“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.
I don’t particularly think of it as a “flattening of church leadership.” The NT structure (elders/overseers, deacons, different gifts) isn’t flat, and it was designed for and implemented in house churches. Of course we can and have found ways to add layers of bureaucracy, but the structure as designed is low-maintenance, flexible, and allows most of the effort to go to front-line ministry. The bigger the edifice we build, the bigger the edifice we have to maintain.
Okay, ‘flattening’ was an infelicitous choice of words. I do wonder why Paul talks more about “fathers” in a letter like 1 Cor than elders or deacons. Similarly in First John’s hierarchy of “fathers, young men, and little children.” Could it be that appointed elders and deacons were somewhat “provisional” until the Spirit could take full control through a more mystical process of outing “those who are spiritual” (2:6-16; 14:37)?
That’s an interesting take. Some folks think the other way round — they wonder if the Corinthian elders aren’t mentioned because the church doesn’t have them yet. Frequently, this hypothesis will then be used to marginalize the praxis of the Corinthian epistles (“That church was really messed up and didn’t have functioning leadership anyway; I don’t think any of that applies to us“). That’s a fairly flimsy justification for dismissing the most direct instructions we have for how we conduct our time together, even if you could prove it. Dunno how you would, either. But even if the pre-elder hypothesis is correct, I don’t see that it changes much. Paul’s emphasis on universal practice makes it fairly clear that he’s not carving out some special niche for the Corinthians; very much the opposite. He’s discipling them into line with the other churches.
That being the case, I think your (directly opposite) take is interesting to consider. We know that Paul’s practice was to let things get going, then appoint elders (Ac. 14:23, where they appoint elders on the return trip; Titus 1:5). If I’m hearing you right, you’re suggesting that the appointed leadership is effectively temporary scaffolding, and the more permanent structure would be revealed organically as the Spirit works through the gifts. Do I have that right?
Off the cuff, I’d say that I don’t see the gap you do between the two concepts. Relationships among the people of Jesus have been familial from the very beginning — “Whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother” and again, “You are all brethren” — so it makes sense that leadership fits within that framework. Modern Americans — radical egalitarians that we are — think a familial framework means no hierarchy, but that’s never the way productive households worked, and we are the household of God. Having elders responsible to shepherd the flock, and deacons whose job is to tend to the things that would pull an elder off his primary duty to “prayer and to the service [diakonia] of the word” makes a ton of sense, and fits nicely within a productive household model. Serving a particular function in the family business doesn’t invalidate the familial relationships, nor vice versa.
Yes, you read me correctly. A lot of ink has been spilled over the question of whether things that happened in the Book of Acts were normative for the church or provisional. John’s baptism, water baptism in Christ, and how that was timed relative to the filling of the Spirit, etc. “Apostolic” appointment of pastors/elders is still the norm among the more traditional hierarchical polities (e.g., the bishopric), but the Bible church movement in the early 20th Century, as well as some strains of Pentecostalism, kind of stirred things up toward what I perhaps too loosely called “democratization” of leadership compared to the more hierarchically structured polities of the older, (previously) larger, traditional denominations.
I agree with you in principle that there isn’t that much of a gap between our views. However, what does it really matter if only precious few are really attuned to the Spirit, whether we structure the leadership of the communion of saints according to the elder/deacon paradigm or the more “democratized” family paradigm? I’m inclined to think that the Corinthian church had already progressed through the earlier phase of apostolic appointment and essentially skipped over the “family” model by a peculiarly (Southern) Greek strain of over-democratization, the foundation for which we could begin to see in Paul’s encounter with the competing philosophers in the public forum of the acropolis. Paul is already hot under the collar by 1 Cor 4 because they have already sold their apostolic “fathers” short and simply have no “fathers” of their own. He essentially tells them he’s ready to “take names and kick a–” if they don’t turn things around.
Paul had already identified the root problem as “carnality”—a dearth of “those who are spiritual” and the corresponding lack of a communal “ear” for the Spirit (2:6–3:1). If I’m anywhere close to seeing what was going on, who knew that this dearth would last 2,000 years, so that we would need another outpouring of the Spirit with a renaissance of prophets and “the spirit of prophecy” by the end of the age (Rev 22, cf. 1 Cor 14:32, 37)? I believe Christ in Rev 2–3 draws on the prevailing problems of the seven churches in first century Asia Minor to predict what is destined to be the environment of local persecution and syncretism/apostasy that will largely characterize the church at the end of the age. In this environment He calls for individual “overcomers” in each of the churches who do “have an ear” for what the Spirit is (apparently) so desperately trying to say to the churches.
Methinks this may be where we should be looking.
I certainly agree there’s no substitute for Spirit-filled people. Carnality can sink any organization and any structure.
The Acts debate strikes me as kinda funny. People who try to slavishly imitate everything they see there are trying to re-create the moment of our founding, which is nuts; that’s a spot on the timeline that’s long past. Meanwhile, people who read the account, not seeking to obey it, but seeking to show how little of it applies to today, are obviously nuts, bibliologically speaking. It’s very convenient to read Acts as transitional, because it turns out then there’s no normative narrative in Scripture and you can do whatever you want. (Not to mention the hypocrisy of finding normative force in epistles written during the same period of time.)
It’s our founding. If we’re out of harmony with it, something is wrong. If we’re slavishly imitating it, something is wrong — they didn’t. (You don’t see Paul setting up the voluntary communism of Acts 4 everywhere he goes, for example.) It’s funny to me how many so-called conservatives readily grasp the normative value of your founding when we’re talking about the Declaration of Independence, but can’t access the same categories when we’re talking about the Book of Acts. One is tempted to view this as revealing the real importance of those documents to them.