God’s blessing. Even in Old Testament times, God exhorted Moses to build the tabernacle and its components “according to the pattern” (Exodus 25:40). It is worth struggling even with our own trusted traditions for the purpose of regaining biblical truth, because it is not tradition that sets us free, but the truth of God’s Word.

11. A budget-conscious way of operating

The congregational system of church can be defined as “plot plus building plus pastor plus salary plus programs.” The house church is “people plus ordinary houses plus faith plus shared life,” all of which is undeniably cheaper. As congregational churches cost enormous sums of money to establish, and more money to maintain and to propagate, the house church literally makes money, because it produces more than it consumes. In an age in which there seems to be an endless cry for more money for “the work of church,” we should not overlook alternatives but instead be good stewards of the financial talents that God gives us.

12. A resurrection of the city church

I see the present church organized into four levels, which is an expansion of the classic church growth model structure:

Level I: the house (where organic fellowship is possible, irrespective of what we call it)

Level II: the congregational church (the traditional meeting-oriented denominational church)

Level III: the city or region

Level IV: the denomination (the network, conference, or organization of denominational churches of an area)

The traditional church is typically focused on two levels—the congregational church and the denomination. The house church, however, allows us to regain a focus on the home and the community. The church in the New Testament was named according to its geographical location, not denomination. Similarly, with a new wave of house churches, this also opens up a way back to the “city church”—all the Christians of a city or region meeting in citywide celebrations. Within the city church, a community’s most gifted Christians forget all titles and politics, and in a new maturity, sacrifice their own names, denominations, reputations, and single-handed successes to the sole advancement of the Kingdom of God. Imagine the public tumult when this collective, city-based, and authentic leadership regularly provides prophetic vision, teaches apostolic standards, stands united, blesses each other, and speaks to the world with one voice. What the devil has tried hard to prevent at any cost will again come true: “the Romans,” “the Ephesians,” “the Corinthians,” “the church of Jerusalem,” Vienna, Singapore, Baghdad, Khartoum, or Montevideo will reconnect with each other, becoming a supernatural corporate identity and movement under one single Lord and Master, and speaking with a collective and powerful voice.

What occurs at the small level of house churches will eventually spill over on a larger, citywide scale, where the church will excel at the small and therefore excel at the large. Rather than Christians who must be regularly motivated through speakers at top-down, topic-based conferences, the infectious joy and excitement at the house level will bubble up and express itself citywide, where no one can miss it, and people will again repeat the statement made first in Jerusalem: You have filled our city with your teaching! (Acts 5:28). If ever God should choose to repeat an instance such as the Pentecost, where one hundred and twenty upper-room Christians suddenly face the challenge of accommodating three thousand converts in one day, the house church will be prepared, because the flexible structure of multiplying will already be in place.

In many areas of the world, local and regional pastoral fellowships and prayer networks are emerging. I believe this can be the beginning of a process—a Spirit-led, intuitive, and slow convergence of people with like-minded spirits—that creates healthy relationships first, and then leads to the formation of a collective spiritual identity. And then we face a new challenge: to jointly take on the task of discipling our cities and regions!

But before we proceed, let us first have a look at how something so beautiful could have been lost in history, and how exciting it is to see millions of people rediscover it in our days!

2: House Churches in History

Into the Dark Ages—and back again

The earliest Christians—in New Testament times and immediately thereafter—met in house churches, usually in the largest rooms of the home. Church historians agree that the churches probably included no more than fifteen or twenty people. Once a group grew larger than that, it usually multiplied by starting another house church nearby. If not, the overgrowth immediately caused problems. Origen, preaching in a home in Caesarea, once complained that “some have hidden in remotest corners of the house to occupy themselves with profane stories.”1 Obviously, even in a house church it is not impossible to sneak away and do your own thing.

The New Testament house church was mostly an organic, relational, spiritual family. But even before His death, Jesus warned His disciples of deception, false prophets, and false Christs, who would all have one common purpose: to deceive and to derail the elect. It is natural for us to think of this deception as a part of some terrible future that will happen to others but not to us. However, Paul, Peter, and Jude all warned of the immediate coming of ungodly men, false teachers, and false prophets—people disguising themselves as angels from heaven. The early writers did not mince words; they even cursed in advance those who would do this.

Early sectarian movements in Christianity created problems, as some adherents were not easy to control and started to build factions in the church and pull people toward individual charismatic leaders. In order to defend the truth and early Christians against this division, the church leaders focused strongly on dogma and creed, and tightly observed who was allowed to do ministry and who was not. In short, the church tried to exert greater control in order to avoid more damage. The motivation was good, but the method was not. The desire for control is the natural result of a lack of trust; it comes from fear, which is the opposite of faith, and it leads people to build a system in an attempt to ensure that nothing can go wrong, or at least to minimize danger and apostasy. As a result, the church began to focus more on “safe” rituals, “right” formulas, and “approved” liturgies, trying to become watertight as well as foolproof.

As a by-product of this attempt to protect itself from danger, the early church quickly fell into the hands of enthusiastic theological watchdogs, policemen of the faith and kinglike figures who were no longer humble servants or down-to-earth elders, but impressive figureheads and religious prime ministers who used their authority to keep the flock together and the problems outside. Again, like with King Saul, human beings replaced God as the king of His people.

The Professionalizing of the Church

When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in AD 312 and made Christianity the state religion, Christians who were tired of centuries of persecution celebrated him as a savior and relaxed. And in doing so, the church experienced probably the biggest single derailment in history. In the years after 312, the church became heavily professionalized: priests were approved and “licensed” to conduct weddings and other functions in a more public manner, and the church experienced the doubtful blessing of being equipped with a mediatory caste between itself and God.

The church needed to be “fit for the king” and his company, which meant meeting in cathedrals rather than shabby houses. Thus the great divide between clergy and laity not only emerged, but was also sanctioned, institutionalized, sealed, and protected by the state, an error that has cost the lives of millions of martyrs right up to the present day. The church had gladly accepted national graduation from a persecuted cult to a state-prescribed religion, but in doing so, it lost its prophetic power over social, cultural, and pagan habits. Because it was now married to the system that granted and protected it, the church lost its identity as a countercultural tool, and instead became a celebrated insider. As a result both the state and the church were trapped. The state lost its direction because it had swallowed the beacon and the compass, and the church became drunk with political power and could no longer light the way because it was lost inside the government.

In all these developments, one in particular stands out: in AD 380 bishops Theodosius and Gratian ordered that there should be only one state-recognized Catholic Church, and one rule-set of faith—the orthodox dogma. Each Roman citizen was forced to become a member of the Catholic Church and was made to adopt the lex fidei, the law of faith. Other groups and movements—including those meeting in homes—were forbidden. That meant the legal end of the house church. This law turned the rules upside down. Until the rule of Severus around AD 222–35, church buildings had not even been allowed by the government, and house churches were the only way for Christians to meet. But from AD 380 on, those involved with starting a house church were breaking the law and viewed as criminals. Thus began a new era: the persecution of the church in the name of the “church.” The Inquisition, a religious-political joint venture in the form of a Christian “faith police,” had lifted its bloody head, killing millions of followers of Christ in the name of organized Christian religion.

Synagogue-Style Worship Patterns

The Jewish Mishnah, an initial theological document of Judaism, allowed at least ten Jewish males to form a synagogue. It is important to note that the Bible never exhorts anyone to form synagogues; synagogues were simply an invention of exiled Jews during the Babylonian captivity aimed at preserving their faith, creating a way for them to worship without having access to the Temple in Jerusalem. Curiously, Christians have inherited the Jews’ basic pattern of worship from the Jewish synagogues, not from the Temple, says Filipino church leader Dr. Met Castillo.2 We can easily identify five basic elements in synagogue worship: the invitation to worship with hymns and a formal call to worship, prayers and petitions, Scripture lessons, an address based on the Scripture lessons, and a conclusion with benedictions. As Christian worship became more and more formal in Christian church houses—rather than house churches—the basic Jewish synagogue pattern was revived and passed down, with the addition of saying the creed. The church thus fell back into legalistic and ritualistic patterns of worship that would remain almost unchanged during the centuries to follow, eventually becoming the agreed-upon, sacrosanct style of Christian meetings everywhere.

After the conversion of Constantine, the spiritual standard of the day was moving further and further away from what Jesus had established for His church. The Council of Ephesus (AD 431), for example, affirmed the title “Mother of God” to Mary, thereby opening the door for the worship of Mary later on. Leo the Great pronounced himself bishop of Rome (AD 440), and Caesar Valentian (AD 444) confirmed Leo’s position as the spiritual leader of the whole Western Empire. Around AD 500, the priesthood started to observe a common dress code. With Justinian (AD 527–65), the church became a true state-ordained institution and all priests became public servants. As early as AD 606, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Boniface III was the first bishop to adopt the title of “Pope” in the Roman Catholic Church. Previously this title (pontifex maximus—Latin for “big bridge builder”) had been used by the Roman emperors to describe themselves as high priests and gods of the Roman Empire.

After the fall of Rome and the Reformation, some of the most marvelous theological works and Christian movements of all time came into being. One of the often overlooked facts of history is that it was not really the Roman Catholic Church that converted Europe, but the Celts. The Celts (French: Gauls) were probably influenced earlier than any other European group by Paul’s letter to the Galatians; Galatia was a province in Asia Minor captured in a Celtic/Gallic invasion in 280 BC. Their holistic faith and their fearless testimony as well as the work of Celtic missionaries like Columba, Gallus, and Beatus implanted a strong seed of the gospel into European soil. Driven northwest into France, England, Scotland, and Ireland by Germanic tribes, the Celts formed influential monasteries and libraries. Between the sixth and ninth centuries, however, they were gradually taken over by the papal doctrines and values of the Roman Catholic Church, often through political force.

The Road to the Bottom

From here on, the downward road of Christianity continued. It was a time that corresponded in some ways to today’s spiritual anarchy in some countries, where people, in practice, basically believe anything—as long as it is not in the Bible.

Fueled by the naive belief that God dwelt in church buildings in a special way, the people forgot the words of Jesus, “Let the dead bury their own dead,” and the church proudly engaged in opening graveyards close to the ”holy” church buildings, where people felt they were safe from the monsters and dragons.

The following time line signifies when some further steps down into spiritual darkness were developed or instituted:

AD 709: Kissing the pope’s foot

AD 786: Worship of images and relics

AD 850: Use of holy water

AD 995: Canonization of dead saints

AD 998: Fasting on Fridays and before Lent

AD 1079: Celibacy of the priesthood

AD 1090: Prayer beads adopted from several pagan religious systems

AD 1184: The Episcopal Inquisition began. Faith was now policed. Millions of Jews and witches (and later, after the Reformation, Protestant believers) died at the hands of the Church of Rome. The Papal Inquisition is officially established by Pope Gregory IX in 1231 with the Reformation churches joining later in the same spirit.

More steps into spiritual darkness followed:

AD 1190: The sale of indulgences—paying money for the forgiveness of sins

AD 1215: Transubstantiation: a new doctrine teaching that the Eucharist elements, the wafer and wine, supernaturally change into the body and blood of Jesus at the incantation of the priest

AD 1229: The Bible is considered too holy to be read and is forbidden to laymen

AD 1414: Communion cup forbidden to laypeople

AD 1439: Doctrine of purgatory decreed; dogma of sacraments affirmed

AD 1545: Tradition is granted equal authority with the Bible (Council of Trent)

From such a rock-bottom place where people believed almost anything as long as it was not written in the Bible, it was a long and stony road to rediscover and recapture the biblical essence of what the church was supposed to be. But not all was lost.

More than 1,100 years after the first energetic wave of house churches had died down, the monk Martin Luther rediscovered the heartbeat of the gospel: salvation by faith and grace, and the centrality of Scripture. His discovery was like a bomb that broke the theological dam and prepared the way for the subsequent chain reaction of Reformational insights. In Luther’s Vorrede zur Deutschen Messe (his preface to the German Mass and Order of Service) published in 1526, he distinguishes three “orders of service”:

1. the Latin Mass, a public meeting in Latin, which Luther specially designed for the young people (Latin was the cosmopolitan language, the “English” of that time)

2. the German Mass, a second public liturgy in German

3. a third kind of worship meeting about which he writes this: “The third kind of service should be a truly evangelical order and should not be held in a public place for all sorts of people. But those who want to be Christians in earnest and who profess the gospel with hand and mouth should sign their names and meet alone in a house somewhere to pray, to read, to baptize, to receive the sacrament, and to do other Christian work.”3

Luther saw the need for house churches, but failed to implement this new insight. He said: “But as yet, I neither can, nor desire to begin such a congregation . . . for I have not yet the people for it, nor do I see many who want it. But if I should be requested to do it and could not refuse with a good conscience, I should gladly do my part and help as best I can.”4

When Ulrich Zwingli started the work of the Reformation in Zurich, a group of friends dared to establish a Christian fellowship in Zollikon near Zurich, without the permission of the government. They were Felix Manz, a Hebrew scholar; Conrad Grebel, a member of the city council and of a respected Zurich family; and Georg Blaurock, a former monk and excellent evangelist.

This was the beginning of the so-called Anabaptist movement that quickly began to spread like wildfire. Thousands of people became part of this movement, though it often meant that they were persecuted or even put to death for their new convictions. In the Netherlands and Friesland between 1535 and 1546 alone, thirty thousand Anabaptists were killed.

When Claude Brousson, the famous Huguenot, was publicly executed in 1698 before a crowd of ten thousand people, he sang Psalm 34 just before he died. That psalm and its message reached as far as the shores of England and was picked up by Daniel Defoe and others, who were part of the Dissenters, those with a “different sense” or opinion. The Dissenters were, in some ways, the English version of the Huguenots, a Protestant movement forced underground by an extreme persecution from the state church. They organized themselves into house churches and “The Church in Wilderness,” as they called it, referring to the Israelites’ deliverance from Egyptian oppression (Acts 7:38). They met in large gatherings in forest clearings, again living out both church structures: cells and celebrations. Defoe’s dissenting faith emerged in his famous story about Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe’s sailing the oceans was a description for the freedom of a person in Christ. In addition, his shipwrecking experience reflected Defoe’s imprisonment, and the island was a symbol for his cell in jail, writes veteran missionary Ken McVety in his book, The Real Robinson Crusoe.5

Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), the father of Pietism in Germany, saw that the existing church needed a correction and that small groups were necessary for encouragement and discipline. He began such meetings in 1670 under the name “pious gatherings” (collegia pietatis). Those Christians met twice a week in houses, sometimes discussing the previous Sunday morning sermon of the Lutheran church. Eventually these meetings became more like biblical discussion groups, which resulted in opposition from Lutheran churches. In Spener’s home city of Frankfurt, the city council finally refused to allow the groups to meet in homes. Spener’s gemeinschaften (fellowships) were basically substandard churches, not intended to replace the existing church. He had even forbidden the sacraments in the home groups. At the end of his life Spener had become cynical and cautious. Once he moved away from Frankfurt, he did not start any other groups.

Many church historians agree that the key to the Methodist revival in the eighteenth century was the accountability of the new believers in small groups, which Wesley called “classes.” In his book The Radical Wesley, Howard A. Snyder says: “The classes were in effect house churches. In weekly midweek meetings, which lasted an hour or so, each person reported their spiritual progress, shared on particular needs and problems, and most conversions occurred here.”6

The Talk That Never Happened

Let’s imagine for a moment what the conversation might have been like if Jesus had audibly spoken to the church over the centuries.

“You may remember that I said I will build my church,” Jesus might say. “And because I promised to be always with you until the end of the age, I also wanted the church to be part of your everyday lives, in the places where you live, in your houses.”

There is a murmur of astonishment among the disciples.

“Oh,” says Pachomius, the founder of the monastic movement. “What you meant to say was that you wanted us to be part of monastic orders and cells of monks, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly,” says Jesus.

“Ecclesiolae in ecclesia?—little churches within the real, big church?” asks Luther.

“Close!” says Christ, “but still not quite what I mean.”

“Collegia pietatis—pious Bible-reading groups in homes?” asks Philipp Jakob Spener.

“Prayer groups? Or at least community-type fellowships?” ask the Moravians in Herrnhut. “We could also call them gemeinschaften!”

“No, I mean house churches,” Jesus answers.

“Now we understand! Bible study groups, right?”

“Not just Bible study groups, but evangelistic Bible study groups! Or how do you feel about LEGS, Lay Evangelistic Group Studies?” asks a group who grew up in the 1970s in the Philippines.

“Is it youth groups?” probe voices from the twentieth century. “Care groups? Sunday school groups? small groups? home groups? house groups? life groups? Or maybe New Life groups? follow-up groups? discovery groups? discipleship groups? ministry groups? oikos groups? serendipity groups?”

“Maybe He doesn’t like the word ‘groups’,” someone suggests. “Let’s try the word ‘cell’!”

“Well, how about house cells, then? Or at least home cells? care cells? life cells? Or just plain cells?”

No answer.

“Alpha! What He means is Alpha groups!’ exclaims another voice. “He will like the name, and we like the food—and the fact that it is only community for a short time. Just what our short-term society is looking for.”

“Base Ecclesial Communities?” asks a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

“Is it TLC?”

“What is that?” asks Jesus.

“Well, Tiny Little Churches, of course.”

“I do not understand the first two words in that slogan. What is so tiny and little about me?” asks Jesus.

“Well, then, we have found it! Cell church, complete with Assistant Subdivisional Zonal Pastor, Type B Evangelism Harvest Events, and a long list of proven conversation starters and icebreaker questions,” exclaims somebody.

“Well,” says Jesus, “what I really mean is just house churches, simple unsophisticated house churches, the church meeting in ordinary homes. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?”

3: The Nature of House Churches

What they are, what they do, and how they function

The house church is a way of living the Christian life communally in ordinary homes through supernatural power. It is the way redeemed people live locally, the organic way disciples follow Jesus together in everyday life. Since the redeemed no longer belong to themselves, they adopt a corporate—rather than a private and individualistic—lifestyle. House churches emerge when truly converted people stop living their own lives for their own ends, and begin living a community life according to the values of the Kingdom of God, sharing their lives and resources with those Christians and not-yet-Christians around them.

House churches are born of the conviction that we do not experience Jesus Christ and His Spirit only in sacred rooms dedicated for that express purpose, but we experience Him in the midst of life. In that sense, the organic house church is the deathbed of egoism and therefore, the birthplace of the church. True community starts where individualism ends. Art Katz, a messianic Jew who lived in community much of his life, said this:

Community life pulverizes your old ego in the power of the Spirit of God, and rescues you from just living a miserable private life, where after loving each other during a one-hour worship service a week we rush home to water our flowers, sit on our porch, eat our individual meals and wash our car. Our! We need to start to function as part of the fellowship of the redeemed. As the redeemed, we do not go home after a service, we are at home with each other.1

House-church Christianity is the body of Christ in ordinary houses, the society of the “three-times converted”: those who are vertically converted to God, horizontally converted to each other (like the more than thirty “one another” verses in the New Testament exhort us to be), and broadly converted to serve the world in love, compassion, and power.

In many ways, a house church is like a spiritual extended family; it is relational, spontaneous, and organic. For its everyday life, a house church does not need any higher level of organization, bureaucracy, or ceremony than an ordinary large family. In fact, house churches very much reflect the way relatives behave with one another. Because the house church is a supernatural creation, invented and endowed by God, it has certain capabilities. One is its ability to form its own support structure from within. In what is known as the fivefold ministry, this support system functions like a human body’s lymphatic and nervous systems, blood vessels, and bone structures. The house church provides such a healthy, noncompetitive way for loving, forgiving, and living with each other.

The house church reflects God’s qualities and His character. This community lifestyle is molded in the spirit of love, truth, forgiveness, faith, and grace. In house churches, we love each other, forgive each other, mourn with those who mourn, laugh with those who laugh, extend and receive grace, and constantly remain in touch with God’s truth and forgiveness. The house church is a place where all masks can be removed, and where we can be open to one another while still loving each other.

What They Do

As humans we are always in danger of taking blueprints and simply copying them. But I am not recommending that anyone try to make exact copies of a New Testament church. Rather I want us to take these New Testament principles and values seriously, as God-given essentials. Only then should we create a house-church movement in our time, on our local soil, and within our specific cultures. This is much more a process of incarnation than contextualization, of allowing God to become flesh in your context, rather than making cheap photocopies of existing models somewhere else.

A study of the New Testament and the early church, as well as contemporary house churches, reveals five elements that seem to be the basic skeleton of the church.

