Houses That Changed The World
By Wolfgang Simson
Madras, 1998

Comments:

A far more significant book than I expected. It challenges many sacred cows, demonstrates remarkable biblical, theological and strategic insight. The whole church needs to hear what Wolfgang Simson has to say in this seminal work."

Prof. Kenneth B. Mulholland, Dean, Colombia Biblical Seminary

"A monumental and marvelous piece of work! It is going to be a very important contribution to the present situation faced by the church."

Ralph Neighbour, Author of "Where do we go from Here"

"Great Book! I was a Pastor in the Reformed Church in Switzerland for six years, and can agree with a lot from my own experience."

Matthias Schuurmann, Theol. Teacher, Windhoek, Naimibia

An excellent book, which goes to the heart of the structure problem in our perception of the church. I completely agree with the analysis and much appreciate the book and it's message."

Patrick Johnstone, WEC, London

"Housechurches seem to be tailor-made for today's Generation-X".

Ulrich Salvisberg, Former Pastor and Coordinator, Explo 97

This is one of the most significant books that I have seen for a long time."

Peter Brierly, Christian Research, UK

"To be honest, I have given up on all those new church fads and Christian waves. But this thing about housechurches excites me deep down. I have hoped for this type of church to become a reality all my Christian life. I can't believe it might come true! I am so excited I could cry."

Computer Programmer, Switzerland

"Something simple, yet dynamic. That is what I have always hoped the church to be." Medical Doctor, Switzerland

God is changing the Church, and that, in turn, will change the world. Millions of Christians around the world are aware of an imminent reformation of global proportions. They say, in effect: "Church as we know it is preventing Church as God wants it."

Fifteen Theses towards a Re-Incarnation of Church

1. Church is a Way of Life, not a series of religious meetings.

Before they where called Christians, followers of Christ have been called "The Way". One of the reasons was, that they have literally found "the way to live." The nature of Church is not reflected in a constant series of religious meetings lead by professional clergy in holy rooms specially reserved to experience Jesus, but in the prophetic way followers of Christ live their everyday life in spiritually extended families as a vivid answer to the questions society faces, at the place where it counts most: in their homes.

2. Time to change the system

In aligning itself to the religious patterns of the day, the historic Orthodox Church after Constantine in the 4th century AD adopted a religious system which was in essence Old Testament, complete with priests, altar, a Christian temple (cathedral), frankincense and a Jewish, synagogue-style worship pattern. The Roman Catholic Church went on to canonize the system. Luther did reform the content of the gospel, but left the outer forms of "church" remarkably untouched; the Free-Churches freed the system from the State, the Baptists then baptized it, the Quakers dry-cleaned it, the Salvation Army put it into a uniform, the Pentecostals anointed it and the Charismatics renewed it, but until today nobody has really changed the superstructure. It is about time to do just that.

3. The Third Reformation.

In rediscovering the gospel of salvation by faith and grace alone, Luther started to reform the Church through a reformation of theology. In the 18th century through movements like the Moravians there was a recovery of a new intimacy with God, which led to a reformation of spirituality, the Second Reformation. Now God is touching the wineskins themselves, initiating a Third Reformation, a reformation of structure.

4. From Church-Houses to house-churches

Since New Testament times, there is no such thing as "a house of God". At the cost of his life, Stephen reminded unequivocally: God does not live in temples made by human hands. The Church is the people of God. The Church, therefore, was and is at home where people are at home: in ordinary houses. There, the people of God: share their lives in the power of the Holy Spirit, have "meetings," that is, they eat when they meet; they often do not even hesitate to sell private property and share material and spiritual blessings, teach each other in real-life situations how to obey God's word—dialogue- and not professor-style, pray and prophesy with each other, baptize, 'lose their face' and their ego by confessing their sins, regaining a new corporate identity by experiencing love, acceptance and forgiveness.

