I Am Not Really a Fan of House Churches

Recently I had the chance to visit a local church here in my community. It is a relatively new church plant, slightly more than a year old. It has been a while since I have been in a church like this, since my most recent experience as a pastor has been in the context of the house church. This short experience in ‘institutional church’ left me with a lot to think about, and affirmed, for me at least, that the house church movement has much to offer the future of Christianity, even as it continues to draw inspiration from the most ancient of church forms. And as you read this, please keep in mind that I am not really a hardened and single-minded fan of the house church.

For me, the form of the church is basically irrelevant. I don’t really care what shape it takes. I don’t really care what it looks like. The real question is ‘What is it that we are to DO as a church? What is it that we are to BE?’ My architecture background continues to prompt me to allow the FUNCTION of the church to shape its FORM. This ‘form follows function’ approach to church planting has become the guiding principle for how I believe we should shape the future of the family of God.

But let me be clear about this. I do believe that the ‘function’ of the church WILL shape it’s ‘form’, and I do believe that most church planters are more concerned with the latter than they are with the former. Worse yet, I don’t believe that the ‘forms’ that most church planters work so desperately to achieve even ALLOW the church to accomplish the function that God has ordained it to accomplish. In fact, I believe that we have been attempting to force the church into a cultural form that makes it nearly impossible for the body of Christ to DO what we are supposed to DO and BE what it is that we are supposed to BE.

See, if we can stop for a second and think about the ‘FUNCTION’ of the church, and try our best not to rest on our presuppositions about the cultural ‘FORM’ that our churches have already taken, we may just discover something. We may discover that the function of the church is going to encourage and even demand a particular form. And I’ll bet that it may also be that this form is going to be far closer to the house church form than it is going to be to the form we all recognize as the traditional institutional church in America.

I’m going to blog again on my visit to this local institutional church plant so I can exhaust some of my thinking about the relationship between form and function, and explore the future of what I hope and pray the church can become. I do think it will need to look more and more like the house church, not because I am a natural fan of this form, but because I think that there are changes that we need to make, and these changes will ultimately return the church to the most ancient of forms.

I Am Not Really a Fan of House Churches

Everyone Has a Worldview

I was listening to a podcast recently that featured a conversation between a Christina and an atheist. the atheist insisted that atheism was NOT a worldview because he did not believe that his belief in the NON-existence of God was a foundational belief that impacted his view of other things in his life. That seemed a bit disingenuous to me.

The reality is that folks like Nancy Pearcey are right when they say that every worldview tries to answer three simply questions: 1) How did we get here? 2) How did things get so messed up? and 3) How can we fix it? Every philosophy for living, every political ideology and every faith system addresses these three issues, and it’s not by accident that the first question is the question of Origin.

What we believe about HOW WE GOT HERE is truly the most foundational stand we will ever take, and this foundational belief DOES impact the way we see everything else. There is a huge difference between believing that we are the random result of a blind process, or the intentional design of a creator God. In the first view of things, our lives are rather incidental and meaningless, as they are the result of a series of random events. In the second view, our lives are the purposeful design of a Creator God. In the first view, all morality is simply a matter of personal or communal taste and preference, in the second view there is an objective standard through which we are able to see the world clearly and determine between right and wrong, good and bad, beauty and ugliness. In the first view, we must deny the reality of the laws of logic and reason (and their ultimate universal objective root), while in the second view we actually have a source for the framework with which we reason.

When atheists hold the position that there is NO God, they have answered the first of three worldview questions and laid the foundation for everything else that they believe. How am I to treat my girlfriend today? What am I to think of the role of the law in our society? What should my position be on genetic engineering or abortion? How am I to deal with the issue of poverty and suffering? How should I feel about homosexuality? All of these questions will find their ultimate source in the way that we answer the question of Origin. Are we created, or not? Is there a Creator, or not? Does He have something to say to us, or not? These foundational questions every other step we take as we journey together through the trials and tribulations of life.

That’s why, as a church, we have been so single minded about what we study and how we live our lives as Christians. The most important thing we can do is to develop a clear and well developed view of the world based on what we know is true about God. It is our duty as Christians. And beyond our group, we are committed to helping other Christians to develop this same worldview. That’s why we built the website. That’s why we speak locally at churches and conferences. We feel God’s call on our lives to speak the truth about the only view of the world that makes sense.

jim
please visit us at www.pleaseconvinceme.com

Everyone Has a Worldview