“Meating”

Christians meet to eat. When Jesus taught people, it usually involved meeting them in their homes, eating and drinking whatever they offered. Typically the teaching occurred right at the table surrounded by children and visitors, not just after a meal or in an artificial setup. Similarly, the house church is a table community, sharing real food. The Lord’s Supper was a substantial supper with a symbolic meaning, not a symbolic supper with a substantial meaning. As the believers were eating a meal of lamb, it probably dawned on them what this was all about: humans having dinner with God. The Hebrew tradition was to start the meal by breaking the bread, then to eat the main course, and then to end the meal with a toast of wine.

The New Testament says this of the early Christians: “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts” (Acts 2:46). Sharing meals was quite possibly a daily experience. Eating was a main purpose of their meetings: “When you come together to eat, wait for each other,” wrote Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:33 (emphasis added). Eating was and is central to the extension of the Kingdom. When Jesus sent His disciples two by two in Luke 10:1-8, He advised them to find a man of peace and to eat and drink what was given to them. As the disciples admitted their own basic needs and accepted food from their hosts, they shared life at a very intimate and basic level, prophetically admitting that we are all dependent on God for our daily bread, whether we know it or not. That, in turn, opened their hosts to the Bread of Life that the disciples had to offer.

The question of who we eat with is central to our social identity. In most cultures we typically eat with our immediate family members. In God’s household, God is the Father, Jesus is the master of the house, and the disciples are the children. We are made one family by the blood of Jesus, so we are spiritual blood relatives. People who previously would have had nothing to do with one another are now close family members and, therefore, even eat together. Sharing one of the most basic of human needs—ordinary food—was and still is a sign of deep and revolutionary fellowship, cutting through all previous nationality, caste, clan, and tribal affiliations. In some nations, eating together is one form of sealing a legal contract or making peace with each other. When people of the most diverse backgrounds eat together, it delivers a strong and powerful message to the world: “We are now one family. See, we even eat together!”

Teaching obedience

Teaching is traditionally geared toward showing someone how to do something and explaining the reason that things are the way they are. The goal of teaching is not just simply to increase knowledge but to help people to obey and serve God and His purposes (Romans 1:5).

In Hebrew culture the father was often the one responsible for teaching his family in his house, usually at mealtimes. Today the elders of house churches assume the role of the father, and together with charismatically gifted teachers, they share the responsibility of teaching “from house to house” (Acts 20:20). Although the early church grew and multiplied greatly without a written New Testament, the Bible tells us that the Word of God continued to increase and spread, growing in power (Acts 6:7; 12:24; 19:20).

The subject of teaching should be the Word—God’s story that He has chosen to reveal to us about Himself; the history of the world; and the way we are to live (1 Thessalonians 4:1). The goal of the teaching is that through joyful obedience we can better fit into His-story according to God’s created patterns for life. We can become mature and normal—according to God’s norms—and therefore be transformed into the image of Christ. This is systematic teaching at its best, not a complete A to Z set of doctrines delivered to students to process on their own.

In the house church, the teaching doesn’t need to be a sermon; it can be a very short talk, an illustration, or a story, and it is usually accompanied and punctuated by nods and grunts of approval, or healthy interruptions of questions and requests for more tea. This is followed by an interactive and dynamic question-and-answer time that allows everyone to participate and better understand the teaching.

“Questions often reveal what a person is thinking and can help to remove mental blocks if we deal with them rightly, and therefore encourage spiritual growth,” says Met Castillo.2 If there is any kind of exam to pass in this style of teaching, it is twofold: to obey the teaching (demonstrated by a changed life), and to start teaching others. Jesus said, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20, emphasis added). Learning is not accomplished only by hearing, but by seeing how it is done, by doing it, and by teaching it to others.

The Greek word often used for Paul’s teaching in the New Testament is dialegomai, which means to have a dialogue between people. When Paul taught well into the night in Ephesus (Acts 20:7) and young Eutychus fell to his short-lived death, Paul was not really teaching in the sense of having an endless monologue; he was having a dialogue, a time of questions and answers. This method of instruction gives the participants a chance to drive the teaching by their own questions, keeping them interested and their learning curve steep.

This is very different from our far less effective Western concept of teaching, which is usually a professorial monologue geared toward students in an academic setup removed from real life. The style is often static, with a teacher indoctrinating a passive crowd, trying to get across his or her points. Emulating the Greek and Roman concepts of scholasticism and intellectualism, the goal is to hand down knowledge gained through the ages to individuals.

But the Eastern teaching style is more kinetic: the topic of discussion literally moves around the table from person to person, and everyone is involved. After such deliberation, a consensus is built, a collective opinion emerges, and corporate action can follow. Communication theory has proven that the participatory, kinetic model is more effective in changing opinions and values than the static, confrontational style. It stands to reason, then, that the kinetic model is also more effective in changing people. Some of this effectiveness can be attributed to the fact that kinetic teaching is more like real life; it is driven by real people with real questions. It does not occur in an artificial environment that relies on a theoretical textbook and agenda.

The kinetic teaching style is geared toward helping people become “doers of the word” (James 1:22, NKJV), “teaching them to obey everything” Jesus taught (Matthew 28:20). It is simply good stewardship to help others develop an ability to express themselves, to help them get involved, and to teach them to obey Christ in real life. Clearly the most effective way to teach is to be an example of the truth in the way that we live, and—since this New Testament lifestyle is sure to raise questions—always being ready to give an answer.

In a house church, a seven-year-old girl might raise her hand and say, “My dog was run over by a car today and died. Do dogs go to heaven?” This would provide a perfect opportunity to address a real-life experience with a teaching from the Bible about heaven and earth, and yes, about the place of dogs in creation. This teaching style speaks straight into people’s lives. Life itself asked the question, and the living God—the father of the oikos, the “household of God”—answers it by making the Bible come alive in the midst of a Kingdom household, by having spiritual parents and children discover the truth together.

Sharing

What the rich young ruler—to whom Jesus said, “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and . . . come, follow me” (Luke 18:22)—did not do, the church did: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need” (Acts 2:44-45). As the company of the redeemed, we do not belong to ourselves anymore; we belong to God and therefore to God’s community. All that we are and all that we have is God’s and belongs to God’s family, the church—not in theory, but in practice. The question is not what percentage we should give, but why we should hold back anything, since we have been saved from the certainty of hell by a loving God who gave His very life to redeem us.

The New Testament Christians shared all of their material possessions: “No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. . . . There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need” (Acts 4:32, 34-35).

They also shared spiritual goods: “When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation” (1 Corinthians 14:26). Paul encouraged the Christians to “speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Ephesians 5:19) and said to Timothy, “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Timothy 2:2).

Just as these early Christians knew that Christ now owned them and everything they had, we too should share all that we are and all that we have, whether it is spiritual or material. In New Testament practice each house church had a common fund into which each member deposited money, clothes, and valuables. Everyone had something to share and therefore was able to serve others, which made everyone able to appreciate and value each other. Potlucks are a good way to start, but we need to learn to be responsible for each other and live not independent of each other, but dependent on each other. In many African or Asian extended families, the sharing of life has always been common practice; in Western cultures shaped strongly by individualism, we might have to relearn this yet again. Think of My Big Fat Greek Wedding meets Jesus.

The call to return to New Testament standards of koinonia may sound to some like social romanticism, an ideal picture of a bygone era, but that does not mean we can simply ignore the God-given concept of sharing. Paul later had to collect money from other churches for the church in Jerusalem, which only goes to show that the concept of sharing material goods is meant to be extended beyond the boundaries of the local church. No God-given concept is foolproof so long as the weakest link—humans—is present in the chain. In our weaknesses, like Ananias and Sapphira, we create less-than-glorious exceptions to the rule. However, this radical biblical lifestyle of sharing saves a lot of everyday expenses, establishes a deep bond of community among Christians, and is in itself a witness to Christ sharing His own life and death with us, so that we may live with Him.

Praying

“They devoted themselves . . . to prayer” (Acts 2:42). Prayer is the heartbeat of a relationship between a child of God and his or her Father in heaven. Whenever Christians come together, therefore, they will pray for each other, for their authorities, for their enemies, for healing, and for peace. They will come before God in petition and thanksgiving.

Prayer is a two-way communication, and as we talk to God, He might want to talk back to us. He often does this through prophets, tongues that are interpreted, dreams and visions, or angels. God “does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7).

Prophecy has been an integral part of the house church since Bible times: “Two or three prophets should speak . . . you can all prophesy in turn” (1 Corinthians 14:29, 31). Unlike traditional churches, New Testament house churches did not have a set agenda or a liturgy for their meetings. The living Christ was the agenda. So, if people did not know what to do next, they could simply pray and prophesy, so that God might reveal what He wanted them to do or pray about next. Supernatural messengers, messages, and prophecy helped to pinpoint sin (Acts 5:3; 1 Corinthians 14:24), give special tasks to the disciples (Acts 8:26-29), identify spiritual potential (Acts 9:10-19), arrange divine appointments (Acts 10:9-47), develop apostolic breakthroughs (Acts 16:6-10), and simply encourage individuals (Acts 18:9-11).

Helping each other to lead transparent lives

In the prayer Jesus taught us, He encouraged us to pray: “Forgive us our sins” (Luke 11:4). In a family whose members share their lives together, misconduct cannot be hidden for very long. Families provide a healthy level of accountability for each other. Similarly, as spiritual families, house churches are an ideal place to be accountable for our conduct. This naturally involves confessing our sins: “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed,” says James 5:16.

As people confess their sins in front of each other and forgive each other (Colossians 3:13), in whatever cultural format is appropriate, they stop being hypocrites, break the power of hidden sins in their lives, admit their need for grace and forgiveness, lose their pride, and gain the love and respect of fellow sinners. They leave the darkness and live in the light (1 John 2:8-11); they humble themselves and experience God’s ability to lift them up (James 4:7-10). They repent, not in order to avoid the consequences of sin, but because they are ashamed of what they have done. Confessing sins to one another also reinstates a healthy and natural form of church discipline, which was well known to the New Testament church.

House Churches in the Bible

Though this book is not intended to provide an extensive exegetical study of house churches in the Bible, even a short overview reveals that whole households can be recipients of the gospel:

As you enter the home, give it your greeting. If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. (Matthew 10:12-14)

When you enter a house, first say, “Peace to this house.” (Luke 10:5)

Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. (Luke 10:7)

The men replied, “We have come from Cornelius the centurion. He is a righteous and God-fearing man, who is respected by all the Jewish people. A holy angel told him to have you come to his house so that he could hear what you have to say.” (Acts 10:22)

Cornelius answered: “Four days ago I was in my house praying at this hour, at three in the afternoon. Suddenly a man in shining clothes stood before me.” (Acts 10:30)

When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” (Acts 16:15)

Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. (Acts 16:32)

Pentecost happened in a house:

Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. (Acts 2:2)

And Christians regularly met in homes:

Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. (Acts 2:46)

Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ. (Acts 5:42)

But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison. (Acts 8:3)

The Lord told him, “Go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying.” (Acts 9:11)

When this had dawned on him, he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying. (Acts 12:12)

After Paul and Silas came out of the prison, they went to Lydia’s house where they met with the brothers and encouraged them. Then they left. (Acts 16:40)

Then Paul left the synagogue and went next door to the house of Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. (Acts 18:7)

You know that I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you but have taught you publicly and from house to house. (Acts 20:20)

Leaving the next day, we reached Caesarea and stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven. (Acts 21:8)

Greet also the church that meets at their house. Greet my dear friend Epenetus, who was the first convert to Christ in the province of Asia. (Romans 16:5)

The churches in the province of Asia send you greetings. Aquila and Priscilla greet you warmly in the Lord, and so does the church that meets at their house. (1 Corinthians 16:19)

Give my greetings to the brothers at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her house. (Colossians 4:15)

Besides, they get into the habit of being idle and going about from house to house. And not only do they become idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying things they ought not to. (1 Timothy 5:13)

To Apphia our sister, to Archippus our fellow soldier and to the church that meets in your home. (Philemon 1:2)

If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take him into your house or welcome him. (2 John 1:10)

Practical Aspects

Though they might look very similar, traditional home groups, Bible study groups, prayer groups, and even youth groups are really miles apart from a house church. They build on different values and a different understanding of church and should not be considered the same thing as a house church. Where the home group is a small part of the bigger, “real” church, the house church in itself is the church in its fullest and most holistic sense. Let’s take a look at what sets the house church apart from these other types of gatherings.

Leadership

House churches do not have leaders in the technical sense; they have elders. As we’ve already seen, elders are responsible members of society who are able to assume a parental role in the house church, and who meet the biblical qualifications describing deacons found in 1 Timothy 3. These elders are empowered and counseled by apostolic people who usually function beyond the borders of an individual house church (Acts 15:2, 4, 22-23).

Baptism

As fully functioning churches, house churches usually handle baptisms themselves, unless they want to team up with other house churches for a larger baptism celebration. Baptisms can happen in a bathtub, a barrel, a pond, a well, a swimming pool, a river, a lake, or the sea. Following the New Testament pattern, baptism normally happens through immersion in water after new Christians have professed their faith. Paul was baptized three days after his conversion (Acts 9), the Ethiopian eunuch was baptized immediately (Acts 8), and Peter encouraged the three thousand converts at Pentecost to be baptized that same day (Acts 2:41).

Weddings

In some cultures, weddings are performed by religious officials, and in other countries, by government officials. Jesus never performed a wedding. The only wedding recorded in Scripture that He was part of is detailed in John 2. But in spite of His qualifications, He did not conduct that ceremony. He did not seem to have been concerned about presiding over any kind of social functions, nor did He prepare His disciples to do so. He never conducted or even attended a burial; in fact He said, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22).

In some cultures and countries, established churches might specialize in solemnizing marriages for all Christians—not only members of their own churches—if the government requires them to do so. In other cases, the house churches are usually not concerned with these issues. Society can take care of them.

Children

Since house churches are spiritual families, children are a natural and important part of that body, just as they are a source of constant joy—and occasionally embarrassment—in a natural family. Children humble us with their questions, break up our endless “adult” discussions, bring us down to earth from our pious clouds, and act as natural evangelists and bridge-builders. They also help us to prove the fruits of the Spirit—patience, for example—and serve as heaven-sent spies to spot instantly any trace of religious superstition and hypocrisy. Children have a ministry to us adults that is at least as important as our ministry to them. They are, in short, as important to house churches as they are to families.

Any couple who has a baby needs to answer this question: are we now born into the life of our baby, or is the baby born into our lives? Children need to be part of the extended family, even if naturally they do not yet understand everything that’s going on. That’s part of being born into the parents’ lives. Kids don’t really grow up if we only tuck them away into “special kids’ programs.” The current, unhealthy obsession of Western society with “keeping the kids entertained at all times” would place the moods and ever-changing feelings of fun-loving children at the center of the agenda; but that is not how God has designed a family to function. Parents model and lead; kids learn to imitate and follow.

If we see a house church as a program-driven event with discussion topics, tasks, objectives, and an agenda—which of course Jesus never taught—we might feel that children only disturb the grown-ups, and therefore need to be separated and put into children’s groups with their own programs to keep them entertained and educated. Certainly it is a positive and natural thing for children to do things with others of their own age. But it is precisely the times of eating, laughing, and crying in the context of a wider family—young and old together—that show children from an early age how people live in community and what it means to be at home with one another, supporting one another. A special time for children can very well be a common exception, but not the rule. Otherwise children will be quickly alienated from church. Again, church is not a meeting; it is a way of life. If we have children, they are a part of our lives and therefore a part of our house churches.

A look inside

Let us look into a contemporary house church in a given neighborhood with mostly traditional families. The house church might start as early as 4:00 p.m., when the wives from the neighborhood get together, have coffee, and play with the children. They might even sing, pray, talk, cry, and laugh together before their husbands start to trickle in. Rather than the families going to their own homes and dinner tables, they go to the neighborhood church tonight.

At 6:10 p.m., the unsaved husband of one of the neighbors furtively comes in the door—for the first time and after an eleventh invitation. He comes mostly because he was invited to supper, not to a Bible study. He’s nervous and stiff, and shifts uneasily back and forth on his chair. His countenance says, “I know that you all want to convert me. I haven’t the foggiest idea how you’re going to do it, but I’m expecting the worst.” At that instant, a one-year-old comes crawling in and makes a beeline for this man’s pant leg. When the baby grabs hold of it, he coos and smears some unidentified substance on the neighbor’s clothing. Then he laughs as only a one-year-old can. In that second, a miracle happens as the stiff neighbor and the house-church elder both become “daddies,” glancing at each other and laughing. The little guy hasn’t just eased the tension; he has also brought human warmth into what the neighbor had expected to be a cold, formal, religious exercise. Suddenly, neither the atmosphere nor the neighbor is the least bit uncomfortable. Everyone becomes much more natural and relaxed.

At about 6:30, everyone sits down to a potluck dinner or perhaps a large pot of spaghetti or noodle soup. There’s some teaching at the table, but it happens as it did in the New Testament: through conversations and discussions during the meal. People talk of their joys and sorrows, tell success stories and bloopers, trade insights on razors and cars, pray for and prophesy over each other, joke with the kids, and collect some money for an unemployed widow who recently moved into the area.

An hour later, before everyone leaves, it’s time for a collective bedtime story told by one person to all the kids (from six months to eighty years old). And perhaps for the very first time in his life, the unsaved neighbor finally hears—and understands—the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Recapturing the Homes

The most difficult place to be holy is at home, in the presence of our kids and spouses, where everything we do and say is tested for real-life value. But that is also where the gospel has the greatest impact, because the message of an extraordinary life in an ordinary setting is its own litmus test. After all, when Jesus asked His disciples to go as His messengers two by two, He asked them to find a house of peace and stay there rather than going from house to house (Luke 10:7).

I believe that over the centuries, the church has hidden from the painful failure of real and everyday life by escaping into artificial preaching centers, large cathedrals, Bible schools, programs, and seminars. But I also believe that God is today reclaiming our very homes for Christ. As our homes are again becoming the natural habitat for the church, Christianity in return is becoming a powerful testimony where it counts most: right next door.

Psychotherapist Larry Crabb, in his book Connecting, says: “I am working toward the day when communities of God’s people, ordinary Christians whose lives regularly intersect, will accomplish most of the good that we now depend on mental health professionals to provide. And they will do it by connecting with each other in ways that only the gospel makes possible. . . . Maybe the center of Christian community is connecting with a few.”3

Persecution Protection

In times of persecution, church-houses stand out but ordinary houses blend in. It has been pointed out countless times that persecution helps the church to be pure and holy as it pays the price of the gospel and becomes less concerned with luxuries. The blood of the martyrs has always been—and still is—the seed of the church. We can draw at least three important conclusions about persecution and the house church:

First, persecution is normal; peace is the exception. If the Kingdom of God is in conflict at the deepest possible level with the kingdom of this world, disturbances and even war are the necessary outcome. At this present stage of history, God’s Kingdom and the world under the rule of the evil one are simply not compatible; they are irreconcilable, like water and fire. Jesus came to destroy the works of the evil one, and this will not happen in diplomatic peace talks. As Jesus’ body on earth, the church will be drawn into this conflict. Persecution, therefore, is business as usual for Christians; peace and harmony are the exception.

Second, persecution reforms the inner quality and structure of Christianity and therefore restores apostolic church patterns. Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” but many pastors know that even after many hours of motivational sermons and Bible studies, few Christians truly manage to love their friendly neighbors, let alone the unfriendly ones. Persecution changes all this by regularly upsetting the status quo and changing comfortably settled Christians into pilgrims. It uproots complacency and restores the pioneer spirit. Persecution liberates Christians from their fixation on big buildings and involves them in a movement. The disciples—commanded by Jesus to be “witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8)—only began to reach beyond Jerusalem after God allowed persecution (Acts 8:1-4). Persecution restores the church back to the likeness of its persecuted founder, Jesus Christ.

Persecution also has structural consequences on the church, because during times of persecution the church needs to “live out of suitcases,” which means it must have a movable, flexible structure that allows for growth and is adaptable to change. The house church perfectly fits this description.

Sometimes persecution may be God’s last word to a lethargic church that has afforded itself the luxury of sleeping through all the apostolic and prophetic warnings in the past. Persecution is a wake-up call few will be able to miss. It may be God’s way of bringing back a mentality of urgency and mission, and restoring the apostolic nature to the church. As they are scattered, Christians may very well go again and preach the Word everywhere (Acts 8:4), which is what we should have been doing in the first place.

Third, persecution purifies the agenda of the church. A settled, streamlined church that is absorbed within its own culture will soon develop values, priorities, habits, and agendas that are not in line with God’s priorities of upsetting the status quo by introducing the Kingdom of God. The early church engaged in few of the projects—social, political, ecological, evangelistic, or holistic—in which the church is involved with today, yet it still grew and flourished. In times of persecution, the agenda of the church is reduced to absolute Kingdom essentials: spreading itself thin, carrying on as the yeast that leavens the dough, and discipling the nations. A degree of persecution also helps to prevent corruption in the church because no one wants to be much of a star in a secret, half-legal society of fairly unimpressive little groups.

