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 There may be a midweek bible study group - though in many churches these have been replaced by home groups lead by church members - and there may be occasional courses, conferences or one-off events at which the bible is taught.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.
