The Priority of Teaching in the Household Style Church

Ask many Christians, especially church leaders, about "house church" and sooner or later you will hear concerns raised that such churches are prone to being weak on bible teaching. Some criticisms will go even further and portray such simple expressions of church as potential hotbeds of heresy.

The reality is however that household-style churches, if they are understood and operating according to principles set out in the New Testament, actually have the potential to be centres of strong bible teaching and learning.

Here's what I mean.

In any midsize or large local church there will often be a number of gifted bible teachers and preachers. Some of these will be elders or leaders in the church - indeed, one of the apostolic requirements of an elder is that they must be "able to teach". In practice, however, many of those with this ability will not exercise it very often - at least not outside of individual pastoral situations. A typical church will have a weekly Sunday morning service, with bible teaching and maybe an evening service as well. There may be a midweek bible study group - though in many churches these have been replaced by home groups lead by church members - and there may be occasional courses, conferences or one-off events at which the bible is taught. Some churches, following a pattern established in north American churches, may also have a Sunday School - meaning an adult biblical education programme supplementary to the main weekend service.

In such a church setting, the total public/group teaching work of the church may amount to no more than a few hours each week. 

This reality raises a number of issues. One of them is a practical question: if a pastor or church leader is only preaching once a week (at the most), what are they meant to be doing the rest of the time? The answer varies from church to church, but in my own experience of being in full-time church leadership for twenty years, non-preaching time often consists of some or all of the following: 

• preparation and study; prayer; 


• meeting individuals; 


• attending planning meetings; 


• strategic thinking; travelling; 


• troubleshooting; 


• interfacing with the wider community; 


• practical acts of service; 


• emails and other administration. 

The question is, are the church's teachers and pastors meant to be doing these tasks? Or are these activities the result of a church system that unwittingly minimises bible teaching and elevates organisational management? 

When the early apostles were arrested and brought before the Sanhedrin, they were accused of having filled Jerusalem with their teaching. How had they managed to leave themselves open to such a charge? 

The Book of Acts tells us that the pattern of the Jerusalem church was to meet in the temple courts (the large setting) and in homes for more intimate fellowship, meals and breaking of bread. What is often missed, however, is that the early apostles taught in both settings - the large and the small. 

Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.      (Acts 5:42)

Let's try a maths exercise. Luke (assuming he wrote Acts) records that the number of men in Jerusalem who believed in Jesus at this time was around five thousand. The text makes it fairly clear that this figure did not include women and children. Let's speculate that this number of men represents a total church population of at least 15,000 people. Let's then speculate that an average Jerusalem home could accommodate about thirty people at one time.  If the total number of believers (including children) were equally divided between such homes when they met, we would discover about 500 "house churches" in Jerusalem in the middle of the first century. None of this is provable through historical means of course. It is a thought exercise resting on a number of suppositions. 

The twelve Jerusalem apostles are portrayed in Acts as spending their days teaching about Jesus in the temple courts and from house to house. In a typical week, therefore, if each apostle visited a house church every day, they might have taught publicly about Jesus at least seven times a week - in addition to any preaching they may have done in the larger temple court setting. This amounts to a total of at least 84 teaching sessions a week in Jerusalem by eye-witnesses of Christ and his resurrection - over 4,000 interactive sermons a year. If we compare this figure with a possible number of home churches of 500, we could envisage a scenario in which each house fellowship received a teaching apostle approximately every three to four weeks. 

This level of apostolic teaching (if it bears any relation to what actually took place) may help shed some light on the claim that the apostles had filled Jerusalem with their teaching. I wonder how many contemporary home groups or house churches are fortunate enough to receive that level of apostolic input in a typical year. I suspect very few. 