4: The Fivefold Ministry

God’s resources for multiplying house churches

The growth of all life-forms is based on the multiplication of cells. This is true for the church, too, as it continues to multiply into organic, relational households of God. Now that we have discovered that the church is not meant to be a series of organized meetings in religious buildings but rather a supernatural, communal life-form, we may have to rethink how this life-form multiplies in a healthy way.

Korean Pentecostal Pastor David Yonggi Cho once said, “If you want to build an organization, use men. If you want to build the church, use women.”1 We men like to have things we can control which accounts for our fascination with engines and machines. As long as we pour water and oil into them and provide some grease here and there, our beloved machines keep running, and we are happy. The problem is that the church is not a machine but a life-form; not an organization, but an organism.

One of the less obvious facts of church planting today is that a significant percentage of churches are planted by women. In many Asian countries, from what I’ve seen, probably the majority of new house churches are being started by women. My friend Bindu Choudhrie, wife of Dr. Victor Choudhrie of India—together probably one of the most fruitful house-church-planting teams the world has seen—even points out that women, who can neither read nor write, are up to four times more fruitful in planting new house churches than literate women are. Why? Practicing what they have learned and showing it to others—rather than just writing down notes or reading a book—is the only way they feel they can show what they have learned! It seems clear that God’s Spirit is challenging the women to get out there and save the country, as we men sit still and discuss more theology and strategy (or, like myself, write one more book).

Men and women have joint roles in the Kingdom. The decision of who does what, when, and how, however, rests with the King.

In his landmark book Natural Church Development, Christian A. Schwarz says: “We can learn about the church by carefully pondering and analyzing the lilies—how they grow. The growth of plants and other living organisms reveals that they have a ‘biotic’ potential, the inherent capacity of an organism or species to survive and reproduce. This type of natural growth is not mechanical or artificial. It is God-given.”2

The principle can be seen in Mark 4:26-28: “A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain.” The words “all by itself” are the translation for the Greek word automatos, which means automatically. This growth-automatism is actually a “theo-matism,” since God Himself is the actual cause of growth; it is He who gives the increase (cf. 1 Corinthians 3:6). This truth has very serious consequences for our thinking and practice. For a church to grow, we must release the biotic growth potential that God has put into it, rather than attempt to inject this potential into the church by our own means. The growth potential is already there, and if we allow it to, the growth will happen all by itself. God has kept this part for Himself for good reasons.

Quality and Quantity

Most people who come across the house-church model for the first time do not immediately see its potential for growth through organic multiplication. But the right quality in the right structure produces a huge dynamic for growth. How can the quality of relationships become so good as to inspire rapid multiplication of churches without losing the quality? The answer is obvious: it happens in proportion to the intensity with which lives are shared in house churches, a dynamic that is rarely experienced in traditional churches. Since traditional Christianity does not always include much sharing of lives, the potential that exists when lives are so intertwined is often overlooked.

I agree with those who say that building communities is not primarily a matter of numbers but of quality. Nevertheless, quality that does not sooner or later lead to quantity is, to me, suspect. I am interested in spiritual quality in the right place in the right order of magnitude and proper distribution. Let’s take a look at the numerical potential of organic house churches.

A friend of mine, American house-church planter Curtis Sergeant, was probably the first one to come up with the following analogy comparing house-church growth with the different reproduction patterns of elephants and rabbits. Tony and Felicity Dale have even written an entire book on this dynamic called The Rabbit and the Elephant.

Though house churches are not necessarily multiplying like rabbits, this example shows the theoretical potential of rapid multiplication. A typical house church may have between six and twenty people, and usually doubles itself once every six to nine months. For example, let’s take an average size of twelve people per house church and a less-than-average doubling rate of twelve months. Let’s assume that in the first year of operation, the house church actually does not grow at all. We’ll remain slightly pessimistic and also assume a 25 percent fallout rate—which means that one out of every four house churches that are started will close down within any given five-year period for any number of reasons—and periods of growth and consolidation. This example will produce the following scenario:

This scenario, which has truly happened several times in history as well as in recent times,3 will incorporate almost two million people in a house-church movement within a period of twenty years. The process may be accelerated through contextual factors or through a shorter multiplication time span, revival, or persecution; or it may be slowed down by other factors. The core observation, however, is that the growth is through multiplication, and the multiplication is exponential, not linear.

House churches are multipliable structures. They can multiply endlessly, as long as they are provided with the essentials. Two of those essentials are biblical quality and leadership.

Most of today’s structures for developing leadership are addition oriented. We teach young leaders a set of lessons and go through some programs that have a similar “output.” We may put people through the Bible school system and faithfully add fifty or five hundred each year to the number of ordained pastors and missionaries. But just as some are graduating each year, others are retiring or dropping out. Moreover, simply adding leaders for the multiplying units of house churches is not enough. Addition cannot keep up with multiplication, because ongoing addition produces linear growth: two plus two is four, plus two is six. Ongoing multiplication produces exponential growth: two times two is four, times two is eight.

If we try to provide leaders for a house-church movement through a structure that is addition oriented rather than multiplication oriented, the leadership development model itself quickly becomes the limiting factor and the growth stops. God does not want the church to give birth to babies only to see them die of malnutrition.

If we have multiplying house churches, which create an exponential growth rate, we need a leadership development structure that grows as fast as the churches multiply. The leadership structure itself therefore also needs to multiply. Either we start multiplying all our seminaries and Bible schools, or we find another way.

If we graph linear growth (leadership development) and exponential growth (house-church multiplication development), the lines intersect at the point where the number of house churches starts to exceed the number of leaders. This results in the movement coming to a grinding halt because the fledgling house-church movement runs out of quality and leaders. The support structure has not grown fast enough, and the whole movement is in danger of becoming shallow or even cultlike.

This choking point, interestingly enough, often happens when there are around 150 or 200 churches in a given movement, similar to how a traditional one-pastor church usually experiences what has often been called the “200 barrier.” One leader simply cannot care for more people than that, and the growth stops. Usually this creates a new denomination or causes the church to split. There is, however, a way to break this built-in structural growth problem: we can simply avoid it from the very beginning and provide structures that will help to multiply leaders.

The Fivefold Ministry*

*Author’s Note: In the following descriptions I use the male pronoun inclusively, speaking for both of the genders. My theological thinking is not church-oriented but Kingdom-oriented. This topic goes beyond fashionable equality to unity (Galatians 3:26-28), whereby women and men both fulfill their Kingdom roles as they are one in Jesus Christ.

One of the answers to the structural growth problem is the so-called fivefold ministry of Ephesians 4:11-13: “[God] gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith.”

This fivefold ministry functions as the self-organizing powers of the church. Each ministry is part of the built-in “biotic growth potential” and the spiritual DNA of the church that forms itself within the body of Christ. Just as we saw that the human body forms its own lymphatic system, white anti-body system, and blood circulation system—each with an amazing, built-in ability to grow organically inside the human body and to maintain or even cure the body—so the structure of the church allows for organic growth, maintenance, and healing. All of the ministries within the fivefold ministry have their own tasks to fulfill in equipping the saints, and they constantly circulate through the (house) churches, like their very own respiratory or circulatory systems.

The most important aspect of these ministries for house churches is that they can also multiply themselves: apostles spotting and training other apostles, prophets spotting and training other prophets, and all of the ministries multiplying themselves through the simple and biblical process of discipleship. This way, the leadership structure can grow exponentially with a multiplying house-church movement. In the words of Barney Coombs, “Jesus takes beggars and turns them into princes. He gets hold of six foul-mouthed fishermen, a despised tax-gatherer and five other nobodies, and transforms them into the elite of heavenly Jerusalem.”4

The bottom line of this process is the empowerment of exponentially more people to do the work of God. The goal is to find, nurture, and release talented and supernaturally gifted people into their God-given calling in order to bring out God’s best in them, and to do this systematically and strategically. The biblical calling of the apostle, prophet, pastor, teacher, or evangelist is not to usurp ministry and perform it as others look on, but to train and equip God’s people for the ministry. They are to be evangelistic, prophetic, teaching, pastoral, and apostolic trainers—not demonstrators, teachers, or one-man shows. An evangelist’s true fruit is not a convert, but more evangelists.

Strangely enough, exactly the opposite of this biblical model has become the norm: specialist teachers, evangelists, pastors, apostles, and prophets move about at breathtaking speed, constantly overworked and under stress, with more than just their blood pressures in danger.

They give seminars and speak at conferences where they present the latest state-of-the-art discoveries in their specialty areas, but they are doing exactly the opposite of their true God-given task. Instead of equipping God’s people for the ministry, they are performing it for them. Instead of teaching people how to teach, they are just teaching. Instead of equipping people to be evangelists, they are simply evangelizing. Instead of training people how to prophesy, they are prophesying and then leaving—and seldom leaving disciples behind.

This pattern not only sets unhealthy standards, but it also leaves both the teacher and the students unfulfilled and empty, because neither has done what God wanted them to do, which is to disciple and be discipled into these ministries, to be transparent with one another, and to initiate and be initiated into the multiplication process themselves.

This pattern creates a new caste, separating clergy from laity, and it ultimately fails to prepare God’s people to do their ministry. The five ministries are given by God to be given away, which means multiplying the structure through which the ministry is operating: the house churches.

For a hands-on picture, let us compare the fivefold ministry to the five fingers of the hand. The apostle is the thumb; he gives stability, holds the counterbalance, and can literally touch all the other fingers. The prophet is the index finger; he points at you and says, “You are the man (or woman)!” The evangelist is the middle finger, the longest of all, sticking farthest out into the world. The ring finger resembles the pastor/shepherd, caring for internal relationships. The little finger is the teacher; he can worm his way deep into any ear, and there share the truth of the gospel.

Leadership in the way we are used to seeing it in the business, political, or religious world is not really a biblical concept. But leadership in the form of parenthood is. After all, God is not simply a leader; He is a father. And if we are truly patterned after Him, we will want to reflect that same father- and servant-leadership.

Good parents don’t want to dominate, rule, and dictate; instead, they try to invest wisdom into their children and then relish watching it take hold. Their goal is for their children to eventually overtake them. The nature of spiritual moms and dads as expressed in the fivefold ministry is therefore never to “lord it over,” but to “lord it under,” to lead by influence, character, and modeling rather than by position, status, and title (2 Corinthians 1:24). We need to be healthily suspicious of gurus who love to be seen on the rooftop but who fail to be involved in the foundation.

God is not blessing the establishment of top-down hierarchies; instead he blesses selfless servanthood. This is the heart of ministry; anything else is not ministry but a form of religious empire building that we need to move away from.

Let us conclude this chapter with a brief look at each of the five ministries mentioned in Ephesians 4:11.5

The pastor

In the charismatic and biblical sense, the pastor is by nature a shepherd. Unlike traditional church pastors, a house-church pastor stands in the midst of a flock of sheep, and everything mills around him. He is by nature a very loving person who can create a family atmosphere. Relationships are highly important to him, simply because he is interested in the flock’s long-term spiritual well-being. The good shepherd knows the names of all of his sheep, as well as what they like and dislike. He is interested in every last detail about those he is caring for.

His motto is “Relationships are everything!” The pastor focuses on our redeemed relationship with God and our relationships with others. He helps those in his flock function in this relational way as well by teaching them to eliminate hurt and trauma. In a more technical sense, pastoral ministry is about member care and team building.

It’s important to remember, however, that a person’s greatest weakness almost always lies in the shadow of his or her greatest strength. The role of pastor tends to include a natural blind spot. Since he is so often focused on relationships, the pastor is less likely to see the big picture. This is why the roles of prophets and apostles are so important to the church.

The prophet

The prophet is always out ahead of the flock of sheep, perhaps five miles beyond the next hill. He is constantly on the lookout, listening to God’s voice and seeing visions of the future. It may actually be a good thing that he is often away from the flock, because few really understand him. He is not so interested in people and what they think of him, but rather in God’s voice for the situation. Added to that, he often has a complicated and disorganized personality—exactly because he is so uniquely gifted. Can you imagine spending a relaxed half hour drinking coffee with Jeremiah? He would probably tear us apart and use the coffee for an illustration.

A prophet’s perspective is radically different from that of the pastor. He hears from God and quite mercilessly questions everything and everyone, including the pastor, from God’s perspective. Questioning, however, is his healthy and God-given duty. For that reason, there is also a historical tension between the pastor and the prophet: one is a defender of the status quo, who wants to maintain the community; the other questions everything and is seen (rightly) by many as a threat, because he disrupts things and wants immediate action. In many pictures, the shepherd has a stick in his hand, not only to tend the sheep and keep away the wolves, but also to keep away prophets. And yet both the pastor’s and the prophet’s views are valid, because both are serving God and the same flock—one with loving attention, the other with a prophetic view. Both are necessary!

The prophet’s motto is “Vision.” Prophets often have the unique ability to see and hear what others cannot. These supernatural revelations need to go through a process of healthy interpretation in the church (1 Corinthians 14:29) and application.

The prophet receives a direct calling from God, and then is usually sent “pouring water over the hands of a master prophet,” as in the case of Elijah and Elisha (2 Kings 3:11), the biblical way of expressing a discipleship relationship, where younger prophets were trained by more experienced ones.

Prophetic ministry is about providing spiritual intelligence, casting a personal and corporate vision, and empowering people according to God’s calling.

The apostle

The apostle is not as far from the flock as the prophet. Rather than being on the other side of the hill, he’s only about three miles away, just on top of the hill. From this command point, he can see the big picture and study his map, looking for the next green pasture. He generally has no time for house visits and small talk; the world is his church. Like Paul, the apostle is never really satisfied. After Rome, he wants to go to Spain!

His core word is “strategy” and his heartbeat is missions. He wants to see God’s plans come true for the nations. Apostles are very much like army generals. They carry the main burden and responsibility for the advancement of a cause. The apostolic ministry is a founding ministry; it can create something out of nothing, build a foundation in the desert. In many ways, the apostle unites all other gifts. The apostle may function as a supernaturally gifted problem solver and talent spotter. And if the pastor is something of an equivalent of a spiritual uncle who is very caring, but not ultimately responsible, then the apostle is the spiritual father who experiences both the joy and the agony of bearing the final responsibility. Apostles have a supernatural ability to build multipliable foundations and, like architects, mold the entire Christian movement in such a way that its form follows its function. Through the apostle, followers of Christ are united in purpose and together complete the divine mission.

The teacher

In relationship to the sheep, the teacher lives at a critical distance from the flock, about half a mile away. He sits at a vantage point that allows him to see which sheep might be struggling or unconsciously separating from the flock.

His motto is, “The truth and nothing but the truth!” The teacher is interested in quality in the details, which he finds even more fascinating than the big picture. He is often a “footnote” person in the truest and best sense of the word, someone who likes details and needs to know everything exactly. He has a passion for teaching itself, and his gift is to empower others to teach others how to teach.

Like Jesus, his Master Rabbi, the teacher does not leave behind teaching notes, but his spirit. A teacher is passionate about enabling newcomers to understand, explain, and finally defend the Christian faith to others.

The evangelist

The evangelist circles the flock closely but stays just far enough away that he doesn’t smell like the sheep pen. He doesn’t want to frighten the wild sheep away, but instead he wants to lead them to the flock. He has a single aim and passion: to help people find Jesus.

The evangelist introduces a healthy outward focus to the churches, and is even involved in discipling new believers into maturity by literally reading the gospel to them, evangelizing them, and filling them with the Good News. Biblically, the evangelist does not lead the extension of the churches, but instead works in partnership with apostolic and prophetic people who bear the main responsibility for laying the foundations of the churches. The evangelist empowers others to be evangelists, not in order to create evangelistic enterprises in themselves, but so that the house churches can become or remain an evangelistic movement.

A healthy evangelist is passionate about the depth of conversion, the retention rate of new disciples, and the quality of discipling.

The fivefold ministry is crucial for the house churches of an area; it is as vital for the healthy development of organic churches as parents are for children, or as coaches are for athletes. Without it, a house church or a network of house churches can easily become self-centered and problem driven. The fivefold ministry is not an option that we all get to vote on: some like it; some don’t. If God has given these ministries, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:28 and Ephesians 2:20 and 4:11, we are not free to dismiss them, and if we do, we do so at our own peril, violating a crucial building principle of the Kingdom. Many Christians have reached a plateau in their lives because they have never really been exposed to the exciting variety of these ministries and are instead sitting “under” the ministry of a one-size-fits-all “pastor,” who is trying to embody all of the ministries himself. Many such pastors burn out quickly, and many traditional congregations are left wondering why things aren’t moving.

Today I believe that God is correcting this devastating error in the church that probably started with Diotrephes, the “first senior pastor” (see 3 John 1:9-11). God is these days reinserting specifically the prophetic and apostolic ministries back into the bloodstream of the body of Christ.6

5: House Church or Cell Church?

Thirteen reasons house churches are the natural solution

Traditional Christianity has always gotten excited when news of particular ministry methods sweeps through the ranks. Things like the invention of the Sunday school, the introduction of praise and worship music, or the concept of “multisite,” “seeker-sensitive,” or “purpose-driven” churches have generated wave after wave of energy as traditional churches try to adopt and implement new concepts that promise growth and significance.

In the past three decades the cell church has become such a movement. The cell church is typically a traditional congregation headed by a single pastor who encourages the church members to participate in cell groups. At first glance the cell of a cell church looks fairly similar to a house church. For this reason, I believe we will find it helpful to look more closely into the subject, and determine what makes house churches very different from cell churches.

David Yonggi Cho, founder and pastor of Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, has made the cell group system world famous. In more recent times material published by Ralph Neighbour, Bill Beckham, Larry Stockstill, and others allowed the concept of the cell church to gain worldwide momentum. “Cells form the basic unit of the Cell Church,” says Neighbour.1

Members of a cell-based church are usually part of a small group or cell that meets at least once a week, as well as meeting additionally in celebrations or large gatherings led by a “senior pastor.” Structurally the cell church forms a pyramid, with the senior pastor on top, followed by assistant pastors, regional and zonal pastors, cell leaders, and cell leader assistants.

Although I share with many of my contemporaries a built-in aversion to “top-down” language, elaborate systems, and Plan As and Plan Bs for all eventualities, I can wholeheartedly agree with Ralph Neighbour’s diagnosis of much of the traditional church in his book Where Do We Go from Here? He points to the program-drivenness of a meeting- and event-oriented church as one of the core culprits of replacing life fellowship with running the “right” agendas and having exciting events.

Neighbour goes on to explain in detail many aspects of a cell-based church. He suggests, for example, structuring cell meetings around the four Ws: welcome, worship, words, and works. The welcome is an icebreaker to get people involved; the worship is about meditations, readings, or songs; the word is the application of last Sunday’s sermon; and works reach out practically to the oikos, a person’s immediate circle of friends and relationships.2

However, I also share with many insiders and observers of the cell-church movement a certain suspicion that in an effort to avoid program-based design, the cell church has become what it fears most: a program-based design.

God’s Hand in the Cell-Church Movement

I want to leave no doubt about it: I see the hand of God clearly in the cell-church and related movements. I believe God is the prime initiator of a paradigm shift in the church that is resulting in changes of such radical and global proportions that many of us would be shocked if we were to see the whole picture. I readily agree that what I write here is only a small part of the whole truth, and needs the complementary work and input of many others. The impending changes will be so immense that even many contemporary prophets will be ill prepared. I realize that it is difficult to swallow the whole issue and the implications of house churches in one big bite, let alone take them seriously and implement them by tomorrow night.

But God is a gentle global teacher. He teaches us step-by-step, first A-B-C, then D-E-F, and finally X-Y-Z. Through the cell church, He teaches a return to smallness in a language that many traditional program-based churches can understand. The fact that the cell church itself clearly carries some genes of a program-based design does not really disturb me, since I see that this can serve as a beautiful bridge of understanding for those yet to cross the river back from organized, cathedral-type religion to an organic and relational understanding of the church as a way of life, at home where we are at home. In this sense, I see the cell church as one of God’s halfway houses, providing a place of focus and vision, albeit limited, along our journey so that at a later time we can get a clearer perspective of the path ahead.

The cell church may also be God’s gracious intent to slow down our traditional-and-global church bus so that we can better negotiate the more radical bend leading to house-church Christianity ahead. God does not want to overturn us and create chaos; He wants to help us negotiate the future. He therefore sometimes has to slow us down to prepare us for the things He sees that we don’t. Often our very own overactivity has a way of slowing us down so we can hear from Him. Many new prophetic insights have been born out of times of burnout and breakdown, because in those times of desperation we are unable to do anything else but pray and think, to be quiet and still before the Lord.