5. The church has to become small in order to grow big.

Most churches of today are simply too big to provide real fellowship. They have too often become "fellowships without fellowship." The New Testament Church was a mass of small groups, typically between 10 and 15 people. It grew not upward into big congregations between 20 and 300 people filling a cathedral and making real, mutual communication improbable. Instead, it multiplied "sideward"—like organic cells—once these groups reached around 15-20 people. Then, if possible, it drew all the Christians together into citywide celebrations, as with Solomon's Temple court in Jerusalem. The traditional congregational church as we know it is, statistically speaking, neither big nor beautiful, but rather a sad compromise, an overgrown house-church and an under-grown celebration, often missing the dynamics of both.

6. No church is led by a Pastor alone

The local church is not lead by a Pastor, but fathered by an Elder, a local person of wisdom and reality. The local house-churches are then networked into a movement by the combination of elders and members of the so-called five-fold ministries (Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Evangelists and Teachers) circulating "from house to house," whereby there is a special foundational role to play for the apostolic and prophetic ministries (Eph. 2:20, and 4:11.12). A Pastor (shepherd) is a very necessary part of the whole team, but he cannot fulfill more than a part of the whole task of "equipping the saints for the ministry," and has to be complemented synergistically by the other four ministries in order to function properly.

7. The right pieces – fitted together in the wrong way

In doing a puzzle, we need to have the right original for the pieces, otherwise the final product, the whole picture, turns out wrong, and the individual pieces do not make much sense. This has happened to large parts of the Christian world: we have all the right pieces, but have fitted them together wrong, because of fear, tradition, religious jealousy and a power-and-control mentality. As water is found in three forms—ice, water and steam—the five ministries mentioned in Eph. 4:11-12, the Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Teachers and Evangelists are also found today, but not always in the right forms and in the right places: they are often frozen to ice in the rigid system of institutionalized Christianity; they sometimes exist as clear water; or they have vanished like steam into the thin air of free-flying ministries and "independent" churches, accountable to no-one. As it is best to water flowers with the fluid version of water, these five equipping ministries will have to be transformed back into new—and at the same time age-old—forms, so that the whole spiritual organism can flourish and the individual "ministers" can find their proper role and place in the whole. That is one more reason why we need to return back to the Maker's original and blueprint for the Church.

8. God does not leave the Church in the hands of bureaucratic clergy

No expression of a New Testament church is ever led by just one professional "holy man" doing the business of communicating with God and then feeding some relatively passive religious consumers Moses-style. Christianity has adopted this method from pagan religions, or at best from the Old Testament. The heavy professionalization of the church since Constantine has now been a pervasive influence long enough, dividing the people of God artificially into laity and clergy. According to the New Testament (1 Tim. 2:5), "there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." God simply does not bless religious professionals to force themselves in-between people and God forever. The veil is torn, and God is allowing people to access Himself directly through Jesus Christ, the only Way. To enable the priesthood of all believers, the present system will have to change completely. Bureaucracy is the most dubious of all administrative systems, because it basically asks only two questions: yes or no. There is no room for spontaneity and humanity, no room for real life. This may be OK for politics and companies, but not the Church. God seems to be in the business of delivering His Church from a Babylonian captivity of religious bureaucrats and controlling spirits into the public domain, the hands of ordinary people made extraordinary by God, who, like in the old days, may still smell of fish, perfume and revolution.

9. Return from organized to organic forms of Christianity

The "Body of Christ" is a vivid description of an organic, not an organized, being. Church consists on its local level of a multitude of spiritual families, which are organically related to each other as a network, where the way the pieces are functioning together is an integral part of the message of the whole. What has become a maximum of organization with a minimum of organism, has to be changed into a minimum of organization to allow a maximum of organism. Too much organization has, like a straightjacket, often choked the organism for fear that something might go wrong. Fear is the opposite of faith, and not exactly a Christian virtue. Fear wants to control, faith can trust. Control, therefore, may be good, but trust is better. The Body of Christ is entrusted by God into the hands of steward-minded people with a supernatural charismatic gift to believe God that He is still in control, even if they are not. A development of trust-related regional and national networks, not a new arrangement of political ecumenism is necessary for organic forms of Christianity to reemerge.

