Simply Church: A House Church Perspective

 What else have I learned from the Christians in India?  Why is the Indian church growing so fast?  They know they are in a battle!  They are taught they are born into a world at war.  They know who they are fighting and they are skilled in the use of spiritual weapons. They firmly believe that they can win.  Through prayer they see idols demolished, temples destroyed, and thousands upon thousands of people rescued from the power of the enemy and released into the Kingdom of light. 

In India, the warfare is far more obvious than here in the West.  There are hideous idols everywhere.  Most homes have shrines and demons are invited to inhabit these idols when they are set in place.  Demon possession is a well-recognized phenomenon.  But as they bind the power of the strongman, they see his goods plundered and people set free (Luke 11:21-22).

Here in the West, outwardly things are very different.  The enemy is far more subtle.  We are like the soldier sitting relaxed at a cafe who became a target for a sniper because he didn't realize he was in a war zone.  Our warfare is mostly against things like drugs and immorality, or invisible things such as materialism.  Second Corinthians 10 is perhaps more applicable here: We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We
use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the
strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God (verses 3-5).

I remember when we had problems in our business a few years ago.  Our major client decided to take his  work in house.  We had a building and employees.  We eventually realized (sometimes we are really slow!) that this happened the month we started House2House, and so we decided to fight the battle spiritually.  We started praying and fighting the enemy.  We employed every spiritual weapon we could think of.  We praised and prayed;  we used the Word; we marched up and down our office shouting and quoting Scripture at the enemy.  Anyone looking at us would have thought we were crazy. Slowly our business turned around.  From being within a month of bankruptcy, it has now become a business that provides for us in such a way that Tony can take plenty of time away from it so we are able to do anything the Lord asks of us.

What will cause us to take spiritual warfare more seriously?  What results would we see if we did?

    Frank Doiron made some great comments that again I would like to respond to in the main blog.  He said:

"I keep wondering if the house church in North America hasn’t made a fundamental mistake. It has gotten excited about home churches and not discipleship and training/equipping. On top of this it has focused on what we do when we meet instead of how we are trained to go into the world. It is my belief and it has been my experience that when we start with the meeting and what we will do when at that meeting…..its over. It is as hard to bring that house church back to a missional conversation as it is in the traditional church. After reading Floyd McClung’s article “Developing a culture of discipleship in your community” and hearing your words about India, “Their training is all geared towards this truth” and Neil Cole saying that his LTG groups are essential to the growth of organic churches, I am beginning to believe that we need that place where we are being equipped to “go.” I am quoting from memory Gordon Cosby of the Church of the Saviour in Washington DC. We thought that if we went to small groups we would become missional. Well that never happened. Not that it sometimes happened. It never happened. It was only when we put in place our discipleship night did things begin to happen. I have a lot more to say about this but if we have a chance to reboot this whole thing we call simple/house/organic church I think we need to start with creating a culture of discipleship instead of what we do when we meet. Finally, the only way to have organic missional churches is to have missional people in those house churches…………… Don't get me wrong, I am not against meeting simply asking the question "Have we put the cart before the horse and are unable to switch it back.?"

Frank, I totally agree with you!  This is our heart cry too.  However, there is just one problem.  It appears to be God who is engineering this movement.  It's not as if there is some location you can go to or some dynamic, gifted speaker that everyone is following.  The commonest communication we get through House2House is this.  "God less us to meet in our home/Starbucks/work.  We thought we were the only ones doing it, but now we've found your website, we realize we are not alone."  According to the latest research, there are now millions of people involved.  Estimates vary on everything from 5 million to 20 million depending on your definition of house church.  The latest Pew Forum research suggest around 7% of the population.  We reckon that between House2House and all our friends who might have extensive contacts around the country, we may be touching 3% to 5% of those involved.  Although we have come across some of these that have started with a missional DNA, I'm sure the majority of them, like you suggest, are more focused on the meeting.

If this is God's doing, He must have the answer to the dilemma.  Is the Holy Spirit going to somehow shift these churches to have a more discipleship and missional emphasis?  What part do any of us play in that?

Here's one story.  We have friends who have a network of house churches in a city about an hour away from us.  The network has been going for a number of years and so the men in the various churches had been meeting for several years for prayer on Monday evenings.  Several months ago, maybe as much as a year now, the Lord challenged them to move this meeting into the harvest, so they started meeting at their local Starbucks.  The very first week, someone saw that they were praying and asked them to pray for him.  He became a Christian that night.  Since then, more than 50 people have become believers and they are now involved in 3 churches that have resulted from that change in location.

One of the questions that Tony and I spend much time deliberating on is how to reach what we call, "Barna's 5 million" with the message of discipleship and mission.  Does anyone have ideas?

Marty Nickel made a great comment on the last blog about being missional that is worth quoting in full.  He says,  "This is a great post Felicity and really focuses on our failing. You
nailed it with your quotes: 'Apostolic teaching is the teaching to go.'
and 'All the commands of Jesus lead to the fulfillment of the Great
Commission.'
Pastoral teaching, by contrast, is to stay and focus on spiritual
growth so "some day" a believer will actually be able to do some
undefined thing in the church.
The fruit of the Spirit *is* a changed life, but fruit isn't intended
for the other trees in the grove. The seed is in the fruit (Genesis
1:11)! It isn't an end to itself but is the means of propagating the
gospel. We've been coring our apples – delivering fruit with no seed -
because we don't understand Kingdom agriculture."

I would like to emphasize two things that Marty says here.

1. Fruit has a purpose, and ultimately that is to bear more fruit.  If all we do is become more mature believers, that doesn't produce more fruit, it just makes us bigger, (or maybe more tasty) fruit.  Disciples are meant to bear fruit.  (John 15:1-8) Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed. (Robert H Schuller)
2. One of the "deadly sins" of church planting, according to David Garrison in his book, "Church Planting Movements" is that of sequentialism.  We think we need to become mature first, and then we can go out and evangelize.  If we wait until we are ready before we reach out to others, it will never happen.  Jesus said, "You say there are still four months until harvest, but I say the harvest is ready now."

Some teach that Jesus was only speaking to the disciples when he gave the Great Commission, that we need some kind of special calling before we share our faith with others. The New Testament does not bear this out.  For example, in Acts 8, all the believers except the apostles were scattered because of persecution, and those who were scattered preached the Good News about Jesus wherever they went.