I have seen and heard about numerous cell-church movements that are actually functioning much more like house churches, which is gratifying to hear. I completely share the cell church’s concern for developing a New Testament church—a working structure that truly disciples people and ultimately disciples nations. I am convinced the cell church is an important part of a reformation process taking place within the church. My intention here is not to create a division but only to point out some key differences between the house-church and cell-church concepts, knowing that there are many models and structures developing today, and that there will be some variations and even overlaps between the two.

Chiefdoms and acephalous tribes. If we compare cell churches and house churches, the differences between the two might simply echo the age-old distinction between chiefdoms (tribes with a headman) and acephalous tribes (those with no head). Cell churches reflect the chiefdom pattern, while house churches are more like headless tribal societies.

City and village culture. Many of today’s cell churches have developed in cities or metropolitan areas, whereas house churches have flourished both in cities and in villages. I think it is important to note that most cell churches are city bred. However, many people today live in both the city and the village at the same time. A person might dwell in a city, but still live in a village within the city: a housing development, an apartment complex, a gated community, or a neighborhood.

The cell church offers a visible island in the urban sea of humanity, a castle rising above the masses, where people can seek and find refuge. However, it’s important to realize that this is one application of the cell-church model that may not always be the case. While it may appear that many people in cities seem to be socially lost, without identity, and waiting for someone to come along to offer them a place to belong, many people do actually belong to a group of some sort: a club, an organization, or a local association. Even within a city people still tend to have their tribes, their villages.

Can a city church disciple villages? Not really. The cultural and sociological makeup of villages is far too different from the larger city culture. The consequences are simple enough: a church developed in the city, on average, will not win the villages within that city. And if we do not win the villages, we will not disciple the whole nation. As much as we need to win the cities, it has to start with the villages and neighborhoods within those cities. If we can disciple the neighborhoods, we can also disciple the nation. House churches seem to be able to do both.

War and peace. Some nations have developed a warrior culture, while others are simply more peace loving. We see this difference expressed in the way people view their nations and themselves as individuals; it is reflected in the films they produce, in the role they assign to their armies and laws, and in the forms of government they choose. In some countries people have simply come to expect others to tell them what to do; in other countries such an expectation would be highly offensive. Some countries’ customs are highly formal and ritualistic; others’ customs are extremely low key and cordial. Some countries have the feel of an army camp, with tight controls from top to bottom, where nobody moves without permission. Other countries feel more like a summer camp, a loosely organized and often quite pleasurable mess. In many Western countries, democracy is valued above all else, and each person is in charge of his or her own life. In nations where the government is generally in charge of the lives of its citizens, people tend to experience a more tight-knit community among each other.

Churches growing in particular cultures and nations always reflect to a high degree this “war” or “peace” mentality. I believe that the cell church reflects a culture’s pattern, and rightly so. People growing up in warrior cultures will expect to be told where to sit and belong, what to do, and how to behave. From childhood, their lives have been filled with rituals and ceremonies, ribbons and badges, titles and career ladders, and there is always a standard-bearer under whom they are expected to rally.

However, people growing up with a peaceful, democratic, socialist, or even communist background have something in common with today’s Generation X culture in the West: they instinctively question any self-imposing authority—be it political, economical, or spiritual. As a result they will resist a church with a military touch or a spiritual general on top. Instead, they will value an organic and relational church with servant leadership. This is one more reason I favor house churches, which can effectively function in both war and peace climates.

Part or the whole. While the cell church is always an important part of a larger individual church, the house church does not belong to a larger organizational unit. Instead, the house church is usually part of an interdependent—not independent—network of similar house churches, or in cases of severe restrictions it might even function completely on its own. House churches are not part of a larger, “real,” or denominational church; they are the real thing all by themselves.

Jethro system or the fivefold ministry. In tune with a stunning absence of the fivefold ministry, many cell churches favor the so-called Jethro principle, a system of administration that delegates authority to several levels of leadership. This concept is based on Exodus 18, where Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, advised him to delegate the responsibility of judging the people of Israel to “officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens” (v. 21), to prevent Moses from being overworked.

We should notice, however, that the Jethro principle is basically a structure for enforcing law and order, but it is not designed to build and empower the New Testament fellowship of grace and love. Moses was a mediator between the people of Israel and God, and this is exactly what Jesus did away with, as He Himself became the mediator once and for all. In a cell church, the leader is typically based on the Jethro principle, with a senior pastor and a “cabinet of ministers” who delegate authority to a myriad of other people. This type of structure often requires an enormous amount of counting, administration, bureaucracy, and, may I say it, control.

This approach almost seems to be a Protestant attempt at Catholicism’s episcopal and hierarchical system. It’s pretty telling when we read in Church Growth and the Home Cell System that “every week new souls are being added to the central computer.”3 What must it do to a person’s sense of place in the church to know that he or she is number 5,432 in the tracking system of the central computer? Few people want to be run and tracked by others, or live a life where every move is controlled and observed by the watchful eye of Big Brother. In the 1990s I toured a number of large computer operating rooms of cell churches, whose leaders acted as if I were stepping foot into the Holy of Holies. Sometimes it seems as if the greatest fears of these churches are that someone might fail to do his or her duty, the senior pastor might fall ill or die, the electricity will fail, or a computer virus might creep in—causing the whole church to fall apart in an instant.

“The growth of the (Cell) Church should only be limited by our anointing and vision,” says Lawrence Khong, senior leader of a Singapore-based cell church.4 And Markus Koch, working with a cell church in Zurich, Switzerland, goes on to suggest that “a church should be led by one pastor.”5 This traditional one-pastor thinking does not differ much from the congregational model of church. In fact the very life and quality of the one-pastor church depends very highly on the quality, vision, and energy of the senior pastor. Knowing many Christian leaders—as well as myself—I am suggesting not only that any of them can go astray, but also that we should not build too much on just one person’s charisma.

The availability of senior pastors today is quite limited, as well. In every nation the number of people of the caliber of Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, Lawrence Khong, or David Yonggi Cho is simply limited. Those with an apostolic gift may not even be senior pastors at all, but simple people with a calling much larger than their current setup allows. And if this is the case, we should not confine people like this to their own church—they should be allowed to share that gift all over the world with many house churches.

A house church is much less threatened by an electrical power outage, because there is not much data to lose. The elders of house churches have genuine relationships with people doing the fivefold ministry. This fivefold ministry is low key and quite invisible. The idea is not to build an ever-increasing pyramid that eventually touches the sky but to empower each other to spread out and generate a movement that can, if necessary, slide under the carpet and continue out of sight.

Driven by agenda or being the agenda. In a typical cell church, there is an agenda to accomplish and a fairly set pattern to follow. This agenda could be a written set of instructions handed to the cell leader from the senior pastor or an agreed-upon regular pattern for each meeting. Often the agenda is discussed with the cell leaders on Wednesday in order to rehearse for the cell meetings on Thursday. Yonggi Cho advises other ministers “never to delegate the important responsibility of writing the teaching lessons and having seminars with the home cell leaders to others.”6

In contrast, the house church itself is the agenda. Since a house church is typically part of an apostolic network within which the fivefold ministry is operating, it is prevented from becoming a pious club, an isolated social gathering, or an inward-looking, self-centered group.

Although Christians in the house church read and discuss the Bible, the house church gathering is not a Bible study; although they pray, it is not a prayer meeting. Since Jesus is a person, the idea of meeting with that person in the same way every time would be as creative and inventive as a bridegroom bringing his future bride the same set of flowers, singing the same songs, and declaring his ardent love with the same poems every time he sees her. I suspect that after a short time, she would be less than excited to receive him and listen to his program.

Much of the program drivenness of the traditional church stems from the fact that meetings are usually arranged in such a way that there can be no (unpleasant) surprises, like “lay people” exercising gifts to the embarrassment of a religious professional. Many traditional churches have developed a democratic form of administration, which seems to be the safest form of church government. But because it has the tendency to block prophetic direction in the name of a numerical majority, democracy often leads to spiritual oblivion and facelessness. Rather than people symbolically sitting in the Garden of Eden under the tree of life, democratic churches tend to place us under the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where arguments over who is right become more important than who we are in Christ.

Church programs then start to feel foolproof: follow an agreed-upon pattern (unpack the guitar and songbooks, sing, pray, listen to a Bible study or sermon, pray again, close the meeting), where simply nothing can go wrong. In such a context, I suspect, not much can go right either.

Nothing is wrong with singing, praying, and having Bible study in itself. But if those things become the dominating program whenever Christians meet, they will soon become a tradition. This is why a preoccupation with Bible studies or even prayer can easily kill a healthy community, because such preoccupation values and emphasizes one agenda over the others. This misplaced emphasis ultimately attracts and involves people quickly into a program, which is easy for the first few months, but eventually requires that we invent follow-up programs and follow-ups to the follow-up programs.

Forcing an agenda on every meeting can potentially harm or even prevent community and fellowship, because it may introduce an overriding focus to the community and squeeze it into a predefined direction. The very agenda drivenness of the cell church introduces a condition, and conditional fellowship is limited fellowship. Many such programs or agendas develop because Christians are told that their meetings are for evangelistic purposes. But this evangelistic structure carries built-in evangelistic pressure to perform, which accounts for much of the startling burn-out figures of cell churches.

“When we realized this with a shock, we closed down all our prayer meetings,” says my friend Reverend D. Mohan of the thiry-thousand-member New Life Assemblies of God Church in Chennai, India.

In a house church, the idea is to come together in order to be together in the presence of Jesus, who might very well have an agenda for the asking. He will gladly reveal that agenda through His Holy Spirit and anyone present with a prophetic ministry: “Whenever you come together . . . let two or three prophets speak” (1 Corinthians 14:26, 29, NKJV). The core reason Christians ought to come together is to share and transfer life, and since life is not predictable, our meetings should not really be predictable either. This very issue of unpredictability makes house churches more attractive, at least for teenagers, which may be a pleasant side effect.

Rather than seeing church or cell groups as a series of program-driven, weekly meetings at 7:30 p.m. at Cherry Tree Lane, house churches see their essence as sharing lives. They might meet every day as in New Testament days or any other number of times that suits that particular group. Here the people are the resources, Jesus is the program, fellowship is the reason, multiplication is the outcome, and discipling the neighborhood is the goal.

Pyramid or flat structure. Almost everything that humans touch—buildings, companies, politics—grows into a bigger and higher structure, with any amount of levels, stairs, hierarchies, and pyramid schemes. Beyond the Tabernacle, which was a tent, the Temple was the only building God ever designed, and it was flat, not multistoried. The cell church usually develops quickly into a pyramid structure with the senior pastor on top, followed downward by assistant pastors, directors of pastoral care departments, district pastors, subdistrict pastors, section leaders, and finally, at the bottom, the home cell leaders with their assistant home cell leader and spiritual parents. Power-based structures like this bring with them the danger of political corruption: the closer you are to the man at the top, the more power or influence you might have. In such a setup, spiritual authority is defined by how close someone is to the source of power, which is the leader himself. The closer you are to the leader, the higher you climb on the ladder.

Like the Temple, the house church has a flat structure. The various tasks are not executed by people within a hierarchy, but by those who are uniquely gifted for particular ministries, people who are relating to each other as redeemed friends and submitting themselves to each other. In the New Testament, there was no inferiority or superiority among members of the church, but equality. No one was more important than the others (1 Corinthians 12:21-25), but everyone simply had to fulfill a different function within the body.

Ministry leadership, therefore, is not to be delegated top-down, but instead should be earned through a spirit of humble servanthood. The structure is flat, because there is no one higher or more important than any other person. Because it is not all that impressive to be the humble elder of thirteen people—or even to serve as a teacher, pastor, or evangelist for a number of house churches—this structure limits the potential for corruption in terms of money and power in the church. Consider the following:

a. house churches are parented by elders

b. more elders are constantly being equipped and trained by people who have been called by God for one of the fivefold ministries

c. those spiritual equippers relate to what I call apostolic regional fathers, people with an apostolic and prophetic gifting, plus a special calling from God for a city, a region, or a nation. Those apostolic fathers, usually recognizable by the almost unbearable agony and spiritual pain they bear for a place, a city, a nation, or a people group, become the local backbone, the regional or national “pillars of faith,” anchoring the whole movement of house churches and being responsible for any celebrations and the city church that will emerge.

The house church is typically part of an interdependent network, a truly self-regulating system of interrelated elements or clusters of house churches. “The biotic principle of interdependence states that the way the individual parts are integrated into a whole system is more important than the parts themselves. This is nature’s blueprint: structured interdependence,” says Christian Schwarz.7

Leaders’ ladder or elders and apostles. Humans love leaders, as evidenced by the popular slogan, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” In the days of Saul, God was already King of the Israelites, but the nation wanted a human king instead. The shift from a theocracy (where God rules) to a monarchy (where a king rules) was extraordinary. Not only did this shift mean a very serious financial burden (royals simply cost a lot) but it also introduced an extra layer of government that prohibited people from directly relating to God as He intended. Now they had to go through middle management that, at some point, started to act like it was the divine boss. Today we are in the same danger.

The world—including the traditional church—wants leaders rather than servants. Maybe we want what God is not willing to give, but instead of seeing the futility of our attempts, we carry on with what we think is persistence. Just like a human body, the body of Christ is not designed to have many leaders but many different members, all with different functions. As those members function together in collective obedience to their Head, so the whole body is literally led by the Head. To call one member a leader over the others—in spite of the presence of the Head—would be grossly misleading. Jesus is the Head of the church, and He is all the leadership the church truly needs. The church is led when its members obey its Head. The church experiences leadership as people collectively obey their Head and function together in unity.

If we want to see a biblical kind of leadership, we must stop blindly assuming and usurping leadership of the church, as if leading is the most natural thing to do. Humans assume there must be leadership in everything. It is part of our creational brief. Our creational brief is to rule over the animals and the land. However, the church is an exception because the church is not our invention or property. The church is truly God’s. This idea runs so contrary to our human thinking. Supernatural faith in a God who has things under control is required for those who want to be true and faithful stewards of His church. That is also why God chooses to rule His church through apostolic and prophetic people who tend to have the charismatic gift of faith more than others. Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Community Church, puts it this way: “For a church to grow, both the pastor and the people must give up control.”8

Leadership in the political sense of assuming the last responsibility, filling a job description within a program, or taking on some delegated authority from someone else, is simply not good enough for the church. That will choke its development as Saul choked Israel, or as kinglike bishops choked the development of the church by leading it into meaningless and religious chiefdoms.

The body of Christ requires humble and faithful stewards, functioning in obedience to Christ and in mutual love, respect, and submission to each other—not to highly professional “leaders” who build kingdoms around their own personalities or personal gifting. The church requires Christlike stewards to handle God’s oikonomia (the management of His household). It needs people who know that they themselves are led by Christ.

A cell group usually has a leader and an assistant leader; a house church has an elder. There is a huge difference. For instance, I am the father and husband of a small family, but few would refer to me as the leader of my family.

While it is part of a father’s responsibility to lead, it is not necessarily part of a leader’s responsibility to father. House churches are by nature spiritual extended families, extension centers of the heavenly Father’s heart. No church in the New Testament was said to be “led” by a pastor or any other leader, though there were always God-ordained people—stewards—who carried a special responsibility for the church: the elders, the apostles, and the prophets. Again, this does not mean that these individuals were leaders.

Few would turn to a steward to ask for his business card. The stewards of the church are servants, and the more they serve the more they will ultimately lead in a way that is upside-down to the way the world expects leadership (Luke 22:26). An obedient and humble servant can lead because he is led. Leadership, if it is to be present at all, is therefore a function of obedience.

For a cell church with a pyramid structure and leaders trained at every level, it is quite possible for a new professionalism and clericalism to enter through the back door. In addition, many cell churches have a “leaders’ ladder,” where people can work themselves “up.” In addition to the danger of competition in such a career structure, this also means that people usually perform their tasks for only a short time, and then move on. What if God has called a person simply to be an elder, and never fashioned him or her to become assistant senior pastor at all?

Headquartered or decentralized. The cell church usually has an impressive headquarters, typically as an expression of the unique ministry of its senior pastor and his close associates. House churches are more of a decentralized system with many different centers—homes—that can change at any time, if needed. I was reminded of this facet of house churches while speaking in Allen Yuan’s house church in Beijing, which is networked invisibly “under the radar” with many other house churches. All this networking happens from a single bedroom with a few chairs and a tiny porch, in a home that is located in a small alley too narrow for a car to pass through, just behind a bustling market.

House churches demonstrate more of a flexible, pilgrim mentality; their members are on the move, just as God’s Spirit is on the move. Cell churches are more settled than that; they have developed roots and an administrative structure, and they usually broadcast the message that they are “here to stay.” One of the negative aspects of having a headquarters is that it generates the need for a lot of organizing and administration. And this introduces bureaucracy. A bureaucratic system of administration throws the door wide open for the kind of people who will ultimately account, organize, administrate, manage, sell, run, control—and therefore, kill—the church.

Bureaucracy can be avoided quite easily in house churches because everything is relational, which means the atmosphere is simply more humane. There is not much more to organize in a house church than there is within an extended family. The church is not a company that needs quality control, a business philosophy, and a plan for maximum customer satisfaction. With the church, we can have a more humble approach, knowing that God is in control. Since there is a Head—and naturally a headquarters in heaven, we can have as many small outlets of this heavenly chain of churches as possible. God does not lose track of them; He has the final oversight.

In frantically trying to help God run His business by establishing visible and impressive cathedrals and headquarters on earth, we might have actually unwittingly hindered Him, because these structures may have shouted glory to humanity so loudly that we’ve drowned out the glory of the Lamb in the process.

Mandatory or optional celebrations. The cell church typically requires both the cell and the celebration in order to function well. But the house church can exist independently of celebrations, especially in a hostile environment. The celebrations of cell churches often have a denominational character—it is our brand of cell groups that meet in our celebration—whereas the house churches favor more regional or citywide celebrations that bring together all of the Christians in an area. One form builds a new denominationalism; the other builds the Kingdom. Which is more biblical?

High and low visibility. Since the house church can function with or without a celebration or an administrative headquarters, it is obviously much less visible. In many areas, house churches can function for a long time without being noticed at all by the public. The interdependent network structure of a house-church movement links the churches under the radar, through an invisible and flat structure so that even the celebration happens as the fivefold ministry rotates through the house churches and carries with it good news, greetings, gifts, and vision. This type of Christianity makes a much more humble statement about itself, which is especially important in areas of the world with a lot of religious bigotry, where religious movements try to outdo each other by competing to see who can have the highest steeple. Low visibility of human structures also means high visibility of God’s hand in the church. Finally, a low-visibility structure is much more persecution proof and better prepared for all apocalyptic eventualities than massive cell churches with a vulnerable top man and hub.

Evangelistic or apostolic and prophetic. Many have correctly understood that the cell church is an evangelistic model of church. And if we agreed that evangelism was the need of the hour, we might feel prone to go with the flow and build evangelistically as well. However, as I have already pointed out, the long-term driving force of a church is not its evangelistic vision but its solid apostolic and prophetic foundation (Ephesians 2:20). In this way, the apostolic outward focus and the prophetic vision for the past, the present, and the future are literally built in. I believe that house churches are often apostolic and prophetic, because that is exactly the way the New Testament apostles and prophets built the church. Evangelists have never played the main role in propagating the church; the growth of the church has always been the ministry of prophetic and apostolically gifted people. The apostolic and prophetic church as a new way of life is good news in itself, and it does not really need evangelism to drive it, especially considering all the unhealthy pressure to perform that comes with it.

A good example of the problems of an evangelism-driven church can be found in Argentina, a country that has been experiencing revival since roughly 1982 when it lost a war with Great Britain. Gifted evangelists like Carlos Annacondia, Hector Gimenez, and Omar Cabrera sprang up at that time and had massive evangelistic rallies of almost unheard-of proportions, counting the “decisions for Christ” by the tens of thousands. However, since that time these men have had to honestly ask themselves where all those people are now. Pastors in Argentina have found it difficult to incorporate the many people who made decisions for Christ into existing or newly planted churches.

A September 1996 study done by DAWN Ministries revealed that Argentina then had one of the lowest church-planting rates of all of Latin America.9 The large number of decisions for Christ had simply not translated into church growth. There must be a missing link. “Evangelism which pulls individuals out of their family context and provides no new context is half-baked and may well do more harm than good,” says Australian missiologist Alan Tippet.10

Back in the 1990s, Argentinian church planter Alberto de Luca saw church planting and multiplication as the prophetic way forward. Together with a growing number of pastors, Luca has been developing a national church-multiplication strategy in an effort to move from being evangelism driven to functioning in an apostolic and prophetic way. Good evangelism supports and functions in unity with the fivefold ministry; it is never isolated as a single force or a cure-all for the lost.