10. From worshipping our worship to worshipping God

The image of much of contemporary Christianity can be summarized, a bit euphemistically, as holy people coming regularly to a holy place at a holy day at a holy hour to participate in a holy ritual lead by a holy man dressed in holy clothes against a holy fee. Since this regular performance-oriented enterprise called "worship service" requires a lot of organizational talent and administrative bureaucracy to keep going, formalized and institutionalized patterns developed quickly into rigid traditions. Statistically, a traditional 1-2 hour "worship service" is very resource-hungry but actually produces very little fruit in terms of discipling people, that is, in changed lives. Economically speaking, it might be a "high input and low output" structure. Traditionally, the desire to "worship in the right way" has led to much denominationalism, confessionalism and nominalism. This not only ignores that Christians are called to "worship in truth and in spirit," not in cathedrals holding songbooks, but also ignores that most of life is informal, and so is Christianity as "the Way of Life." Do we need to change from being powerful actors to start "acting powerfully?"

11. Stop bringing people to church, and start bringing the church to the people

The church is changing back from being a Come-structure to being again a Go-structure. As one result, the Church needs to stop trying to bring people "into the church," and start bringing the Church to the people. The mission of the Church will never be accomplished just by adding to the existing structure; it will take nothing less than a mushrooming of the church through spontaneous multiplication of itself into areas of the population of the world, where Christ is not yet known.

12. Rediscovering the "Lord's Supper" to be a real supper with real food

Church tradition has managed to "celebrate the Lord's Supper" in a homeopathic and deeply religious form, characteristically with a few drops of wine, a tasteless cookie and a sad face. However, the "Lord's Supper" was actually more a substantial supper with a symbolic meaning, than a symbolic supper with a substantial meaning. God is restoring eating back into our meeting.

13. From Denominations to city-wide celebrations

Jesus called a universal movement, and what came was a series of religious companies with global chains marketing their special brands of Christianity and competing with each other. Through this branding of Christianity most of Protestantism has, therefore, become politically insignificant and often more concerned with traditional specialties and religious infighting than with developing a collective testimony before the world. Jesus simply never asked people to organize themselves into denominations. In the early days of the Church, Christians had a dual identity: they were truly His church and vertically converted to God, and then organized themselves according to geography, that is, converting also horizontally to each other on earth. This means not only Christian neighbors organizing themselves into neighborhood- or house-churches, where they share their lives locally, but Christians coming together as a collective identity as much as they can for citywide or regional celebrations expressing the corporateness of the Church of the city or region. Authenticity in the neighborhoods connected with a regional or citywide corporate identity will make the Church not only politically significant and spiritually convincing, but will allow a return to the biblical model of the City-Church.

14. Developing a persecution-proof spirit

They crucified Jesus, the Boss of all the Christians. Today, his followers are often more into titles, medals and social respectability, or, worst of all, they remain silent and are not worth being noticed at all. "Blessed are you when you are persecuted", says Jesus. Biblical Christianity is a healthy threat to pagan godlessness and sinfulness, a world overcome by greed, materialism, jealousy and any amount of demonic standards of ethics, sex, money and power. Contemporary Christianity in many countries is simply too harmless and polite to be worth persecuting. But as Christians again live out New Testament standards of life and, for example, call sin as sin, conversion or persecution has been, is and will be the natural reaction of the world. Instead of nesting comfortably in temporary zones of religious liberty, Christians will have to prepare to be again discovered as the main culprits against global humanism, the modern slavery of having to have fun and the outright worship of Self, the wrong centre of the universe. That is why Christians will and must feel the "repressive tolerance" of a world which has lost any absolutes and therefore refuses to recognize and obey its creator God with his absolute standards. Coupled with the growing ideologization, privatization and spiritualization of politics and economics, Christians will—sooner than most think—have their chance to stand happily accused in the company of Jesus. They need to prepare now for the future by developing a persecution-proof spirit and an even more persecution-proof structure.

15. The Church comes home

Where is the easiest place, say, for a man to be spiritual? Maybe again, is it hiding behind a big pulpit, dressed up in holy robes, preaching holy words to a faceless crowd and then disappearing into an office? And what is the most difficult—and therefore most meaningful—place for a man to be spiritual? At home, in the presence of his wife and children, where everything he does and says is automatically put through a spiritual litmus test against reality, where hypocrisy can be effectively weeded out and authenticity can grow. Much of Christianity has fled the family, often as a place of its own spiritual defeat, and then has organized artificial performances in sacred buildings far from the atmosphere of real life. As God is in the business of recapturing the homes, the church turns back to its roots—back to where it came from. It literally comes home, completing the circle of Church history at the end of world history.