The thought exercise outlined above does not prove anything historically. It merely illustrates the fact that, if those with the gifting and calling to teach the word of God were released to do so as the primary activity of their working week, there is no inherent reason why such teachers, apostles, pastors or prophets could not be actively and fruitfully deployed in small household style churches if they moved around between them on a regular basis. Such a model actually allows for more bible teaching from those able to teach rather than less. By contrast, the current system of larger Sunday services, with all their inefficiencies of size, resource and administration, leads inevitably to less bible teaching, as those primarily gifted and called to do it find themselves spending time on maintaining an organisation rather than equipping believers in their homes and places of work.  



Church history actually gives us a working model of such a system of widespread decentralised itinerant bible teaching. Early Methodism, under the leadership of John Wesley, had a very well-worked-out system of such teaching with ministers assigned to several local "societies", "classes" (groups of about 6) and "bands" within a geographical area or territory.  



Many of these itinerant preachers and bible teachers were commissioned by Wesley not by the official Church of England to which they nominally adhered in the movement's early years. The effective use of such itinerant ministers went hand-in-hand with the growth of the Methodist movement - from around 15,000 people in the 1780s to 130,000 a decade later and around one million within 50 years of its founding. 



One writer of Methodist history notes that:

“Moving to and fro, the itinerant was a bond of union between the societies in the circuit, and his appointment in several circuits with the passing years knit them together in the connexion of which he was the representative. The system helped also to secure uniformity in teaching and administration......His doctrine and discipline and those of his predecessor and successor had been derived from Wesley and the Conference. To these he and they were all amenable. Different times and conditions may necessitate modifications; but for securing the unity. homogeneity, and happy co-operation of a new, scattered, varied, and rapidly-growing community, perhaps nothing better than the itinerancy within the circuits and from circuit to circuit could have been devised. Wesley's preachers had the mobility of Wyclif's itinerating poor priests and laymen, or recalled the Friars of the Middle Ages without their hampering vows.”

Decentralised models of church (call them "house church" if you want) both require and facilitate the emergence of bible teachers who focus on that activity as a priority, without the encumbrances of a settled organisational model of church congregations and Sunday services. 

Beyond Information Sharing: Preaching that Reveals Secrets

The prophet Jeremiah faced a challenge unlikely to be encountered by most modern preachers in the western world: his family were plotting to kill him.

...the men of Anathoth...are seeking your life and saying 'Do not prophesy in the name of the LORD or you will die by our hands'. (Jeremiah 11:21)

According to Jeremiah's own account of the incident, he was unaware of the conspiracy before it became an immediate threat. His insight into the plot came about, he claims, as a result of God revealing it to him:

Because the LORD revealed their plot to me, I knew it, for at that time he showed me what they were doing. (Jeremiah 11:18)  

The exact reasons for his family's extreme hostility are not fully given in the passage (Jeremiah 11:18-12:6) but it centred around their strong dislike of the prophet's message.

Great bible scholars whose opinions I respect and whose qualifications greatly exceed my own suggest that Jeremiah may have come to an understanding of the murder plot through a message being passed on to him by someone who was aware of it. The late John A Thompson, for instance, cites the influential archaeologist and biblical scholar Dr John Bright when he writes:

A sympathetic relative who brought the news may well have been Yahweh's informant. 

(JA Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah, p. 350, NICOT series)

While it is quite possible that this was the case, there is an alternative view at least worth considering: that the news of the plot on Jeremiah's life came to the prophet through immediate divine revelation, without any human intermediary.

The following factors seem to suggest that this was in fact the case:

• the repeated insistence in 11:18 of the agency of Yahweh in disclosing the deeds (“revealed”, “he showed me”)


• the inclusion of the possible word-for-word content of the revelation (12:6)


• the absence in the passage of any reference to a third party 


• the use of the word “reveal”; its only other use in the book indicates an immediate disclosure, without human means (38:21) 

The frequency in the book of auditory and/or visual messages as a means of divine communication with the prophet, messages which included the prediction of invasion, defeat and exile at the hands of the "enemy from the north", also suggest that the revealing of a secret conspiracy was not outside the scope of the spiritual possibilities experienced by Jeremiah as he sought to follow and discharge his call to be a "prophet to the nations" (1:5).