As we’ve already mentioned, the cell church seems to be an urban product, a model of church grown in a city or metropolitan climate. The city develops a particular culture that is quite different from the villages. In a village’s atmosphere of tight social control, everybody knows everybody, and people are directly responsible for their actions. In a city, however, individuals quickly get lost in the crowd and may start to feel that they do not have to stand up for the consequences of their actions. The city breeds a philosophy of its own, a hit-and-run approach, one in which any “salesman” understands that he needs to quickly touch as many people as he can with his product, because the next moment the customer will be gone. This philosophy has molded much of today’s evangelistic thinking, which has in turn grown into the cell-church approach. But as long as the church thinks that evangelists are the prophets, the true prophets will not be heard.

Denominational or citywide celebrations. Bill Beckham introduces a helpful picture of the church as a bird with two wings. One wing is the cell structure, the small gatherings of believers, and the other wing is the big worship service, or the celebration. A one-winged church, with only a celebration worship service is a restricted creature that can only fly in circles and cannot really soar like an eagle any more. It needs a second wing.11 I completely agree.

However, the core difference between house church and cell church in this regard is that cell churches typically develop a denominational, members-only type of celebration, such as a “Faith Community Baptist Church Celebration.”

For the house church, this celebration brings all of the house churches within a city or region together, either regularly or irregularly, and without a denominational label. It is simply the Christians of the city coming together and acting as one body. Instead of having a focus and identity on church level I (the house) and III (the city or region), a cell church usually focuses on level I (the house or cell) and II (a congregation), a certain cluster of “branded” cells within an area.

Coming Full Circle

One of the most striking aspects of cell churches is that most of them seem to be constantly in transition. In my view cell churches have made a brilliant start in the right direction, given the fact that a large proportion of the churches in the world are built according to the congregational model. However, I believe the cell-church movement has accomplished only half of a paradigm shift. They have not fully completed the circle and not yet finished the “second reformation,” as Bill Beckham calls it. My friend Ben Wong, a Hong Kong–based leader and tireless mission mobilizer in the worldwide cell-church movement, believes that a stronger focus on the Kingdom of God will help cell churches and house churches complement each other and work together in a number of areas.

I believe that God wants once more to turn the world upside down. He wants us to go full circle, returning back wholeheartedly to the New Testament model of house churches, incarnated in apostolic and prophetic ways into our soil, time, people groups, and cultures.

Though we know that Jesus will one day come back to establish His dominion, we are not there yet. Though we are experiencing the messianic Kingdom in the here and now, in many ways we are not experiencing it fully.

In biblical revelation, we meet Jesus in many forms, including the Lamb of God and the Lion of Judah. House churches are much more lamblike: fragile and vulnerable in nature. Many things can—and probably will— go wrong in the house church. But if anything positive is achieved through this movement, the ultimate glory will go to the Lamb of God Himself, not to an ingenious system, a fantastic human pastor, or an anointed concept. Like Jesus, we may be beaten, ridiculed, mocked, harmed, and even crucified on earth, but we will rule forever in His Kingdom to come.

6: No Progress without Change

How to avoid doing the new in the power of the old

A camel train was trotting through the desert. Suddenly someone was missing, requiring the group to turn back and look for the lost member. They finally found him, sitting under a tree in the last oasis they had passed. When they asked why he had stayed behind, he said, “My body moved so fast during the journey. I needed to wait for my spirit to catch up with me again.”

In a similar way, many Christians today find their spirits going far ahead of their present-day realities. They may experience a vision or a dream, in which they suddenly feel lifted away from their familiar lives and find themselves soaring above the plains and deserts, driven to unknown lands by the wind of the Spirit. When they wake up, they may feel challenged to go where they have not gone before, but they experience the classic tension between their visions of the future and the realities of the present.

This disconnect seems to happen to many Christians in regard to the nature of the church. Many are waiting for their bodies to catch up with their spirits and for the current church structures to match this new quality of church they are discovering. To turn around the illustration of our lost camel driver, their spirits have gone into the future and are now resting under a tree in an oasis, while their bodies still toil under the brutal sun of the desert.

A denominational leader once approached me after a seminar and said, “I am 100 percent convinced about house churches. But the denomination I lead is based on the traditional church model. What do I do now?” He had seen a new vision of church, but as a responsible leader he also saw his present-day realities and realized that his structures now had some catching up to do.

In almost every meeting, seminar, or conference on the subject of the house-based church movement, the same question inevitably arises: “I understand what you’re saying, and I’m totally with you. But how do I change the system without destroying the church?” I call this the how-to-cross-the-river-without-getting-my-feet-wet question.

After a seminar in an Asian country, I was walking with a local pastor back toward our sleeping quarters, and he asked me this very question. It was late, and I knew we didn’t have the time to go into an in-depth discussion, so I said rather casually, “Do you know what? If I were you, I would stop pastoring in the traditional sense. I would realize, in your case, that I have a more apostolic role, lay down my office, get my hands free, and start fathering and equipping a new generation of house-church planters.”

The man turned to me with a smile. “That is the answer I have been looking for these last seven years!” he exclaimed.

Can we really have progress without change? I do not think so. It’s painful, but all change is personal. It upsets routines and traditions. If we want to see new things happening in and through the church, we need to be prepared to make personal changes first, changes in the family second, and changes in our ministry third.

The following letter, even with its authenticity questioned by many, beautifully reflects the consequences of holding to a philosophy of defending the status quo:

31 January 1829

To President Jackson

The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as “railroads.” The federal government must preserve the canals for the following reasons:

1. If canal boats are supplanted by “railroads,” serious unemployment will result. Captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen and lock tenders will be left without means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers now employed in growing hay for the horses.

2. Boat builders would suffer, and towline, whip, and harness makers would be left destitute.

3. Canal boats are absolutely essential to defend the United States. In the event of the expected trouble with England, the Erie Canal would be the only means by which we could ever move the supplies so vital to waging modern war.

As you may well know, Mr. President, “railroad” carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of fifteen miles per hour by “engines” which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.

Martin Van Buren,

Governor of New York.1

Four Phases of a Paradigm Shift

If we want to see practical changes, our paradigm must change first. A paradigm is the way we see and interpret the world according to a built-in pattern or worldview. A paradigm shift typically has four stages.

Search for it

False contentedness is the biggest enemy of change. Unless we ask pertinent and pointed questions, and unless we have a burning desire to search for new answers, we won’t have room to accept a new insight, let alone a new paradigm. But typically a paradigm shift starts with a crisis, an occurrence that causes our safe and sound world—our traditional way of explaining things—to simply fall to pieces. This crisis can be caused by an accident or a revelation, a negative or positive experience with something that simply does not fit into our worldview. Fortunately, crisis tends to give birth to creativity.

Preach it

When we find what we have been searching for, we also experience the overwhelming thrill and excitement of finally “finding it.” For this reason, I call this phase “the eureka phase.” We may be so excited that we want to tell everyone about our discovery—in an almost evangelistic or apologetic fashion. It may be, however, that we’ve found only a piece of the truth—a fragment of a larger piece—but we have been thirsty for so long that all we want to do is drink, drink, drink. This phase is the most dangerous, because our excitement may drive us to immature and naive statements or actions that are difficult to redeem later.

Live it

In this third phase we symbolically sit down, wipe the emotional foam off our lips, and start to become an integral part of our newfound paradigm. We stop preaching and defending our discovery, and we begin to live it.

Teach it

This last phase turns us into an agent of change, as we begin helping others to discover the paradigm we have found ourselves and assist them in making the necessary changes themselves.

Three Options of Change

It can be extremely frustrating to try to do something new through the power of the old. Praising the advantages of a typewriter by sending out text messages over iPhones and BlackBerries would not make a huge impact. In His teaching about new wine in old wineskins, Jesus said that two so radically different elements as new wine and old wineskins cannot be mixed without doing damage to both the wine and the wineskins. The same principle is true for the new patch on old cloth (Matthew 9:16-17). That gives us three options for change.

Do not change at all. If you believe that change will be too costly, too upsetting, too painful, too frightening, or too insecure, then stay where you are. Maintain your current structure, expand it, and work from within it. God will bless you. Not everyone has an apostolic or prophetic ministry. Do the best you can to use your structure for good, and keep close and personal relationships—open doors and bridges of communication—to those who have made a different choice. You may need each other in the days ahead. Maybe God will open doors for cooperation in the future with people who will help you, your church, your organization, or your denomination to be ready to change. Prepare yourself for that day now.

Attempt a compromise. Try to “dance at two weddings at the same time.” Pour new wine into old wineskins, or old wine into new wineskins, and try to live in both worlds. This is, from all I have seen, a sure recipe for disaster. You may very well enter a phase of transitioning and never leave it.

Prepare for change. Your spirit may have gone far ahead. Now you may have to simply wait for the structures to catch up with it. Let me spell out for you in practical terms what this would mean, should you be willing to take this road.

Beyond the Titanic model

The best and most radical kind of change might be to start all over again. Changing from one setup to another means crossing over from one camp to another, and it won’t be easy. There are many ways to do it, but they are all dangerous and costly. Change of this magnitude takes time, energy, and money. Companies spend millions of dollars anticipating and implementing change in order to remain in business or gain markets.

However, sometimes changes do not change a thing. Instead they simply help us to soothe our minds and our emotions, and give us the temporary illusion that we are doing something. Someone might decide to paint the sanctuary a different color, move the piano from the left to the right side of the stage, or merge with another, similar organization. I call this type of change the Titanic model. When the Titanic struck an iceberg, no amount of changing the furniture, repainting the ship, or even restructuring the compartments could help. These changes would have had only cosmetic value and would have quickly become obsolete as the ship itself was sinking into oblivion.

Most changes in history did not result through safe democratic processes, but instead from people whose actions and ideas were considered quite radical. Very few innovations or true changes were initiated by committees and boards; most came from visionary people who saw what no one else saw, said what no one else dared to say, and did what was forbidden in their time. Many of yesterday’s revolutionaries, like Martin Luther, William Booth, John Wesley, and Hudson Taylor, have become today’s trusted pillars of the church. Many of them created churches or movements that today have become so vast and administratively complex that it is almost certain the decision-making responsibility of these current systems lies with more than just one visionary person.

Yet change starts with people, and you may be just the man or the woman for the job. I encourage you to start with what is at hand. Start with what is within your personal or organizational jurisdiction, no matter how small or large it may be. George Bernard Shaw once said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”2 In this sense, how unreasonable do we dare to be?

The Apostolic Migration of Christianity

Today, as we are well into the third millennium, most parts of worldwide Protestantism lie in a veritable depression. The symptoms? Deep resignation, self-centeredness, and the absence of growth. Other symptoms include churches that seem to be at a standstill in spite of hectic activity, alarming burnout rates (especially of the “good leaders”), a need to cling to the old and trusted, idolizing and even worshiping tradition, and seeking security and identity in denominationalism or religious confessionalism. Psychologically speaking, this depression takes the form of a more manic, frantic reaction, celebrating what I call a vicarious revival—an attempt to partake in other people’s breakthroughs by copying their spiritual experiences and pragmatic how-to methods.

It seems that this depressed state represents a Christianity that God has pulled the plug on—but no one has yet noticed. I once heard the story of a Korean pastor visiting the West for the first time. After being shown around for some time, this pastor finally exclaimed, “It’s amazing what you people can do without the Holy Spirit!” We need to stop consuming—and start learning.

Martin Luther spoke of a Babylonian captivity of the church, and I believe the majority of the church is still captive, after centuries of breaking almost every rule in God’s Book, preferring human traditions over apostolic patterns, and literally celebrating the absence of any biblical order as if doing so were freedom.

But this unfortunate set of circumstances is changing as a result of a huge initiative of God’s Spirit. Those people who echo what the Spirit is saying to the churches are beginning to get restless and starting to move. A migration of birds or fish is caused by a corporate response of animals to a “call of nature.” Could it be that, figuratively speaking, the Holy Spirit stands at the Babylon Railway Station, blowing His whistle and calling everyone to wake up, get packed, and join the great migration into God’s Promised Land? It’s time to get back to our roots and return to a genuine, apostolic, and prophetic understanding of the Christian faith. This call has gripped the hearts and minds of millions, and today it lies at the center of the present realignment and reconfiguration of the church.

A global spiritual migration usually happens in phases and it is a bit like moving from one mountain peak to another. From Peak B (Babylon), we have a great view of Peak P (prophetic apostolic Christianity). Though it looks like you can almost touch one peak from the other, you can’t move from B to P easily. You must embark on an often difficult descent from one mountaintop, negotiate the valley in between mountains, and then ascend an entirely different mountain. Not everyone will succeed.

Let’s take a brief look at the five phases of a spiritual migration journey. I call them Utopia “-2 to +2”:

Point -2: Our church is just great!

This is where most Christians are today: content with where they are in their church experience. When you talk to them about the need for a new paradigm, their response is basically, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” They view their church and their faith as a safe religious haven. The new choir is great, the last conference was outstanding, the new pastor seems very promising, and the building and parking lot are almost paid off. Any talk of a Babylonian captivity is considered a joke at best.

But this ostrich mentality can quickly evolve into a dance on the tip of a volcano. Once the finances get tight and burnout strikes, people start leaving for the hip church next door; or once something happens to an idolized leader, the cards can quickly collapse. People at Point -2 need to hear a simple message: the days of old-time religion are over. It’s time to get up and start moving, or keep drifting into a religious oblivion.

Point -1: The Balancing Act

This second phase in the process of apostolic migration represents people who are no longer satisfied with church as they have known it. These are people who have heard from God about more authentic expressions of church, but although they want something new to happen, they don’t want anything to change. Their spirits have begun to move, but their bodies and their money have not. And so they begin to feel stretched as they attempt to maintain a spiritual balancing act. It’s like realizing that you’ve gotten on the wrong bus but you choose to stay on that bus anyway. You see, the seat is nicely warmed, the neighbors are so very friendly, and the ticket has been paid. And after all, what would people think?

People at Point -1 are inwardly torn. A fresh vision has gripped them and left them hungry. With time the tension grows only stronger and stronger—until the pain becomes unbearable and they get up and press that red button to get off the bus. The message for folks at Point -1 is this: be honest with yourself, follow your heart, end the balancing act, and press that button.

Ground 0: Welcome to the desert

This is where people decide to get off the bus and suddenly find themselves in the middle of a desert. Alone and vulnerable, sweating in the day and shivering at night, they may face a time of thirst, dark valleys, and reorientation. Experiencing what the biblical kernel of wheat must feel as it falls into the ground to die (John 12:24), people at Ground 0 realize that the old must die in order to make room for the new. This is where pastors and other leaders start selling shoes and driving taxis again. Yes, they may have migrated from Babylon, but now the Babylon that is in them has to die.

Ground 0 is a place of quarantine: once people are out of the system, the system also has to get out of them. For this very reason God engineers the wilderness as a place of spiritual death to the old, a place of “religious detoxification” for dealing with baggage. In the desert, your religious ego, your fleshly, consumer-oriented Christianity has to be killed. And this cleansing process takes time, more time than most would think. As a rule of thumb, one month quarantine is required for each year of passive participation in traditional Christianity. For active members (like paid church/mission staff), double that!

The message for folks at this waypoint is this: die thoroughly! Don’t linger at the oasis and force your survival with gimmicks or tricks. God has arranged for your self to die.

Point +1: The Jordan

This is the point at which people choose to leave the past and the wilderness behind and to cross over the Jordan into the new paradigm of what God is doing. This requires both a leaving (of the old) and a cleaving (to the new). It requires us to “uncovenant” with what has gone before, and to make a new covenant with God’s new unfolding paradigm. Jonathan is an example, albeit a bad one, of someone who attempted to make this type of choice. Though he was the son of King Saul and the rightful heir to the throne of Israel, Jonathan covenanted twice with David, the new (apostolic) leader. But “(David) rose and departed, while Jonathan went into the city” (1 Samuel 20:42, NASB). Jonathan was unable to “uncovenant” from Saul and his system—and he died with his father. Here at “the Jordan,” where we can already smell and see the Promised Land, and where we can hear the cowbells in the “land flowing with milk and honey” on the other side, an ultimate step is required: leaving the old; doing better than Jonathan.

And as an added benefit, you will have met many new friends in the desert, fellow pilgrims and outcasts. After some time you realize that what once looked like a lonely group of losers looks more like a movement of pioneers. The message to folks at Point +1: say your farewell quickly—and get into the water. You will see it will part for you when you do.

Point +2: Apostolic Conquest

Once you have crossed that Jordan, it’s time to take up your position along with the others and start taking the land for God. Here you need to answer three key questions for your life:

What exactly is your personal calling?

Where (geographically) are you supposed to live and work?

With whom has God placed you?

A former question like, “What church is good for me?” begins to fade and is replaced by much more important ones like, “What kind of church can take and possess the land?” “What kind of church is good for God?” Like in the early days of Christianity, questions like these will lead to developing regional strategies, house-church networks, city churches, fivefold ministries, citywide servanthood, and much, much more. As the church is again functioning under God, so also we as individuals and families will find our places of godly destiny. If this is not worth dropping everything else for, then what is?

At what phase in this migration are you? What will be your next step?

7: All Change Is Practical

The last step you want to take determines your next step

“That means that we have to change almost everything we do!” exclaimed a well-known mission leader in India after hearing about house churches. Now, only a few years later, India has experienced a veritable explosion of house churches. Studies like the one done by the IMB, the International Missions Board of the Southern Baptists, indicates that thousands of new house churches have been planted, and in many other countries people have been inspired and challenged by the work of spiritual parents like Dr. Victor and Bindu Choudhrie.

Let’s face it. Not everything will change when we start to develop house-church movements. The eternal gospel, its content, and many quality insights that the church of the past has discovered and taught us, will remain—and need to remain. But some changes will have some very serious theological and practical consequences for the church, for church growth, for church planting, and also for missions. “Truth never damages a cause that is just,” said Mahatma Gandhi.1 This material, however, is not intended to criticize any particular church. We have to move beyond that. In genuine love and appreciation for each other, we are all called to be part of the solution, and not to remain part of the problem.

Many Christian leaders agree that even if we were to multiply what we do today by a factor of ten, it is not going to make a big difference in terms of discipling the nations. Sometimes I am startled to observe issues and areas of ministry where seemingly no amount of empirical research and truth can change our thinking for good. How foolish to act before knowing the facts! (Proverbs 18:13).

In many countries, the population is still growing faster than the church, and even large evangelistic projects barely scratch the surface of the need.

Are Sacred Cows Standing in the Way of the Lamb?

It may be neither the first nor the last time that the people of God have been deaf to God’s true intentions while they dance around a golden cow. Most leaders agree today that the obstacles to the extension of the Kingdom of God are much more inside our own thinking than anywhere else. The key problems of churches and missions today, many contend, are not money or the -isms of the day; rather they exist in the “hard ground” of our own heads, hidden in those unquestioned concepts, axioms, long-grown convictions, and man-made traditions that have become so dear and sacred to us that even daring to touch them is for many an act of heresy.

This is the “sacred cow syndrome,” where seemingly holy spiritual concepts block the road to the Lamb of God, daring to sleep in the streets and make the public drive around them. Rather than passively accepting the cow, we sometimes need to sound the horn. Who knows? The cow might actually move so that the road clears and life goes on.

Paying the Price

One of the prices we pay for house-church Christianity is lessening the emphasis on individual freedom and focusing more on collective obedience to Christ. If we want what Christ wants, we will no longer be willing to simply go along with whatever everyone else is doing. No longer will our homes be our own. No longer will our cars belong to us. In the West, the lifestyles of many Christians are still centered on careers, TV, hobbies, privacy, and pets. We sugarcoat our faith with a thin layer of Christian behavior: attending church services, praying before meals, and listening to Christian music. This is not much different from the lifestyle of the average person living in the West where almost everything is geared toward the pursuit of personal security, success, fun, and even individual spiritual growth.

Those who live in the non-Western world have their own challenges as well. Those challenges start with overcoming an addiction to wrong priorities, where family honor and clan and tribal allegiance often still come firmly before an allegiance to God, and where strong shame-oriented cultures make it difficult to say the plain truth and confess sins to one other, since conversations always remain on a polite, religious surface.

In other words, without transformation that starts with repentance, the crucifixion of self, and, yes, even some of our cultural values and habits, there will be little redemptive power left to touch and transform our societies with the gospel. Christianity has never been cheap; it was always meant to cost us our very lives.

For almost two thousand years, people have tried to come up with a compromise between the claims of God’s Kingdom and the spirit of this world. Unfortunately, some of the sad consequences of aligning ourselves with the world in order to be fashionable and modern have become an institutionalized part of the way we think and “do church.” Some have become part of our heritage and cherished tradition, and may now be painful and difficult to rethink. However, Paul’s message on the subject is short and simple: Since I became a disciple of Christ, I as my old self no longer exist, but Christ lives in me (Galatians 2:20).

