Why

After almost thirty years of involvement in the institutional church, mainly in Pentecostal denominations we became increasingly aware of the shortcomings associated with simply ‘doing church’ in the existing model.

Our church ‘experience’ had become primarily Sunday morning focused, our meetings were program driven, performance oriented, relationally superficial, and predictable.

At the same time we were increasingly aware that the church in New Zealand is in decline both in numerical terms, and also in it’s influence upon our culture. Rather than being accused of turning the world upside down, as the early disciples had been, we are simply accommodated, tolerated, or ignored.

When you take a moment to step back from all of the activity typically associated with ‘church life’ it quickly becomes apparent that simply doing ‘more of the same’ is never going to produce a different outcome. In the light of these circumstances change is not an option it has become an imperative.

We knew that changing churches was not the answer. We had visited enough churches to know that they were variations of the same theme. We also knew from discussions with church leaders that they didn’t feel the same itch we were trying to scratch, and so change from within was highly unlikely.

Jesus said in Matthew 9:17 that no one puts new wine into old wineskins, and for some time we pondered the question, “what does a new wineskin look like?”

The first glimmer of hope came in December of 2001 when as three families we came together to pray and seek God to see what He was saying to us. Our journey had already taken the best part of two years, and we were getting desperate for answers. Leading up to this meeting, and quite independently we came to the conclusion that the Lord was speaking to us about house church. When we came together to pray, the book, “Houses that Change the World” by Wolfgang Simpson was produced by one of the families, and for the first time we felt that there existed a Biblical pattern of gathering and ‘being’ the church outside of what we had previously known.

In hind site, even a cursory look at the book of Acts and the New Testament letters shows the church meeting in peoples homes as a common, if not the primary pattern for believers gathering together. We had become so entrenched in the prevailing paradigm that we could not see what scripture clearly showed.

House church is a world removed from simply transferring the typical ‘Sunday morning service’ into a home. There are no paid professionals doing ‘the work of the ministry’. While many churches pay lip service to the ‘priesthood of all believers’ in house church it’s a reality. There is always a shared meal, and time for genuine fellowship, prayer and encouragement from the scriptures.

After more than twelve months of being house church together, and seeing the Lord gather others to us, we are beginning to understand in a fresh way what it means to be part of a relational Christian community. Although we have much to learn we remain confident of God’s leading in what could become the 'next reformation'.

The fifteen theses (or why house church) as expressed by Wolfgang Simpson follow on the link below. They make excellent reading.

15 theses