Taking a wider biblical view, we can see the revealing of secrets as an aspect of many of the great teachers, prophets, reformers and apostles of both the Old and New Covenants. These include Daniel's ability to describe both the content and the meaning of Nebuchadnezzar's unspoken dream (Daniel 2), the insight Jesus had of the Samaritan woman's five previous husbands and her current domestic arrangements (John 4), Peter's discernment of the motives and action of Ananias and Sapphira in their financial dishonesty (Acts 5).

A striking example from church history is from the preaching of Charles Spurgeon. The person on the receiving end of the revealed secrets explains:

Mr. Spurgeon looked at me as if he knew me, and in his sermon he pointed to me, and told the congregation that I was a shoemaker, and that I kept my shop open on Sundays; and I did, sir. I should not have minded that; but he also said that I took ninepence the Sunday before, and that there was fourpence profit out of it. I did take ninepence that day, and fourpence was just the profit; but how he should know that, I could not tell. Then it struck me that it was God who had spoken to my soul through him, so I shut up my shop the next Sunday. At first, I was afraid to go again to hear him, lest he should tell the people more about me; but afterwards I went, and the Lord met with me, and saved my soul. 

The Autobiography of Charles H. Spurgeon [Curts & Jennings, 1899], II:226-27)

Commenting himself, Spurgeon says:

I could tell as many as a dozen similar cases in which I pointed at somebody in the hall without having the slightest knowledge of the person, or any idea that what I said was right, except that I believed I was moved by the Spirit to say it; and so striking has been my description, that the persons have gone away, and said to their friends, ‘Come, see a man that told me all things that ever I did; beyond a doubt, he must have been sent of God to my soul, or else he could not have described me so exactly.’ And not only so, but I have known many instances in which the thoughts of men have been revealed from the pulpit. (ibid)

The link between revealing secrets and the power of the word of God is stated explicitly by the writer to the Hebrews:

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. 

(Hebrews 4:12-13)

Jeremiah, like some evangelists and pastors today in parts of the Muslim-majority world, experienced such extreme hostility to his message that his life was at risk. It was through an act of divine disclosure that he come to know of this danger and was able to take preventative measures (Jer 12:6).

In the age of encryption and Wikileaks, secrets are everywhere and feature powerfully in the activities of governments, corporations and nations. Individuals also carry secrets, for good or evil. As Christian believers read, hear and (especially) speak the word of God, may we do so not as mere conveyors of general information but as those who speak with that revelatory edge to our communication, confident that "there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries." As Daniel expressed this discovery:

He reveals deep and hidden things;

    he knows what lies in darkness,

    and light dwells with him.

(Daniel 2:22)

As the church learns to speak with such insight, may the hearers respond not with adulation of the human messenger but as Nebuchadnezzar did when he fell prostrate, with reverence for the God who reveals:

"your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings."

Should We Use Twitter in Church? A Response to Josh Harris

Although not really the main focus of this blog, I was stimulated by Josh Harris's post on the use of Twitter in church.

His conclusion is to leave the tweeting out during the church meetings and his reasons are as follows:

1. Doing so will be likely to distract me from the word of God (as I am likely to be tempted to check emails, etc.)

2. Tweeting, even in response to the sermon, is time spent not actively listening to the sermon.

3. Tweeting focuses on me broadcasting rather than listening and, thus, is a different activity to that needed to benefit from the word.

4. We may set the wrong example to other people - they may think we're merely checking our emails and this may lead them to do likewise.