Cutting Out the Double Standards

As any pastor of a traditional church knows, it is not only fairly easy, but also quite common, for Sunday-morning-Wednesday-night Christians to live by double standards. Many have a secret second life hidden away for years from their own congregations or pastors. Many harbor petty sins for decades without anyone knowing. This is due in part to the fact that out of the 168 hours that exist in a week, Christians in traditional, meeting-oriented churches typically spend only three or four together. This is simply not enough time to effectively transfer life and Kingdom values, to develop deep relationships, to make disciples, and to lay down our lives for each other.

House-church Christianity will greatly reduce the number of Christians leading a compromising lifestyle—one that tries to make the best of both worlds—because it involves us deeply in everyday community and healthy ongoing accountability. And though it will cost us dearly, if our lifestyles can help to save real people from a real hell, it is worth it.

Practical Consequences

Let’s take a look at some of the most important practical consequences of a house-church setup and some key issues we may need to address as we start developing a house-church movement.

1. We will start being church rather than doing church. Rather than going to church, we will start becoming the church— seven days a week. In a true house-church movement, church will cease to be an organized Sunday morning activity and will start being the corporate, organic, local lifestyle of Christians.

2. Church will be holistic, touching all of life. When church again becomes part of everyday life, all of life will become touched and transformed by God. The gospel of the Kingdom will again be expressed in “words, works, and wonders,” reflecting the triune and holistic God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

3. Churches will be financially secure. Many traditional church-planting activities and mission movements have a significant limiting factor: money. They need money for outreach activities, a land or building purchase, and pastors’ salaries. Then they need money for parsonages, chairs, a sound system, and an overhead projector. Not so with house churches. House churches don’t cost money; they produce money, which can then be used to financially support the fivefold ministry, which, in turn, supports the church spiritually. House churches simply do not need a full-time professional pastor; any person with the qualification of an elder will do.

4. Churches will have plenty of good leaders. After money, the second loudest complaint of the church is that there are never enough leaders. For a typical congregational church, a large number of people are needed to organize and lead the various programs, to preach, to teach, to play the organ, to raise funds, to organize and conduct meetings, and to run Bible studies throughout the week.

In changing to a house-church setup, we would no longer require professional or semiprofessional leaders to fit the congregational structure. Instead we would have a structure tailor-made for all the people. Such a structure would also solve the global problem of spiritual unemployment. Spiritual gifts’ research studies like the one done by Natural Church Development indicate that about 70 percent of all Christians are spiritually unemployed with no way to get involved in their church systems—even as the leaders of the very systems are crying out for more leaders. In a house church, everyone participates and has a spiritual task.

5. Churches will meet in ready-made buildings. Instead of having to build, buy, or lease bigger or newer buildings, house churches use what is already available in abundance: homes of every kind and shape. We simply use the existing houses and their facilities to multiply the church.

6. We will see a new quality of conversions. Most traditional churches organize outreach and evangelistic programs in order to get more people to attend the church. My own research into the retention rate of traditional evangelism indicates that, on average, only one in one hundred who make a decision for Christ in evangelistic meetings, rallies, conventions, or crusades will actually start attending a church.2 That means Christians lose ninety-nine out of one hundred new converts. Not only is this costly in terms of money and people, it also speaks of a very low quality of the conversions produced through such activities. Instead of encouraging individual spiritual seekers to parrot prayers, such as, “Repeat after me to invite Jesus into your heart,” house churches allow much more relational conversions, often of whole families and households, and they create built-in support to help each other grow in the faith after conversion.

For a quality conversion to occur, contends David Pawson in his book The Normal Christian Birth, we need personal repentance, personal faith, personal infilling of the Holy Spirit, and baptism. Operating very differently from the rushed atmosphere of evangelistic rallies and follow-up meetings, the house church provides the natural framework for such personal attention, and so improves the quality of the conversions, reduces problems in the church generated by half-baked conversions, and improves the overall quality of the church in a locality.

7. We will eat and drink together. Jesus told his disciples not to go from door to door (Luke 10:7). Yet, the foundations of many evangelistic activities include door-to-door strategies. This has very serious consequences. In Luke 10, Jesus sent his disciples two by two, without money, to find a “man of peace” in a village. He said they should enter this person’s house, forming an immediate nucleus church with that third member. Then they were to eat and drink whatever was given to them.

Eating and drinking is a very significant means of identifying with a new group. If we appreciate what they serve us to eat, our hosts might appreciate what we have to say. Many Christians today take their own food with them when they enter a village or community for outreach. But if they don’t trust that the people in that community will provide them with clean, healthy food, how can they expect the people to trust them (or their God) with their eternal lives in return? In many societies, hospitality is a God-given task; if strangers come to a village and knock at a door, it is the task of that family to host them. If, however, those strangers are seen leaving the first house and knocking on other doors, the villagers have only two possible conclusions: either something is terribly wrong with the first house, or the strangers are, in fact, not guests at all, but salespeople, criminals, or members of a cult. In either case, the visitors might win a few people for some time, but ultimately they will lose the village.

Evangelistic door-knocking usually involves knocking at a great number of doors in order to end up with a small handful of people. Apostolic–prophetic church planting usually works the other way around; it moves from the few to the many. Finding and staying in the right house is one area where the prophet’s gifts are needed; it is more important to find and stay in the right house than to knock on the doors of many houses. By first establishing a quality house church and by giving peace to the house, we gain a foothold for discipling the whole village or city.

8. Missions will be redefined. At the heart of both traditional and contemporary missions is the congregational understanding of church. From this static center we reach out to others in proximity of the church building, trying to get them to come to church—and we call it evangelism. If we reach out abroad or across significant social and ethno-linguistic barriers, we call it missions. If the house church, however, is the center of our missionary understanding, the static church can stop identifying and sending mobile specialists—the missionaries—and instead send itself by simply acting apostolically as a whole. The church, in the best sense of the word, again becomes the mission, the sender, as well as the sent ones.

By sending forth multipliable units of itself, the church, with its spiritual DNA, changes everything it touches and deposits its spiritual message into every culture and language. This type of missions spreads much like an infection, where the virus introduces its own genetic code into every host cell that it touches, transforming the cells into its own image. Or to consider another example, missions regains the dynamics of yeast, which reproduces itself. Instead of bringing more people to the church, we bring the church to more people.

9. There will be more authenticity. The congregational type of church is geared toward a stage performance. The emphasis is on conducting the meeting, delivering the message, performing the functions, and celebrating the rites. But with so many spectators involved, it is not a structure for discipleship at all. This type of church lends itself to acting—going through the motions without emotions and performing the outward forms without content, while the spectators remain empty and void behind a smoke screen of nods, hallelujahs, and amens. By returning the church to normal life—away from artificially conducted meetings—authenticity and authority would be restored locally, right in the neighborhoods. This leads to less acting and more significant action.

10. Church will become part of a larger network. When computers are linked by cables or telephone wires, we differentiate between a Local Area Network (LAN), and a Wider Area Network (WAN). The LAN could be part of a WAN, which is exactly the way house churches develop.

A local network of interdependent house churches (LAN) interlinks with a wider network of house churches (WAN) in the district, the city, or the state; they exchange ministries and work together in a strategic partnership toward a goal of saturation church planting.

11. The church will have a better chance of reaching Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. It is no secret that today’s current church setup seems to appeal only to the marginalized and lower-caste adherents of other faiths. For many Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, entering a church building itself is a spiritual, cultural, social, and philosophical problem. As relational family-style house churches develop—similar in style to the extended family culture from which these three religions have come—a more welcoming and less taboo environment is created, helping people raised in other faiths to learn about Jesus Christ in an appropriate fashion. Already today we see that of all possible church structures, house churches have by far the greatest potential to grow among Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist people groups.

12. The church will thrive in socialist and communist cultures. The traditional church has not done particularly well in attracting the attention and excitement of many intellectuals, social entrepreneurs, atheists, socialists, and communists. But let’s consider for a moment what these groups of people value most: the redistribution of wealth, sharing resources, and justice for all. These are all New Testament values, which the congregational church has preached but not always lived.

Communism as an ideology is still a powerful attraction today because it focuses on justice, the rights of the poor, and the redistribution of wealth, if necessary by force. But although Vladimir Lenin’s communism spoke of “power to the people,” that power was ultimately usurped by the elitist few toward the top of the power pyramid.

As Christians, we need to avoid a romantic version of early communism, because though our faith also speaks of power to the people, it provides a God-given delivery and accountability system for that power: the church, where God’s power is facilitated through the humble services of elders and members of the fivefold ministry.

Communism does not deal with the root problem of corruption and sin so those people who redistribute wealth are as fallen and sinful as those from whom they take it; more corruption and dictatorship is usually the result.

With their emphasis on sharing resources and with their absence of dictator-type leaders, house churches are particularly effective in current or historically socialist or communist societies like Russia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and Ethiopia. In many ways, communism has been a strategic ally in preparing people for a massive house-church movement. The house church, without much propaganda, can do locally what the government cannot do nationally. The house church provides the right structure for life in a working model, because it has found the solution to the root problem, sin.

13. The excitement level will rise. Far fewer people in traditional congregational churches are mobilized for actual ministry than in small house churches. Even in a traditional church of fewer than one hundred attendees, only 31 percent are involved in a ministry corresponding to their spiritual gifts. In a larger church, the figure is only 17 percent. It is a known fact that involved people are excited people, and uninvolved people quickly become bored. With its participatory lifestyle, the house church is immediately able to involve almost everyone. As a result, more people get excited. Excited people excel, and excellent people attract.

Practical Issues

If we want to see new developments, we need to do new things. Let’s consider a few practical areas that are going to require a new approach as we develop house churches.

Restore the family

Western culture is often focused strongly on the individual, at the expense of the family. But secure families, even those with only a single parent, are a much more stable social unit than today’s double-earning couples who scorn Christian traditions for the sake of a short life in luxury. Children in these families are often insecure, troubled, and violent. Left alone while their parents pursue careers or social significance, these kids grow up restless and stressed.

The family has been sacrificed on the altar of economic and social success, and only the church can break that cycle, because it has found a better and more humane way to live: for God. A right relationship between man and woman as the core of the family is also at the core of the house church. My friend Kari Törmä, who initiated Whole Marriage Ministries in Finland, believes that we need to focus on the most demanding relationship in the world, the one between husband and wife, to create a healthy foundation for the church and society. “Whoever can take care of his marriage and take care of his family, can also take care of the church,” she says.3

One of the best things a father, for example, can do for his children is to love their mother. Within a family house-church setting, true fathers and mothers can emerge, and healthy families can be restored. Children can contribute in their own ways to the house church just by being who they are, bringing out the vulnerable and soft aspects of adults, taking the rough edges off of conversations, making the group laugh and cry, and humbling and amazing everyone in the room. The planting of house churches, therefore, may very well start in the relationship of husband and wife and in the restoration of the family.

Develop empowering structures

Jesus gave the early disciples the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 16:19), and they turned the ancient world upside down (Acts 17:6, NKJV). Similarly as Christians, we do not draw power from each other, but from God. Our job on earth, however, is to help bring out the best in each other. The core of the great commission is discipling, which is basically empowering others as God has empowered us.

I once met a young and dynamic pastor who served under another pastor he called a “mighty servant of the Lord.” This young man faithfully led the worship, did what he was asked to do, and humbly served the senior servant. However, he was never given real responsibility. After six years he was ready to leave his position; he felt powerless and knew he was losing his passion for ministry. He moved to another church network, where the senior pastor immediately saw his potential and how he could fit into the church’s own vision and strategy. Unfortunately, the young man fell from the frying pan into the fire. In this new church he was not discipled and empowered; instead he was used—and used up.

If we do not disciple and empower others as Jesus did, we end up exploiting them and using them for our own ends, even if we clothe our actions in very spiritual terms.

If our churches want to disciple and empower nations, we must focus on discipling people first.

As we commit to the principles of discipling and empowering, we must determine to develop appropriate forms and systems that support these principles on local, regional, national, and even international levels, without making the mistake of allowing organizational forms to take on a life of their own again.

Develop the gifts of every member

Ten percent of the world suffers from injuries and disability. One way to empower others is to turn strategically to those who are traditionally considered the weaker members. Instead of trying to make it easier for people with disabilities to get into our existing churches, we should instead bring the church into the homes of those with disabilities. We need to encourage and equip people who are housebound to develop their homes into house churches. Not only will this add 10 percent of the world’s population to the list of possible house-church planters and elders, but you will hardly find more enthusiastic promoters of the idea.

Similarly, we need to empower not only bright young men between ages eighteen and thirty who already enjoy the attention of society—but also our senior citizens. Because a traditional church is often very program driven, there is little need for seniors. However, as we train and equip older people to become elders of house churches, we will see many of them flourish, just as the churches in their homes will flourish.

Start incarnating

We often forget that Jesus was Asian, not European. We do not really need a contextualized, but basically Western, church in Asia or Africa or Latin America. Each nation needs to develop its own model of church, incarnating Christ again into its own time, culture, and soil. Contextualizing has been a helpful missionary method in the past, where the gospel and Western expressions of church were adapted and made to fit into the local culture and language. But now that the church is literally present and growing in almost all cultures of the world, we need to allow the church to form its own expressions, with both its rural and its urban forms speaking powerfully to local cultural patterns.

Change our traditional worship patterns

As the pouring out of the Spirit replaces the Temple-centered worship rituals and patterns in the Old Testament, Christians are now called to worship God “in spirit and truth.” We are in danger of overlooking, however, that true New Testament worship has much more to do with Spirit-filled obedience (Romans 12:1-2) than with music and singing “worship” songs. Our worship must center on the unquestioning readiness to lay aside life, limb, possessions, family, house, friendships, evangelical respectability—everything—to see the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covering the earth as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). It may be quite appropriate even to recover some New Testament forms of worship: laying ourselves down flat on the floor to express speechless adoration and praise to God (Matthew 28:9; Revelation 4:10), signaling to God that we are ready to lay down our very lives for Him.

While we might still sing songs of praise, phrases like, “Let us now have a time of worship,” or, “Let us now go into worship” will no longer be necessary. The New Testament never mentions worship as a reason for Christians coming together; they came for mutual encouragement and edification (1 Corinthians 14:26; Hebrews 10:24-25). Worship is not so much what we do but how we do it; not so much what we say or sing but how we are a living sacrifice.

Introduce a new commitment level

Secret societies have flourished and are still flourishing because of people’s curiosity about the unknown. Everybody wants to belong to something special. In its house-church form, Christianity has been a secret society. This means we must give more attention to the initiation process of novices into the house church, and we must require a higher level of commitment from those who want to become part of a house church. After all, becoming part of a house church is a commitment to become part of a spiritual family and share one’s life with others; it is much more than a membership to a voluntary club or community organization.

I once heard a pastor in Germany announce, “The sermons in my church are intellectually so demanding that not everybody will truly be able to grasp what is being preached.” His statement caused a lot of people to come to the church, merely out of curiosity to see whether he was right. When it comes to communications strategies, the narrower the door, the more people there are who seem to be interested in squeezing through it. In addition, the higher the commitment level, the higher the quality of the church.

8: QSQ

How to think Quality–Structure–Quantity

The message of QSQ, which stands for Quality, Structure, and Quantity, is simple: reformation, revival, church growth, and church planting seem to follow these three steps in that very order, each one related to the former one. Each one is incomplete—and even dangerous—without the other, and they follow logically and naturally.

At this very moment around the world, God seems to be bringing back foundational New Testament, apostolic–prophetic quality to His body. This new quality leads to new structures emerging from within. And these new structures will, in turn, prove worthy and capable of fast growth and multiplication—quantity. This may very well mean many more, qualitatively better and—for some surprisingly—much smaller churches than we are used to.

Quality

Still, there is a big difference between building a church and building a house. We cannot just take “six guaranteed principles” and build the house of God, independent of its Maker. God has wisely tied the whole process to Himself. In an act of grace and sovereignty, He reserves the right to give the increase as He likes and supply the growth whenever and wherever He pleases. Jesus summed it up in His famous words: “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18).

I see four possible interpretations of these words, of which I suggest we should favor only the last one. The interesting thing is that most of these interpretations are subtle and unspoken.

1. “We will build our church.” In our own strength and traditional methods, we will build our own kingdoms. The result is just that, a human-driven religious cult. Flesh builds flesh.

2. “We will build His church.” This interpretation is actually more dangerous than the first, because it appeals to the go-getters, the doers, and the activists in each culture, and it implies that humans can build God’s house, that flesh can construct spirit, and that great human strategy projects will usher in God’s Kingdom. The result is usually the same human-driven religious cult as in the first approach, but this time it is more spiritually deceptive and sometimes even carries a triumphalist overtone. Some have even called this approach modern witchcraft and magic, because it tries to use means other than the Holy Spirit for spiritual ends. The results are often manipulation and spiritual megalomania.

3. “Jesus will build our church.” This interpretation says, in effect, that Jesus uses His resources for our ends; spirit builds flesh. It assumes that we are God’s chosen few, the right denomination or group, a holy—perhaps even the only—remnant, and so Jesus has now chosen to build our church. Here humans are using God for human ends; everything becomes secondary to the goal of building a single denomination or organization, not His whole universal church. To put it in pictorial terms, Jesus pours His oil on our fire, but the result may very well be nothing more than a temporary human and religious kingdom. There is another downside to this thinking: if nothing grows and nothing happens, we assume the lack of growth must also be God’s will, and we fail to look closely at our own possible missteps as a cause.

4. “Jesus will build His church.” This interpretation implies that Jesus Himself is the master builder and that He offers a definite invitation for any one of us to become His coworkers (Colossians 4:11) and help Him build up His church His way. This idea is somewhat humbling, because it stresses a spiritual partnership with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, rather than an emphasis on our human efforts. The result will have God’s stamp of approval because He gave the very mandate to build and His own spiritual genes are engineered into it.

Spirit builds spirit. Only by the grace of God can we appreciate the fact that Jesus building His church is the only way to emphasize the right name in the credit line for all church growth and church-planting endeavors.

God is good, and He therefore sets good standards for the church of God. Normality, therefore, is only what stands up to God’s norm, no matter what place a given concept has had in history or tradition. God’s Kingdom is no democracy. Many Christians today feel strongly that God is simply calling the church back to New Testament standards with sound apostolic and prophetic foundations.

In practice, this means that God is calling us away from a spirit of complacency to a spirit of revival; from superficiality to depth; from lukewarmness to true heat; from mediocrity to spiritual excellence; from the pursuit of pleasure to a life of passion; from living in false peace with the world to a state of war under God’s law; from conforming to the patterns of this world to being transformed into the image of Christ; from trial and error to prophetic vision; from a settler mentality to a pilgrim mind-set; from a me-focus to a we-focus; from individual thinking to corporate thinking; from hiding one’s sin to living in the light; from proud boasting to true strength in weakness. Are we truly ready for such a change?

Some of God’s essential qualities are love, hope, faith, truth, light, and compassion. The essence of God, His true qualities, is not related so much to what He does, but to who He is. God is the great I AM, the one who simply was in the beginning, and who only does what He does as an outflow of His personality. So also are we called first to be, and then to do.

God’s actions show us who He is. Because He is a lover, He loves. Because He is a good God, His actions are good and of a supernatural quality. That is why the gospel is Good News. A supernaturally good God redeemed humankind from terrible sin by sacrificing His own Son, liberating us from a bondage that was too great for us to liberate ourselves from. God has provided us with a new system to live out our new lives in Christ, a structure called the church, before which all hell is rendered powerless.

Structure

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, structure is “the way things are put together”1; it is how things are organized. Since the Bible describes the local church as the body of Christ, the essence and qualities of God will have to be reflected in the local church rather than in one or two perfect and holy individuals. We are not to ignore the supernatural pattern, divine blueprint, and purpose of the church of God. It is not a feel-good club for mere socializing, but it has a divine destiny.2

Jesus became flesh and lived among us. He ate with, spoke to, and related to people of His time in a special way that is difficult for anyone today to emulate because we live in a different time and culture. Through His incarnation, the eternal God became one of us and allowed us to see Him for the first time: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

If Jesus were to be incarnated today, say, in southern France, He would probably behave and act very similarly, and at the same time very differently. The quality of His life, His principles, and His destiny would be the same, but the way He would speak and act might be quite different than the way he spoke and acted in Palestine. This means that although the internal quality of the church might be the same in each culture and time, it will differ greatly in its style and the structural outworking of its life.

