“I do not believe in home churches.” It was hard to believe my eyes. There I was, reading a public social media post by…well, let’s leave his name out of it, shall we? Suffice it to say he’s a bigwig in a Bible-preaching denomination that projects a public image of rock-ribbed faithfulness, and generally delivers on it. I think highly of him, and of the organization he’s part of. And he goes and says that.
It’s a dumb thing to say. There’s no way he actually believes it.
There’s no way this man doesn’t believe in the church that met in Aquila and Priscilla’s house (1 Cor. 16:19), the church that met in Nymphas’ house (Col. 4:15), or the church that met in Philemon’s house (Phm. 2). The first purpose-built church building dates back to the beginning of the fourth century; there is no way this man is seriously claiming that none of the home gatherings of our first three centuries were real churches. There is likewise no way that he is disparaging the thousands of home assemblies in which our persecuted brethren meet throughout China and the Muslim world today. He’s a good man, he understands the unity of the Body, and he simply wouldn’t say that those gatherings aren’t real churches.
In fact, if I were to title this post “[Name] Doesn’t Believe in Persecuted Chinese House Churches,” I imagine that he’d find that very uncharitable. Why? Because he doesn’t think that. Which is my point: “I do not believe in home churches” was a dumb thing to say, in that it can’t possibly be true.
So why say it? I don’t know the man personally, but I’ve enjoyed his writing in the past, and he does not strike me as given to casual flights of rhetorical fancy. He’s trying to tell us something, so let’s steel-man this thing: what could he possibly have meant? If he believes in home churches in New Testament times and around the world today, what home churches does he not believe in?
Home churches in present-day North America, it would seem. So why is Philemon’s house church fine, but a house church in Omaha today isn’t? That, I think, is the question.
Until a few years ago, this would have been a complete mystery to me. More recently, I’ve had occasion to rub shoulders with some more militant house church folk, and I’ve discovered that there’s an entire regrettable subculture of folks who seem to think that a church meeting in a building is The Whore Of Babylon. Having a pastor, taking an offering, any sort of shared funds, even having musical instruments is anathema for some of these folks.
In their defense, a lot of them got burned badly by institutional churches, and have responded to the pain by leaving the institutional church behind. Not the wisest or most measured response, but understandable. Some of them have rebelled against the spiritual authorities God gave them, and started something in their own living room where nobody can tell them no. Some are serially offended to the point of leaving every church within reasonable driving distance, and are doing their own thing because they’ve burned every bridge they have.
This to say, I now understand why so many of my pastoral colleagues are leery of “house church people.” Makes sense, regrettably. If his experience of home churches has been that they’re collecting points for malcontents with bad theology, then it makes sense to blow them off. I assume something along these lines is true, and that’s why the fellow “doesn’t believe in home churches.”
But it’s still a dumb thing to say.
Regrettably … yes, at both extremes. But it raises what I consider a deeper question, one that we have discussed more briefly in the past. It is the question of polity “in [all] the churches,” as Paul puts it more than once, suggesting that there are some things that shouldn’t be all over the map in the way that leaders in various local churches “do their thing.” The early precedent of home churches might suggest a “democratization” of sorts in the nature of church leadership, yet we know that we serve a king in a kingdom not of this world. So, how would a flattening of church leadership jive with living in a monarchy?
I don’t even pretend to have all the answers to that question, but I do think the (one?) church at Corinth gives us quite a few caveats on what the polity “in the churches” should not look like. Yet, as you and I have discussed in the past, we agree that texts like 1 Cor 14 are not to be viewed as obsolescent, and they may well offer some guidance on what it should look like. In discussing tongues and prophecy, Paul suggests that the way we speak as a new creation should reflect the goodness that God spoke in the Creation of the world we now live in. And just as the Spirit was hovering over chaos to bring order into the Creation, so should the Spirit hover over a democratized leadership in the New Creation and thereby bring it into alignment with Kingdom values. I can’t imagine how a “prophetic discourse” like Paul describes in 1 Cor 14 could function smoothly except in a “smaller” group of people. Like a home church, for example.