5. Popularity in the culture does not make an activity appropriate in the church.

6. Nothing will be lost by tweeting after the Sunday meeting.


Judging by the number of comments on Josh's blog, this seems a pretty live issue, with John Piper even entering the debate. So here goes with a response, point by point:

1. If it is true that tweeting distracts you from the word of God, then it is certainly an activity to be avoided.

My difficulty with Josh's first point, however, is that, having been honest about his own struggles in this area and sharing the effect that tweeting during the sermon has on him ( I assume he has tried it), he moves from that to a general claim that the action must have the same effect on every human being.

A superficial consideration of this premise, or a familiarity with the varieties of human experiences, will reveal it to be unsustainable. Everyone is different and one man's meat is another man's poison. The Lord Jesus only required us to cut off our hands if they were causing us to sin. If they were not, we are permitted to keep them attached to our arms.


2. Tweeting is not time spent listening. This is surely being righteous over-much. The act of listening (to God's word) is far more multi-faceted than the mere act of sitting still and hearing. It involves, for instance, thinking about what is heard, engaging our will and emotions in response to it; applying it to our lives as we hear; praying while we listen, etc. Actively listening to the word of God may also involve us weeping or trembling at it (a response that God says he "esteems") .

Any or all of these excellent actions may involve us, temporarily, "not listening" in the narrow sense that Josh suggests. But, surely, they are all very much at the heart of how a godly congregation should listen. If an individual finds that they can use a tool of some kind to focus their response and enrich their capacity to engage with the message, that is surely a valid act for them, subject to it being done unto the Lord and with due regard to the needs of the weaker brother. I note that, annecdotally, several of those commenting on Josh's post do in fact state this to be the reason they use twitter during the sermon.

Furthermore, Josh's assumption that the act of tweeting cannot be done while actively listening is, presumably, a statement which he himself has found to be the case in his experience. To make a rule based on this experience, however, appears unwise and a possible case of imposing one' s own freedom (or lack of it) on another.

I would disagree with those who compare tweeting with note taking. I compare it more with saying "amen" to a particular point in the sermon. I don't know if he still does it, but CJ Mahaney was one of the first Christian leaders I observed giving verbal feedback during Bible teaching - often of a vigorous kind. Are we to prohibit this activity because it is "not time spent listening"? Please see my concluding comments for more on this point.

3. I agree that tweeting is broadcasting, but this action does not have to be seen as incompatible with listening. My definition (above) of what is involved in active listening is, I think, relevant to this point as well as to the previous one. I am not qualified to comment on listening from a neurological or educational perspective, but there may be more to discover from those fields of knowledge and common grace about what it is exactly that is involved in effective listening.

A subsidiary point could be made here that, by sharing the individual's response to the sermon, the effect of it is being spread in real time and in a natural, relational way.

4. Example. Oh! The great argument that has stifled innovation in God's church for centuries! Exactly the same argument has been used repeatedly in connection with a hundred and one developments in church that are now uncontroversial, including (in no particular order):

• using TV monitors in the meetings (people will think they've come to a cinema, etc)
• using guitars (people will think that it's OK to listen to rock music)
• wearing suits (people will think they've come to a business convention)
• not wearing suits (people will think they've come to a hippy festival, etc)

This argument is really a dead end for two reasons. Firstly, because it focuses so much on externals at the expense of heart attitude that it is difficult to see how such an argument will tend towards producing anything other than ....... well, externalism!

Secondly, it suggests that Christian adults who are often handling major responsibility in the world of work all week, are incapable of dealing emotionally or intellectually with another individual who is accessing a palmtop or other device during a public meeting. Do such people actually exist in our churches? If so, I would want to ask the question, "Where did they learn to be so uptight?" My concern is that they might have learned such unseemly traits in church itself.


5. Josh's analysis of the relationship between church life and the surrounding culture is, to my mind, the weakest element in his article. To say that we do not need to incorporate a thing into church life just because it is popular is at one level, a mere truism.

At another level, however, it reads a little bit like the age-old line, "We don't want change just for the sake of change" to which I reply, "Why not? We're quite happy with predictability for the sake of predictability."