Vincent Donovan, a missionary to the Masai tribe in East Africa, explains in his book Christianity Rediscovered that past Christian missions to this African people group have been mostly agricultural and social, focusing on schools and other needs. But these outreaches hardly had any effect on the Masai. Donovan decided to set aside traditional forms of mission work, and simply take the message of Jesus to the Masai. As a result, he saw “whole villages come to Jesus.”3

Through his experiences in Kenya, Donovan found that if you preach the church, the response will look like the church that sent you out; if you preach Jesus, the response looks like Jesus. Delivering the message of Jesus also brings a new discovery of the gospel to the messenger, as he or she sees the church “becoming flesh” in a new culture.

I once heard some young Christians from the United States talking about some outreach they were doing in Calcutta. They had genuine tears of brokenness in their eyes as they talked about the people worshiping dead idols in temples, yet these young people did not recognize the idols of sports, music, and television being worshiped in their own country. They had broken hearts over the abject poverty in Calcutta, but they did not see the spiritual and emotional poverty of the countless millions suffering from loneliness and meaninglessness in the United States. While they could not believe that people sacrifice flowers and even animals to their gods, they overlooked the fact that many of us sacrifice children and whole families on the altar of success every day. They marveled at the smoke and incense offerings made to pagan gods but failed to see the smog caused by cars, industry, and cigarette smokers in their own country. They said, “These children here are so dirty!” yet they did not realize that most children in their own country regularly use unbelievably dirty language.

In short, they saw and judged the outside but could not see inside. They were shocked by the culture, but not by the spirit behind it, and they failed to see that it is no better at home than in Asia. Humankind’s fallen and sinful nature only takes on a different outward appearance in different cultures and places; its quality is essentially the same everywhere.

The gospel of the Kingdom challenges and changes the very essence, beliefs, and values of a fallen world. It crucifies sinful patterns and is able to redeem and use those aspects of a culture that reflect the blessings of God. In each culture there are essentially three ways to plant and build the church:

1. We can try to fit in with a given culture and nation, arrang-ing the church as neatly as possible into the accepted patterns. This method, which is sometimes known as “felt-need evangelism” or “state-church Christianity,” will at first look like a quick success, but it usually fails to cut through the spiritual roots through which sinful patterns and culturally accepted habits are sustained. Initially, the result is usually a phenomenal growth, but after awhile the church adapts to its culture, loses its power and identity, and finally becomes absorbed into the patterns of this world.

2. We can take the other extreme and ignore the patterns of the local culture, trying to remain so separate from the world that almost all meaningful communication and interaction breaks down. This mentality usually creates a “holy island syndrome,” with the church being very different and therefore, truly foreign, small, and powerless to change people and to disciple and transform a country.

3. Finally, we can strive for a truly godly mix between redeem- ing and crucifying a given culture. This is not a middle-of-the-road compromise created by human wisdom and anthropological insights, but is an ideal based on divine revelation, prophecy, and sound apostolic thinking.

Create Rather than Copy

Many pastors I meet tell me, “I tried it and it did not work!” By my guess, there could be about two hundred thousand pastors worldwide today who suffer from what I call the “Yonggi Cho depression.” David Yonggi Cho is a most unusual Korean pastor, extremely gifted and capable of leading people and building a church movement.

Many have followed his example and tried to copy him. A very few well-gifted men have even succeeded to some degree, but most have failed. The latter group feel today more guilty and depressed than before, a clear symptom of the pathological pattern of “copyism,” a dangerous and deadly disease that has stricken many churches around the globe today.

But Pastor Cho’s message has never been “Copy me, and you will get the same results.” Instead, he wants people to obey God and learn from the church-growth principles that God has shown him.

Let us slip into the devil’s shoes for a few seconds: isn’t “copyism” a perfect trap? For many churches, everything starts so wonderfully. Someone experiences God’s blessing because he or she has been obedient to His Word and Spirit. Someone else tells the story and a third person creates a model out of this experience, which is then copied and cloned by a fourth person. A fifth person finally suggests, “Let’s create an institution around this new model!” He goes on to start franchises all over the world. The sixth person forms this way of doing things into a new “law,” which judges everyone who chooses to do things differently. Here then are “six sure and easy steps to transform a blessing into a curse.” If we put our hands to the plow and then look back—or abroad—how dare we think we are fit for the work in the Kingdom of God? (Luke 9:62).

It is high time that we resurrected and nurtured all that good, creative, and powerful potential that our Creator put into all of us long ago, which is nearly suffocating under too many layers of copied blessings. To do so would mean that we have to continually learn and research the ways that God is winning people to Himself and His church in our part of the world and in our society and culture. Could it be that our addiction to “successful” church models actually reveals a deep leadership crisis and a widespread insecurity about what we should do? Even more dangerous, could our wish for success reveal a serious deafness to what the Holy Spirit is trying to say to our churches about what we need to repent and get rid of?

But let us remain realistic. Statistics reveal that 80 percent of all pastors will simply copy other models and programs. Fifteen percent of all pastors will change the models to make them fit better. Only 5 percent are true inventors of their own models.4

The core values of Christianity defy logical thinking. Things like love, faith, and hope often appeal only to those who are childlike. Therefore, I have a very “unrealistic” proposal to make: In the name of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, I suggest that we confuse all those statisticians out there and reverse these sad figures. Let’s stop copying and start creating in the name of the Creator God who lives in all of us, whether we are pastors or not.

Quantity

How long did it take the New Testament house-church movement to “fill Jerusalem” with the teaching of Jesus Christ (Acts 5:28)? Maybe it was two or three years, maybe even less. Again, quantity started with quality. Soon the growth in Jerusalem was like yeast, spreading and transforming everything it touched with a dynamic power. It was as if Christianity had reached a critical mass and had become a self-propelling chain reaction that could neither be contained nor controlled any longer, except by God. Each believer was like a virus, carrying a core genetic code that he or she was able to deposit through every open door of every possible house to transform each cell into a part of the Kingdom of God.

In a worldwide research project, German church-growth researcher Christian Schwarz studied the average number of people added to a local church over a typical five-year period. The following chart reflects his results:

A church of up to 100 attendees (with an average size of 51) won 32 new people over a period of five years, and grew 63 percent. In contrast, a church of over 1,000 people (with an average size of 2,856) won 112 new people in five years, which is a growth of 4 percent.

Comparing the growth rate of a church of under 100 with that of a church of between 100 and 200 people, the difference is already very significant, the smaller church showing almost three times the growth rate of the larger. This startling research also shows that a church of 2,856, which is 56 times bigger than an average “small church” of 51 people, wins only a little over three times more people than the small church.5

In other words, if we took the megachurch and divided it into 56 churches of 51 people each, statistics suggest that they would win an average of 1,792 people in the same five-year period, sixteen times more than if the megachurch remained as it was. From a different perspective, the average megachurch structure prevents 1,680 people (i.e., 1,792 minus 112) from being won every five years. The bottom line is this kind of research shows that small churches are much more effective in attracting people. The relationship is as simple as a teeter-totter on the playground: as quantity goes up, growth and discipling potential go down.

Shopwindows for God

If every person on earth is going to see and understand the gospel (Romans 15:21), the church will need to work toward the goal of placing a church within walking distance of every person on earth.

In order to make people “see how they love one another,” like the church father Tertullian wrote of the early Christians, the church will need to become a shopwindow for God in every neighborhood. More and more, Christians are catching hold of this type of apostolic goal. But it requires us all to discipline our thinking, away from a frantic, numbers-driven mind-set that wants quick results. God is concerned with quality, not with mass-marketing superficiality; therefore, it may take more time to build apostolic and prophetic foundations (Ephesians 2:20). Think quality first—and then allow God to decide how big the numbers could get. We all might be very surprised!

9: Fathering the Next Generation

Who will do all the work?

Who will be the people to start all those necessary house churches? Who will be carrying out the fivefold ministries? Who will do the work? And where will all those people come from? Ultimately, we would all agree that it will have to be ordinary people made extraordinary by God—people who, as in the old days, may still smell of fish, perfume, and revolution. If elders are to father house churches, we will simply have to spot and develop potential elders. Elders are people of wisdom and reality and, typically, fathers or mothers of families. Many family ministries already exist today. Could it be that we are already doing most of the training and developing of elders—and therefore church planters—but not seeing the connection between the role of sound and healthy families and church planting?

Training Leaders or Raising Sons?

As the ministries of Barnabas and Paul, Paul and Timothy, and Elijah and Elisha show, apostolic and prophetic ministries produce new believers, very much like parents “give birth” to sons and daughters. Paul writes to the Galatians, “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, . . . I am perplexed about you” (Galatians 4:19-20). He does not address these Christians as his students, disciples, or trainees, but as his children. This is a true hallmark of New Testament and contemporary apostolic Christians: they are constantly in spiritual labor.

Though it is unnatural for a man to give birth to children, people are born again by the Spirit, and, I suggest, also born into ministry by the same Spirit. As any Bible school dean will agree, sending a student through the rigors of seminary does not necessarily guarantee that student will be a strong leader. There is much more to it, namely the fathering of spiritual sons and daughters. Though we may want to train new leaders, God wants us simply to raise spiritual sons.

Raising a son involves much more than just teaching him a few lessons or ideas. As anyone with children knows, there is no such thing as pain-free parenting. It is utterly engaging, frustrating, and exhilarating at the same time; it brings you to your knees or drives you up the wall; it makes you weep and laugh and usually leaves you feeling “perplexed” about your abilities and your children (Galatians 4:20). This is the price we need to pay for the spiritual generations to come. Are we ready for it?

Cheap training shortcuts, emergency crash courses, relationally uninvolving seminars, and purely academic efforts are about as effective as quick-fix parenting and pain-free book writing.

Imagine yourself, a spiritual son or daughter, resting on the chest of a spiritual father who is expressing his unconditional love for you, telling you that you are the jewel of his life. He says you are someone he can be proud of, a dream come true, and he leaves a fond tear of fatherly love and affirmation on your cheek as you leave him.

Now imagine yourself as a spiritual father, hugged by a son who tells you how proud he is of you, how secure he is in your presence, and how much he admires your wisdom. Imagine what it would be like for him to say, “Tell me how I can be like you. What shall I do with my life?”

In that instant, something happens in both of you. A wholeness is restored that enables you to boldly and radically stand up for Kingdom values and visions. Something has given both of you almost inconceivable strength and drive: a son who believes in his father and a father who loves his son with all his heart. You have a sense of purpose that propels you boldly through closed doors and allows you to do what no one has ever dared to do before. A curse has been broken, and a blessing is released.

Following Faceless Leaders

Many prophets say that the future leaders of the Kingdom of God will have no faces and no titles. They will be nobodies, antileaders who are frail and weak rather than powerful and overwhelming. They will clearly not be stars but will prefer instead to be known as parents rather than leaders. And they will be broken, agonizing about the lost rather than boasting shamelessly about their latest ministry victories.

These new leaders will not be interested in control and power; they will be actively ignorant of their public image, deaf to the cheerful lures of worldly Christian fans wanting to elect their next King Saul. But who listens to prophets? Have we not always stoned them in the name of good old tradition?

But this attitude toward prophets may be changing. The financial crisis that hit many countries in 2008 created a new situation for many and interestingly enough raised many previously overlooked or ignored prophetic voices to new significance. My British friend Dr. Clifford Hill, a prophetic man, has warned both the church and society for decades of a life based on materialism and greed. Few have bothered with his message up to this point; however, his advice is now being sought by many in leading positions—be it in politics, business, or church.

Before we think further into the leadership issue, let us define what we are actually looking for. After the call for more money, the biggest cry of the traditional church has always been for more “leaders.” A leader is a person who rules, has followers, and influences a group of people toward the achievement of a goal. If we call, recruit, train, and commission such people, we should not be surprised if we get what we ask for.

In stark contrast, Jesus did not train leaders; He developed servants, and He raised them through the three vital stages of manhood: child, man, father. Isaiah describes Jesus with these terms: “a child is born . . . a son is given . . . Everlasting Father” (Isaiah 9:6). In the New Testament, Jesus’ childhood is described as a time of growing “in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52).

During the second phase in His life, from age twelve to thirty, Jesus worked as a carpenter in Nazareth in His dad’s business. And in the third and final phase, He left all this behind in order to step into His apostolic role. At this point, Jesus called disciples to follow Him, and He raised them as His spiritual sons. Once the disciples had become the spiritual children of Jesus, He could go on to the last task that was reserved for Him: to die a sinless death on the cross once and for all. I believe these three natural maturity phases are prescriptive for all of us who follow Christ. We see the same development of thought in the first letter John wrote to fathers, young men (sons), and dear children (1 John 2:13), indicating that there is a natural progression of spiritual age and therefore maturity. Let me illustrate these three phases that describe the anatomy of maturing:

Passing the Baton

When it comes to raising up the next generation of Christ followers, the key is not only modeling discipleship ourselves but intentionally inviting and initiating future generations into their next phase—passing on the baton. If those among us who are spiritual parents do not do this, the younger generations will be forced to initiate themselves—or be initiated by someone else who does not reflect Kingdom values. This is why spiritual grandparents need to voluntarily make room for the next generation of spiritual parents to move into their roles; in turn, spiritual parents need to help godly young men and women step into their tasks, so this younger generation can then take care of the spiritual children who are joining the Kingdom.

Initiations

Initiations—the ritual or nonritual passing of the baton to the next generation—are the key to explosive growth. Initiation rituals of young men into manhood and young women into womanhood are commonplace among many tribes. Initiation comes from the Latin word initiare, meaning to go in. It describes transitioning from one phase to another; one chapter is finished, a next chapter is opened. In many cultures, death symbols are used at times of initiations, to make it clear that a former time is passed away, and a new time has come; an old life is over and a new one has begun. Baptism in Christianity is a well-known sign of initiation: the old life is over; a new life in Christ has begun.

My friend Alan Hirsch likes to point out the way initiations are typically done in an African village. Within a village, there are two subvillages, one for the men and one for the women. Both the girls and the boys are raised by the women, until one night a group of men raid the women’s camp, herd together all the boys aged twelve to thirteen, and bring them out into the bush many days away. They rough them up a bit, disorient them, often have them circumcised, and then leave them completely alone. The boys, now alone in the wilderness, typically attempt to make it back on their own, but then realize very quickly that they will be lost without help. So they begin to team up, learning the vital lesson that alone they will surely die and that only by sticking together in a life-endangering environment will they stand any chance of survival. Anthropologists call this experience liminality, a violent push beyond all safe limits in order to activate communitas. Technically, communitas means a fellowship born in danger. In the face of adversity, a bond is created not to satisfy the need for fellowship (classical community), but for sheer survival.

After some time, sometimes months, the group of boys (typically there will be casualties—a huge price for an even greater lesson in communitas) finds its way home, and they are received with great fanfare, not into the women’s camp but now as real men. As the newly initiated men get their chance to tell their stories extensively at the evening campfires, the crowd hoots with laughter and many old men will wipe away tears in their eyes, as old memories and the passions for their community are reignited. The young men’s personal experiences of communitas become the foundational stone for the survival and future of the community, as the men have learned how precious communitas is and how every single person counts.

Such a powerful initiation model can be culturally adapted into discipleship patterns everywhere. Many of my Christian friends have been running such “initiation camps” in various forms. Even in traditional churches, “rites of passage” like confirmation classes or “firming” have been known for hundreds of years. However, most such rites at best initiate the individuals into a “community” that is merely membership, not communitas, the formation of a band of people that depend on each other with their very lives. We need to be far more dangerous, and stop overprotecting our children forever from life itself in a false attempt to keep them out of harm’s way. Otherwise, we may continue to grow nice-looking vegetables in our safe Christian greenhouses, but the “fruits of our labor” will be unsuitable for the tough streets of real life; instead they will run when danger lurks; they will be an army that will hardly ever go to battle because they have been raised too safe.

Maybe we need to learn more from those African villages, and organize more raiding parties, invading more spaces with harmless and unsuspecting sheep in them (churches, Bible schools, seminars, conferences, choirs, summer camps, you get the picture), roughing them up and hijacking them into the desert, thrusting them far outside of their comfort zones into an experience of liminality and communitas, and initiating them into their new roles as disciples. Otherwise, in the absence of initiations—which all have a certain violence to them—many Christians will grow old simply sitting in their pews, comfortable in their giftings, and at some point they will stop waiting for something to happen in and through their lives.

Looking at the typical development of men through the ages, we can observe six distinct phases in their lives: boy, adventurer, warrior, lover, knight, sage. Boys innocently grow up until around the age of twelve when they start to become adventurers, playfully discovering the world around them. Once they have locked into a cause that truly challenges them (around fifteen to eighteen years old), they are ready to stop the games and become warriors, serving a knight. Only after their time of service will they then move on to become lovers and thus fathers, and eventually knights themselves, directly in the service of a king, with their own jurisdiction to take care of. Ultimately, they grow into their retirement stage and become sages, upholding the traditions, giving solicited (and unsolicited) advice and blessings.

Looking into the corresponding historic phases for women (girl, daughter, princess, lover, plunderer, and wisewoman), we need to consider new ways of initiating the spiritually younger generations into their next phases and support their growth in stature in Christ. In the absence of Christian initiations, many Christians take role models from the world and imitate them. And so whole generations are initiated by MTV, sports, and sometimes even by cults or satanic groups who know very well the power of initiation.

How does a young girl of thirteen grow up into a mature mother in Christ if she is never initiated into motherhood? How many of us complain of how many girls are embracing pop-star role models, becoming initiated into this value system in concerts and clubs and ending up as more sad copies of dancing Barbie dolls? Similarly, many boys never meet a truly dedicated and dangerous Christian man but are familiar only with predictable, boring names on church membership roles. Once they run into a drug dealer, a freak, or a recruiter for any organization that smells of adventure, off they go, swept off their feet by the promise of more meaningful and adventurous lives and a chance to change the world. Many of God’s best and most influential men and women in history come from rough, rather than overprotected, backgrounds: fishermen, prostitutes, zealots, orphans, drug dealers, mafia members, political extremists, and even former jihadists and near-terrorists. Few come from reputable Bible schools or predictable middle-class churches where no one has given them a cause to die for, challenged them to the core, or forced them to embrace the challenge and find something to live for.

Consider the way that Israeli soldiers are routinely brought through the initiation process. They are led to visit Masada or Holocaust memorial sites like Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Faced with the terrors of the Holocaust and the past wars, they are told: “You soldiers are the last line of defense between such an enemy that is still out there and the safety of our land and your family. What will be your resolve?” Often enough, with tears in their eyes, something clicks in the young men and women, and they understand that if they don’t give their lives for this, their country will be lost. And it transforms them from dreamy teenagers, waiting to watch one more movie, into soldiers who take responsibility. It wakes them up, challenges them, and initiates them as disciples for their cause, those who are no longer waiting for others to take initiative while they enjoy the good life, but who are instead willing to leave their former lives and enter into a new kind of existence.

What if we as Christians would lead our young generations down the aisle of our very own holocaust memorial, where the walls are lined with symbolic or real relics of the things that have killed the passion of millions of would-be disciples? These men and women should have changed the world, but instead they simply worked, retired, and died in horrible spiritual oblivion. They have been killed not as the Jews by a Nazi regime but by something just as lethal: predictability, boredom, lack of communitas, liberal theology, nominalism, lukewarmness, nonapostolic traditions of elders, ritualistic religion, and legalistic pride.

If you are young, let me tell you in all seriousness, You are the last line of defense. If you don’t take up your sword and dedicate your life to defend your spiritual family, the enemy will take over and win. So what will be your resolve, soldier?

10: Models of Church Multiplication

How to plant churches without manufacturing them

If we want to multiply churches, we need to stop “planting churches.” Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it?

But let’s think about this for a minute. Jesus never gave an express command to go out and plant churches. Instead, His core message revolved around three very basic commands:

“Repent of your sins.”

“Love your neighbor.”

“Go and make disciples.”

If we do the things God has commanded, He promises to do His part:

“I will forgive.”

“I will accept your neighbor also.”

“I will build My church.”

Notice that building churches falls under God’s list of responsibilities, not ours. Too often we try to take the reins out of God’s hand and build His temple for Him. But when we usurp God’s role, we find ourselves manufacturing assembly-line churches and franchises. We experiment and build what looks like a church but in reality is nothing more than a shell. God’s way is always the better way, especially when it comes to multiplying His church. As we accept and carry out our part of the plan—repenting, loving, and discipling—He will do what He has promised to do: build His church. In this sense, true church planting starts when we repent of trying to do work that was never ours to begin with.

Loving others and discipling them is a simple and effective way of multiplying ourselves. And as we multiply ourselves, Jesus will be able to multiply churches made up of multiplied disciples. Again, it is not our job to build the church; that is what Jesus does. However, as we do our job and He does His, new house churches will grow and multiply.