As Christians of all walks of life, from all denominations and backgrounds, feel a clear echo in their spirit to what God's Spirit is saying to the Church, and start to hear globally in order to act locally, they begin to function again as one body. They organize themselves into neighborhood house-churches and meet in regional or city-celebrations. You are invited to become part of this movement and make your own contribution. Maybe your home, too, will become a house that changes the world.

Why and for whom this book was written

This booklet is the product of many people in many countries, and draws on the learning experiences of a wide variety of servants of God. Not only have I physically been writing the notes for it over the last 2 years in Colombia, USA, Germany, Switzerland, England, Sudan, Egypt, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Muscat, Dubai, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Korea, China and Mongolia, but I have been able to discuss these issues with numerous Pastors and Missionaries and Christian Leaders. Most important of all, I wanted to listen intently to normal Christians and their dreams and experiences. I am thankful for all those inspiring moments, visits, listening to stories, having discussions, drinking tea. And I am also inspired by a host of valuable books and other materials; they are simply too numerous to mention.

Jesus has given us the commission to go and make disciples of all nations. It is the growing conviction of many Christians around the world, that this will only be ever achieved by having a church - the shopping window of God - in walking distance of every person on the globe. The church - the secret and powerful society of the redeemed - must again become the place were people can literally see the Body of Christ, were his glory is revealed in the most practical of all terms - hands on, down to earth, right next door, unable to overlook or ignore, living every day amongst us. The process to move towards the goal of whole nations - countries and people groups and regions - being discipled by a mass dispersion of the presence of Christ has come to be known as "Saturation Church Planting," the process which God seems to choose in nation after nation to mobilize all his people to work together towards that ultimate goal. The word saturation means to "fill to the brim", to make full of, to reach a critical mass. God is the God of Nations. You will quickly see that planting a few churches here and there is just not enough. What will it take to see whole nations discipled, with millions of inhabitants and tens of thousands of villages, with longstanding nonchristian - or worse - pseudo Christian - traditions and customs and formidable spiritual forces of their own, with poverty and urbanization and any conceivable difference of opinions, colors, castes and clans, tribes and language groups? Many have told me, often enough with tears in their eyes, that their nation will not truly change its values and be discipled by anything artificial, by being briefly touched for a fleeting moment by the abbreviated Gospel of a rather short-lived campaign or program, by an evangelistic Blitzkrieg or even by the type of church that has been there for the last 5, 50 or 500 years. Nothing short of the very presence of the living Christ in every neighborhood and village of every corner of the nation will do. He has come to live amongst us - and stay on. We therefore need to plant and water churchplanting movements that plant and water other churchplanting movements - until there is no space left for anyone to misunderstand, ignore or even escape the presence of Jesus in the form that he has chosen to take, while on Earth - the local church.

This book focuses on the question, what type of church will it take to do just that? And how do we plant those type of churches?

It is a vision statement in the sense that it tries to capture and express the visions, hopes and expectations of many Christians around the globe for a New Testament type church that will truly disciple - and not only fill - nations;

It is a manifest in the sense that it declares a threefold conviction: that without a return to the New Testament simplicity of housechurches; the empowering Five-Fold ministry to spawn a flood of quality housechurches; and the strategic process of saturation church planting as a united effort of the Body of Christ, we will continue to fall short of being obedient to the Great Commission. The number of people alive today - more than 6 billion - is more than all those in history combined. If ever we needed to recover a New Testament church to disciple the nations, now would be a good time.

It is a churchplanting manual in the sense that it will explain how to plant housechurches. As every company knows, it is best to develop a working prototype of a product first, and then head for mass production. If we know what type of church we want, we will also know how to plant and multiply it.

Why no models?