Anyone who argues that we should "start doing something" in church because "they do it in the world" is clearly a sad person who needs befriending and taking out more. The fact is, people are using twitter increasingly in public conferences and other presentational settings and it is a trend that is naturally finding expression in some churches. The issue, therefore, is a pastoral one - should leaders encourage or discourage this practice for the good of the body - not one based on making the meetings more culturally relevant to the outsider.

6. Several things will be lost by tweeting after the Sunday meeting instead of during it. Most significantly, I would suggest, is the sense of immediacy. Preaching, if I have understood correctly, is meant to cause a response now. Of course, such a response cannot only be expressed through tweeting! But, if the point of preaching is that it is meant to have an effect in the moment, we should be careful that we do not confuse this aim with the ability to form a considered evaluation of a sermon at a later point.

Some final thoughts:

Listening (to paraphrase Jonathan Edwards in his Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World) is a subordinate end not an ultimate end when we gather to hear God's word. The ultimate end of listening to preaching is, of course, to glorify God, but between the subordinate end of listening and the ultimate end of God being glorified, other subordinate ends exist. In particular, we should expect the preaching of the word to effect change in us, conforming us in greater measure to the will of God and the character of Jesus Christ.

If this is happening, we should rejoice whether or not tweeting is happening. If it is not, tweeting or sitting still is a non-issue.

Menno Simmons on Poverty and Piety

O preachers, dear preachers, where is the power of the Gospel you preach? . . . Shame on you for the easygoing gospel and barren bread-breaking, you who have in so many years been unable to effect enough with your gospel and sacraments so as to remove your needy and distressed members from the streets, even though the Scripture plainly teaches . . . [that] there shall be no beggars among you.

Menno Simons, “Reply to False Accusations” (1552), in Complete Writings, ed. J.C. Wenger.

The Gospels and the Gospel

Not being in the forefront of current Christian thought and discussion, I have only now got round to reading Dr NT Wright's response to the controversy that ran through British evangelicalism last year concerning the evangelical understanding of the nature of the atonement - a controversy fueled in part by Steve Chalke's book The Lost Message of Jesus and reported on in depth at my friend Adrian Warnock's site over the months.

In reading Dr Wright's response to the issue (a 13,000 word treatise which he modestly describes as being "only a tip-of-the-iceberg treatment written in haste") I was struck by several aspects of the article.

In particular, I was heartened by the way he demands that evangelicals must give more attention in their theological reflection on the nature of the atonement to the canonical gospel texts and not only to Paul's writings. The following is typical of his concern:

I am forced to conclude that there is a substantial swathe of contemporary evangelicalism which actually doesn't know what the gospels themselves are there for, and would rather elevate 'Paul' ... and treat Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as mere repositories of Jesus' stories from which certain doctrinal and theological nuggets may be collected.

As a third generation unbeliever, I was converted to the faith of Christ through reading and preaching that centered on Matthew and John. It was only later in my Christian life that I was introduced in any meaningful way to the Pauline corpus (through the preaching of Terry Virgo), a development for which I remain continually thankful.

Partly because of my own journey to faith, no doubt, I have always had a high view of the gospels and have at times wondered whether the focus on Paul's letters in so much of the preaching of the churches I have been part of has lead to an imbalanced theology in some respects. Shocking sentence, I know.

Although I have my own views on the controversy outlined at the start of this post, I am not going to share them here (not yet, anyway). Nor am I suggesting (as some have done) that the gospels and Paul are in any way in tension with each other.

Instead, I would rather state that in the church of my dreams, the gospel narratives are treated with the same reverence and respect afforded to the apostolic letters and Acts and that their theology of Christ - his life, his teaching, his kingdom works, his humanity, his divinity, his place in the history of God's saving purpose, his death and his resurrection - is taught, received and put into practice with the same vigor and commitment that we afford to the apostolic letters of Paul.