Five Organic Stages

In order to saturate society with the glory of God, the church should be where the people are (Matthew 13:33, Romans 15:18-21). Each church should therefore be a shopwindow for God, where people can see Him and exclaim, “See how they love one another.” Showing love to each other needs to happen repeatedly, locally, and convincingly in order to allow neighbors of the churches to become and remain disciples of Jesus Christ.

Most churches go through five organic stages in their development process and life span.

1. Conception: When an individual or a group of people have an idea for a new church, the spiritual seed of the new church is planted, and the church is conceived; people are now “pregnant” with an invisible church. Perhaps the idea came about as a direct word from the Lord, a vision, a calling, a growing conviction, or part of a church-planting movement.

2. Prenatal phase: During this planning time, the church of the future is being discussed (who, where, when, how, why) and everyone is preparing for the birth. This is a good time for inspired dreaming about the future, just as parents dream together when they know a child is on the way.

3. Delivery: This is the time of actually starting the church, when it begins to function as an organic entity.

4. Growth: The church grows and matures by addition, and just as with humans, it will eventually reach its maximum growth potential.

5. Multiplication: If a church fails to multiply itself, it enters a spiritual menopause and starts to die. During the healthy multiplication process, the fivefold ministry emerges and starts to ensure quality development and continuing multiplication.

Practical Church Planting

Since there are many cultures, languages, ministries, and circumstances, there are countless ways to plant churches. Again, we should begin by listening to God, not blindly copying other people’s models or recipes for success. We always need to be aware of God’s creativity and His often unique way of starting a particular church at a particular time and place. However, the following guidelines might provide insight for following His lead as He builds His church.

The “house of peace” model

In Luke 10, Jesus told His disciples to go out two by two and to stay in the house of “a man of peace,” someone who might not necessarily have been a Christian but who was willing to open his home and his family to the message of Christ. A person of peace is often a person that God has uniquely prepared for two things: to receive the gospel of the Kingdom and to establish a beachhead for the gospel in a given society or group. Thom Wolf, a former pastor in California who became a missionary in India, characterizes a person of peace three ways: such a person is receptive to the gospel, possesses a reputation to gain attention for the message among family and community, and effectively refers the bearers of the Good News to that larger group. This church-planting method seeks to plant a multiplying house-church movement in an area or town, and it begins with one particular “person of peace” who is willing to open his or her home.

As we’ve already seen, many house churches today have between six and twenty members, and they typically multiply every six to nine months. Many of these churches are fathered by an unpaid elder who is usually working together with elders of other house churches for contact, teaching, and planning. Sizes and forms of house churches vary greatly. In former communist Bulgaria, some house churches even met in houses for celebrations, gathering up to 250 people quietly in order not to attract attention from neighbors. In some house churches in China, sometimes more than one thousand people have been baptized during such celebrations.

Some house churches meet at the same home, others in four or five or six different places during the week, allowing for a number of hosts to be involved. Such multisited house churches are especially suited for situations in which followers of Christ are persecuted or closely observed, in order not to attract too much attention toward one place. There are “house” churches that meet in caves, or on a bus, or in a hotel room, or under a tree, or in an office, or in a restaurant, or even on a boat. But the main heartbeat of the house church happens in the very houses of the members.

The family approach

This church-planting method grows by winning not only individuals but also whole family units for Christ. It seeks to start a new house church with an entire newly converted family, who is then linked with other families into multiplying house churches. This is based on biblical examples of household conversions like that of Cornelius in Acts 10 or Lydia in Acts 16.

Once a family is converted, a house church is started in their home. The following three-step model was developed in a predominantly Muslim context, but could easily apply to Christian house churches as well. First, let people in a community know that you are ready to pray, free of charge, in the name of Jesus for anyone with problems. Second, if someone requests your ministry, ask that the whole family be present when you go. Once there, you can then share the gospel of the Kingdom with the whole family. No one will interrupt, because they want you to pray. After presenting the gospel, pray for the need in that family. It’s best to pray aloud and then to leave immediately. This way, if people are healed or delivered, the family can have time to reflect on what they have heard and seen.

Finally, if the family decides they want to know more about Christ, they will ask you to come a second time. Again, you should go only on the condition that the whole family is present, because this time it is your intention to call the whole family to faith in Christ and start a church with them that very day.

A movement like this that started a little over ten years ago in Bangladesh has seen close to one million Muslims come to Christ. This is more than all members of all known denominations in the entire country!

Vision-based planting

Planting churches is a work of the Holy Spirit. Some people, especially apostolic and prophetic people, are uniquely gifted for this church planting and can simply catalyze and enhance the work of the Holy Spirit through other individuals. They inspire and release a vision and new action in people. They “make others spiritually pregnant,” as David Yonggi Cho has been known to say, showing that new churches can be planted simply by inspiring others and giving them the vision to plant them. There are many undiscovered, uninspired, and therefore spiritually unemployed church planters in the world. They need to be strategically recruited to use their gifts. Recruitment can usually be accomplished by following a three-part strategy: seek and find those who have church-planting potential; nurture them; release them.

Spirit-led cooperation

This strategy works by prophetically mobilizing the churches in a given area to be ready to respond to and cooperate quickly with a special work of the Holy Spirit. It requires us to first either ask God to extend His hand to do mighty things in the name of Jesus (Acts 4:28-31) or recognize that He has already done so. Then we must get the churches ready to respond quickly to an “open door” and a field “white unto harvest” by planting many churches quickly through the reorganization of resources and people.

There are many examples of this kind of church planting: supernaturally prepared revivals, movements that have grown out of national or local crises, and other powerful encounters, healings, and experiences. Among the Turkish Muslims in southern Bulgaria in the early 1990s a number of churches sprang up among former Muslims due to many unusual healings and exorcisms. Many more churches could have been planted during that period, but many were simply not ready or flexible enough to take advantage of this window of opportunity.

The best strategy of all, however, is first to refrain from following practiced and proven methods, no matter how successful they seem to be; then remain vulnerable and teachable to both the current and future promptings of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ core strategy was to pray and obey. He said He would never do anything unless He saw His Father do it first (John 5:19), and His standard should in turn be our ultimate standard. This is why I believe groups of believers can and should come together regularly and irregularly to seek their King’s leading in regard to whatever He would have them do in a given situation.

In a larger context, like a city church or a regional church, one of the core tasks of prophetic and apostolic people is to constantly seek God both alone and together, and to be alert for what the Spirit of God is saying to the church. His directives will be far better than anything our most creative minds can come up with, and His wisdom beats our traditional thinking anytime. Again, as we seek first His Kingdom and His agenda, He will do what He has promised to do: build His church. As we learn to hear and follow His voice as well as remove any labels that we have affixed to something that ultimately does not belong to us, we will again see Jesus building His church in ways we might have never imagined before.

11: Starfish Church Planting

How a decentralized revolution will change the world

What would happen if house churches actually multiplied “like rabbits”? Or, to leave the poor rabbits alone, let’s use another “animal” as an analogy. Have you ever looked into the secrets behind the phenomenal rise of Craigslist or Skype? Why do people prefer to turn to Wikipedia rather than to Encyclopedia Britannica for information? The answer has to do with what is known as open source software, which enables anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. This new philosophy has given the world Linux, Apache, Mozilla Firefox, and many other excellent computer applications.

In 2006 Time magazine named YouTube (an Internet platform that allows ordinary people to share their videos—as well as search, watch, and rate those of others) its invention of the year. In the article, Lev Grossman describes three revolutions that have turned YouTube into “a portal into another dimension.” According to Grossman, the three revolutions are a technological revolution, bringing us ever cheaper hardware and software; a social revolution that analysts have called Web 2.0, where people create and share information together; and a cultural revolution, where people turn away from mainstream media and its top-down culture and choose instead to listen to unfiltered stories from folks like themselves.1

The Decentralized Revolution

So what does all of this have to do with the current global reformation that is sweeping and reshaping Christianity? It has everything to do with the differences between a spider and a starfish, argue Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, two young entrepreneurs with MBAs from Stanford who have written The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. “If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies,” they say. “But if you cut off a starfish’s leg, it grows a new one—and the cut-off leg can grow an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world.”2

A spider is a creature with a head and eight legs. It’s a symbol of a centralized, top-down, hierarchical structure. In a spider structure, there has to be someone who is in charge (the head) and those who do the work but are not required to think (the legs). In comparison, starfish have no head; they are a flat neural system, a decentralized network of cells. If cut into pieces, the entire animal can replicate itself from a single piece of a leg. Starfish organizations, Brafman and Beckstrom contend, stand on five important foundations (legs):

Circles. Circles are self-organizing groups of people with a common cause who can emerge, expand, multiply, or die spontaneously, without red tape or authorization. Circles don’t follow someone else’s rules, but they do depend on norms (values, ethics, codes) as their backbone. The members who start or join a circle will own, embrace, and even enforce these norms themselves, which is exactly why norms are more powerful than rules. A typical circle might be an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group, peer-to-peer file-sharing users, a group of Quakers—or a house church. “Ordinary people, organized into circles, gain immense power,” say Brafman and Beckstrom.3

Catalysts. A catalyst is an element that initiates (or speeds up) a reaction of other elements without being used up in the process. In starfish organizations, catalysts are the inventors and ideologists. They don’t want to control anyone, they want to inspire. They are like architects who build a house but don’t move in. Entirely different from CEOs, catalysts know their time is short. Those who stay around for too long become absorbed into their own creation and eventually start to centralize the whole structure—the very opposite effect of the catalytic movement they want to achieve!

Ideology. A starfish organization needs a “big idea,” a founding vision. For AA, the ideology is simple: “If you have a problem with alcohol, let’s help each other to follow twelve simple steps.” Skype’s motto is “The whole world can talk for free!” For house churches, it’s “Let’s move from church houses to house churches.”

Pre-Existing Networks. Just as you can’t shoot off a rocket without a launching pad, an idea needs a platform from which to start. In England, a network of about twenty thousand Quakers, who were at the beginning of the eighteenth century an early house-church movement, started to own the vision of abolishing slavery and became the platform that birthed a nationwide movement that finally succeeded. One lesson from history is clear: centralized organizations are not set up to launch decentralized movements. That is one of the reasons that many traditional churches or denominations (or even mission agencies) find it difficult to launch true organic house-church movements. The Internet, however, offers a different environment than spider-shaped organizations (including traditional churches), which is why the Web is today a huge breeding ground for many starfish organizations—including house churches.

Champions. While catalysts are the visionaries, champions are the implementers. They apply, embody, promote, or sell the idea of someone else and give that person wings. By yielding and becoming the echo to a voice, champions make the vision work and incarnate the catalysts’ original design. Though the catalyst and the champion are very different, they both desperately need each other for the entire enterprise to work. For the planting of contemporary house churches, this means, for example, that apostolic and prophetic people will mostly have catalytic functions, while literally anybody can become a champion and start house churches wherever he or she happens to be.

Who’s the Boss?

Christianity has no official human boss. Jesus is the only head we need. In early Christianity, there were truly no human “heads.” This is why Brafman and Beckstrom mention early Christianity as a model of a starfish organization. Even a decade ago, church planter Curtis Sergeant compared the reproductive abilities of a starfish with those of house churches.

As we’ve already discussed, if a starfish loses a leg, it has the ability to grow a new one in its place. And not only is it able to grow back a new leg, but it is also able to generate an entirely new starfish! If we cut a starfish into five pieces, each piece has the reproductive ability to become a new starfish, altogether creating five starfish from one! With such an amazing resilience, starfish are almost impossible to destroy, even by chemical or biological means.

Similarly, an octopus is able to replace a tentacle that has been cut off. However, if the head of the octopus is destroyed, the animal dies. Sergeant likens the octopus to a traditional church. Traditional churches, as well as cell churches, rely heavily on the superstructure for teaching, leadership, and authority. In times of pressure, problems, or persecution, however, the cell dies; it cannot survive without its head.4

Sergeant goes on to say, “Starfish are simple and non-specialized, whereas octopi are complex and specialized. This is true of cell churches and house churches. A cell church . . . that is complex and specialized can provide a myriad of services and opportunities which can never be offered by the house churches because the house churches are simple and nonspecialized. They simply meet the simple, basic, straightforward needs, not the highly specialized needs.”5

Maybe God has created the starfish in order to challenge us to be like the starfish ourselves. Imagine a church that grows under pressure, expands the more it is squeezed, multiplies as it is persecuted, and doubles its numbers once a year. A church like that might well be able to do what up until now has been unimaginable—and do it in a breathtakingly short time.

Let me be plain: it is true that there are house churches that do not really deserve that name. There are do-it-yourself house groups and self-help Christian groups that center only on their own needs. They hibernate, stagnate, or—worst case scenario—sit under the “leadership” of a contemporary disciple of Diotrephes, who wanted to be first and have nothing to do with John, gossiped behind the back of other Christians, refusing to welcome the brothers and even stopping those who wanted to do so and excommunicated them (3 John 1:9-10).

Like any other church or organization, house churches can easily become little empires run by strong or manipulative personalities. When this happens, the group quickly becomes religious, strange, or even cultic. If you find such groups, beware; and if you are in them, get out. Healthy house churches that are born out of a genuine passion to reach the lost are organically connected, doing their part within a wider regional house-church network and reproducing after their own kind.

Sometimes, depending on context and situation, house churches can double or triple their own number in only a few weeks, or even days. Sometimes, in phases of consolidation or challenge, the time it takes for one church to become two can be up to two years, but usually not more. Empirical church-planting research in a number of nations shows that the statistical average of reproduction is around twelve months.

Given these factors, we are faced with some crucial questions: What would happen if a spiritual starfish plague swept our lands? How quickly would a proliferation of house churches in schools, colleges, businesses, governments, clubs, and neighborhoods lead to a movement that truly has the authenticity, the caliber, and the blessing of God to disciple our nations? And if there were such a general return to Jesus, His book, His church, and His mission, would you be in?

The following chart shows the number of new house churches that, to the best of my knowledge, have emerged over the last eight to ten years in select countries. This chart does not include China, where the number of house churches may have already surpassed three million.

What would happen if the church of the future ended up being very much like the church of the beginning? We need to prepare ourselves for a time when the family of God once again meets around dining room tables—or wherever you find tables—and stadiums. Those large arenas that are already in place will be perfect for large, regional, and citywide celebrations of a church that is maturing, coming out of its man-made shell, and repositioning itself according to divine order.

I believe that before too long, we are all going to have a front-row seat to watch the opening of a divine chrysalis. Soon the former caterpillar (the church as we know it) will break forth and show itself as a startling butterfly (the church as God wants it).

About the Author

Wolfgang Simson was born in Germany in 1959 and has German, Jewish, and Hungarian roots. He is married to Mercy, and they have three children. After living in the United Kingdom and India, they now live in the south of Germany.

In the midst of beginning a political career, a number of supernatural experiences brought Wolfgang to a confrontation with the reality of Christ. After working as a social worker and taxi driver in Stuttgart, Germany, he earned a master’s in theology from Free Evangelical Theological Academy in Basel, Switzerland, where he later taught courses on church growth and mission strategy, and became the assistant to the dean, the late Professor Samuel Külling.

While pursuing a PhD at various academic institutions in Belgium and the United States—doing postgraduate studies in missions and cultural anthropology—Simson discovered that academia did not have the answers to the questions he was after. But God did. In yet another direct experience with God, Simson was shown the purpose, direction, and path of his life, and he has been pursuing this ever since.

Since 1983 Simson has been involved in the planting of several churches and in church-based leadership positions, while at the same time beginning a life of extensive global research on growing churches, church-planting movements and revivals, and mission breakthroughs.

Wolfgang Simson worked for two decades (1986–2006) as a church-growth, evangelism, and strategy consultant, as well as a researcher and journalist within various Christian networks and regional and global strategy think tanks in close to sixty nations. As one of the founders of Dawn Europa, he has been a board member of both the British and the German Church Growth Associations, a member of the Lausanne Movement in Germany, and editor of the well-known newsletters Fridayfax (now StarFish News) and The Mammon-Fax. He is the author of twelve books that have been translated into twenty languages.

The author’s Web site is www.simsonwolfgang.de.

Recommended Reading

Wolfgang Simson, Houses That Change the World

If you wish to study the subject of house churches further, Houses That Change the World is the “big brother” of the book you have just read.

Wolfgang Simson, The Starfish Manifesto

This foundational book, which introduces The Starfish Project, is a prophetic road map for an apostolic journey. It describes in detail the current global apostolic reformation of the ekklesia through a return to Kingdom principles.

Other relevant materials can be found on www.starfishportal.net.

Notes

1: The Reinvention of Church

1. Based on a study done by Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in 1990; quoted by Floyd McClung in Basic Discipleship (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992).

2. “Wie Christliche ist Deutschland,” empirical church attendance survey done in 1992 by DAWN Europa e.V, directed by Wolfgang Simson.

3. D. Elton Trueblood, While It Is Day: An Autobiography (Richmond, IN: Yokefellow Press, 1974).

2: House Churches in History

1. Origen of Alexandria, early church father.

2. Met Castillo, The Church in Thy House (Manila: The Alliance Publishers, 1982).

3. Martin Luther, Vorrede zur Deutschen Messe, published in 1526.

4. Ibid.

5. Ken McVety, The Real Robinson Crusoe (Coquitlam, B.C.: Word of Life Press, n.d.).

6. Howard A. Snyder, The Radical Wesley (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990).

3: The Nature of House Churches

1. Art Katz, Apostolic Conversion, at www.artkatzministries.org.

2. Met Castillo, The Church in Thy House.

3. Larry Crabb, Connecting (Nashville: Word Publishing, 1997), xii, xiii.

4: The Fivefold Ministry

1. David Yonggi Cho, in a personal conversation with the author.

2. Christian A. Schwarz, Natural Church Development (St. Charles, IL: Churchsmart Resources, 1996).

3. For more on this, see Jim Rutz’s book, Megashift (Colorado Springs: Empowerment Press, 2005).

4. Barney Coombs, Apostles Today (Lancaster, UK: Sovereign World, Ltd., 2000).

5. For a far more developed and current discussion of the fivefold ministry, I recommend the upcoming book Primal Fire (Baker Books, publication date 2010), written by Neil Cole, Alan Hirsch, and myself.

6. Ibid.

5: House Church or Cell Church?

1. Ralph W. Neighbour, Where Do We Go from Here? (Houston: Touch Outreach Ministries, 2000).

2. Ibid.

3. Margaret Kannaday, Church Growth and the Home Cell System (Seoul: Church Growth International, 1995), 122.

4. Statement by Lawrence Khong at a cell church conference, Singapore, 1999.

5. Markus Koch, in personal communication with the author.

6. David Yonggi Cho, speaking at a church growth conference in Helsinki, Finland, 1996.

7. Christian A. Schwarz, Natural Church Development.

8. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995).

9. From research done by DAWN Ministres, Colorado Springs, www.dawnministries.org.

10. Alan Tippet, Introduction to Missiology (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1987).

11. Bill Beckham, The Second Reformation (Houston: Touch Outreach Ministries, 1995).

6: No Progress without Change

1. Found in “Dynamic Preaching,” Net Results magazine, March 1991.

2. “Maxims for Revolutionists,” in Man and Superman (Cambridge, MA: The University Press, 1902), 238.

7: All Change Is Practical

1. Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War, vol. 2 (1949), ch. 162.

2. These statistics are from the author’s own personal research. Patrick McIntyre of http://www.sfee.info speaks of 3 to 16 percent, C. Peter Wagner of 1 to 2 percent, and some even far less.

3. Kari Törmä, Whole Marriage Ministry (Helsinki: NMCA).

8: QSQ

1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “structure.”

2. Wolfgang Simson, “The Starfish Manifesto,” (Starfish Resources, 2009), www.starfishportal.net.

3. Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003).

4. C. Peter Wagner, church growth lectures at Fuller Theological Seminary, 1986.

5. Christian A. Schwarz, Natural Church Development.

11: Starfish Church Planting

1. Lev Grossman, “Best Invention: YouTube,” Time, October 2006, http://www.time.com/time/2006/techguide/bestinventions/inventions/youtube.html.

2. Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider (New York: Portfolio, 2006).

3. Ibid.

4. Curtis Sergeant, “Starfish Church Planting,” published at http://www.english.ffax2.com/Resources/RS-Portal/rs-portal.html.

5. Ibid.

Table of Contents

Special Copyright Notice

Foreword

Preface: A Vision Too Good to Be True?

15 Theses toward a Re-Incarnation of Church

Introduction: People with Principles, Not Methods

1: The Reinvention of Church

2: House Churches in History

3: The Nature of House Churches

4: The Fivefold Ministry

5: House Church or Cell Church?

6: No Progress without Change

7: All Change Is Practical

8: QSQ

9: Fathering the Next Generation

10: Models of Church Multiplication

11: Starfish Church Planting

About the Author

Recommended Reading

Notes