There's
No Pulpit Like Home
Some Evangelicals are
abandoning megachurches for minichurches--based
in their own living rooms
By RITA
HEALY, DAVID VAN BIEMA
Mar. 6, 2006
On a Sunday at their modest, gray ranch house in the Denver suburb of Englewood,
Tim and Jeanine Pynes gather with four other
Christians for an evening of fellowship, food and faith. Jeanine's spicy
rigatoni precedes a yogurt-and-wafer confection by Ann Moore, none of the food
violating the group's solemn commitment to Weight Watchers. The participants,
who have pooled resources for baby sitting, discuss a planned missionary trip
and sing along with a CD by the Christian crossover group Sixpence None the
Richer. One of the lyrics, presumably written in Jesus'
voice, runs, "I'm here, I'm closer than your breath/ I've conquered even
death." That leads to earnest discussion of a friend's suicide,
which flows into an exercise in which each participant brings something to the
table--a personal issue, a faith question--and the group offers talk and
prayer. Its members read from the New Testament's Epistle to the Hebrews,
observe a mindful silence and share a hymn.
The
meeting could be a sidebar gathering of almost any church in the country but
for a ceramic vessel of red wine on the dinner table--offered in communion.
Because the dinner, it turns out, is no mere Bible study, 12-step meeting or
other pendant to Sunday service at a Denver
megachurch. It is the service. There is no pastor,
choir or sermon--just six believers and Jesus among them, closer than their
breath. Or so thinks Jeanine, who two years ago abandoned a large congregation
for the burgeoning movement known in evangelical circles as "house
churching," "home churching" or "simple church." The
week she left, she says, "I cried every day." But the home service
flourished, grew to 40 people and then divided into five smaller groups. One
participant at the Pyneses' house, a retired pastor
named John White, also attends a conventional church, where he gives classes on
how to found, or plant, the house variety. "Church," he says,
"is not just about a meeting." Jeanine is a passionate convert:
"I'd never go back to a traditional church. I love what we're doing."
Since
the 1990s, the ascendant mode of conservative American faith has been the megachurch. It gathers thousands, or even tens of
thousands, for entertaining if sometimes undemanding services amid
family-friendly amenities. It is made possible by hundreds of smaller
"cell groups" that meet off-nights and provide a humanly scaled
framework for scriptural exploration, spiritual mentoring and emotional
support. Now, however, some experts look at groups like Jeanine Pynes'--spreading in parts of Colorado,
Southern California, Texas
and probably elsewhere--and muse, What if the cell groups decided to lose the
mother church?
In the 2005 book Revolution, George Barna,
Evangelicalism's best-known and perhaps most enthusiastic pollster, named
simple church as one of several "mini-movements" vacuuming up
"millions of believers [who] have stopped going to [standard]
church." In
two decades, he wrote, "only about one-third of the population" will
rely on conventional congregations. Not everyone buys Barna's
numbers--previous estimates set house churchers at a
minuscule 50,000--but some serious players are intrigued.
The
Maclellan Foundation, a major Christian funder based in Chattanooga,
Tenn., is backing a three-year project to
track Colorado
house churching. The Southern Baptist Convention, with more standard-church pew
sitters than any other Protestant group, has commissioned its own poll and
experimented in planting hundreds of its own house churches. Allan Karr, a
professor at the Rocky
Mountain campus of Golden
Gate Baptist Theological Seminary who is involved in the poll, guesses that
three out of 10 churches founded today are simple and that their individual
odds for survival are better than those of the other seven. House churches are
not known for denominational loyalty. That doesn't bother Karr, however.
"I want the denomination to prevail," he says, "but I have an
agenda that supersedes that: the Kingdom
of God at large."
House
churches claim the oldest organizational pedigree in Christianity: the book of
Acts records that after Jesus' death, his Apostles gathered not at the temple
but in an "upper room." House churching has always prospered where
resources were scarce or Christianity officially discouraged. In the U.S. its last
previous bloom was rooted in the bohemian ethos of the California-bred Jesus
People movement of the 1970s. Many of those groups were eventually reabsorbed
by larger congregations, and the remnants tend to take a hard line. Frank
Viola, a 20-year veteran Florida house churcher and
author of Rethinking the Wineskin and other manuals, talks fondly of pilgrims
who doctrinairely abjure pastors, sermons or a
physical plant; feel that the "modern institutional church does not
reflect the early church"; and "don't believe you are going to see
the fullness of Jesus Christ expressed just sitting in a pew listening to one
other member of the body of Christ talking for 45 minutes while everyone else
is passive."
More
recent arrangements can seem more ad hoc. Tim and Susie Grade moved to Denver a year ago. They
had attended cell groups subsidiary to Sunday services
but were delighted to learn that their new neighbors Tim and Michelle Fox
longed for a house church like the ones they had seen overseas. Now they and
seven other twenty- and thirtysomethings mix a fairly
formal weekly communion with a laid-back laying on of
hands, semiconfessional "sharing" and a
guitar sing-along. Says Tim: "We have some people who come from regular
churches, and were a little disenfranchised. And people who joined because of
friendships, and people who are kind of hurting, kind of searching. My age
group and younger are seeking spiritual things that they have not found
elsewhere."
Critics fret that small, pastorless
groups can become doctrinally or even socially unmoored. Thom Rainer, a Southern Baptist who
has written extensively on church growth, says, "I have no problem with
where a church meets, [but] I do think that there are some house churches that,
in their desire to move in different directions, have perhaps moved from
biblical accountability." In extreme circumstances home churches dominated
by magnetic but unorthodox leaders can shade over the line into cults.
Yet
the flexibility of simple churches is a huge plus. They can accommodate the
demands of a multi-job worker, convene around the bedside of an ailing member
and undertake big initiatives with dispatch, as in the case of a group in the
Northwest that reportedly yearned to do social outreach but found that every
member had heavy credit-card debt. An austerity campaign yielded a balance with
which to help the true poor.
Indeed,
house churching in itself can be an economically beneficial proposition. Golden
Gate Seminary's Karr reckons that building and staff consume 75% of a standard
church's budget, with little left for good works. House churches can often
dedicate up to 90% of their offerings. Karr notes that traditional church is
fine "if you like buildings. But I think the reason house churches are
becoming more popular is that their resources are going into something more
meaningful."
Evangelical
boosters find revival everywhere. Barna says he sees
house churching and practices like home schooling and workplace ministries as
part of a "seminal transition that may be akin to a third spiritual
awakening in the U.S."
Jeffrey Mahan, academic vice president of Denver's
liberal and institutionally oriented Iliff School of
Theology, doesn't go that far, but he does think the trend is significant.
American participation in formal church has risen and fallen throughout
history, he notes, and after a prolonged post--World War II upswell,
big-building Christianity may be exhaling again in favor of informal
arrangements.
If
so, he suggests, "I don't think the denominations need be anxious. They
don't have a franchise on religion. The challenge is for people to talk about
what constitutes a full and adequate religious life, to be the church together,
not in a denominational sense, but in the broadest sense." Or as Jesus put
it, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am
I."
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