For some good reasons, I have tried to resist the temptation to describe a multitude of models, which could be used as a blueprint for copying. I also have avoided including issues like "six easy steps to plant a housechurch-movement", because I believe it is neither easy nor advisable to take formulas and existing models and make Xerox-copies of them. One reason is: I simply do not believe in copycat-mentality. It is more important for spiritually significant principles to sink in and to be grasped, then to simply take a 5-step outline and copy it. Instead of importing spiritual success-stories of others I would find it much more natural if we all search for the ways, which God has ordained for out time and our places to put into practice, what we feel he has revealed to us. I do not want to spare anyone of us this creative tension. Another reason is, that many are looking for a proven truth, a foolproof method and model, a concept which a sufficient number of others have already tried out and tested, before they take "a leap of faith" and go and do likewise. This "play it safe"-mentality, I would suggest, is a spiritual way of hiding fear which sounds very reasonable, and we may leap, but not really out of faith. The core secret of followers of Christ to do the works of Jesus is not that they demand academic and sufficient statistical proof before they act, but the faithful and obedient desire to follow Christ's word and do what He said, no matter what.

What about the existing church structure

Nobody lives in a vacuum, and many of us will have grown up in denominational structures or work in areas with an existing church history. We will be unable to turn back the wheel of history altogether, but nowhere in the Bible are we also challenged to stoically take the Status Quo for granted , but "to be perfect as God is perfect". This book is not written to suggest that housechurches are the only possible way of Church. However, it does suggest that if we want to see whole nations discipled according to the biblical command of Jesus, we will not be able to accomplish much without radically returning back to New Testament principles and dynamics of Church. The focus and perspective of discipling the nations is very different from maintaining a certain church tradition or sitting in the ivory tower of theoretical reflection. If housechurches are a valid expression of the Church - which I am advocating here - then we need to embrace it at least as one of many valid forms of Church, and see it's potential unfold towards discipling the nations. I believe that God has been blessing the world through the existing Church structures, and has done and is still doing uncounted miracles of transforming peoples lives and doing good in ways too numerous to mention. But even the Church should never settle for less than it has been made for. I believe churches - including housechurches!- come in all grades and shades of human works coupled with the work of God, an ever changing mix of spirit and flesh, as long as we will occupy this earth. But, as it is for us, we are all called to lean as much towards the works of the Spirit as possible, and to root out the works of the flesh, if we can. This is humanly impossible, and let me say it already here: the Church of God is God's invention and humanly not "doable" or makeable; it cannot be fabricated nor manufactured, but will only emerge as we yield ourselves to God and become His very junior partners and stewards in His work of calling back His creation through His Church unto Himself. But there is hope! God, in His sovereign ways, is able to do the undoable: to make wine out of water, to make donkeys talk and ,water flow from a rock, part the sea - and, most astonishing - even use ordinary humans for His divine glory. This book is not advocating for you and me to dream up and paint a perfect and almost romantic picture of Church and admire it from a distance like in a museum, but to get personally involved as a response to what God is calling us to do. In this book, I have made plain what I feel God is calling the Church to be, or to become, and I am willing to be personally involved locally and globally for that task. I must confess that I do feel very inadequate at times, loaded with any amount of my own various Church traditions and many inadequacies and biases. This also means that I am painfully aware that this book is only an introductory and unfinished statement, which I am more than happy to admit. But even the unfinished nature of this book is part of the message: deus semper major, God is always bigger - than we think. Yes, we have seen something, but yes, it is also only a part.

But most of all this book is intended to inspire, cheerlead and celebrate those Christians who will be God's instruments of gathering the harvest in this last leg of history. As many prophets tell us, it will be a generation of nobodies, without faces and titles who lead God's movement on Earth to fulfill its calling. They will do it under persecution or celebrated in talk shows (which one is worse?), under unspeakable difficulties or walking on red carpets, despised or adored, ridiculed or consulted, cheated or honored, scorned or quoted, tortured or pampered, unknown or known, with frequent flyer cards or walking bare foot. In other words, this is a battle cry for ordinary followers of Christ, who, through their humble, self-denying and obedient lives, will be made extraordinary in purpose and power, and therefore flood this earth with housechurches, the presence, knowledge and glory of Christ, like the waters cover the sea.

1. The Reinvention of Church

Bridging the church gap

It is an interesting phenomenon: never in the history has there been a phase with more significant and global growth of the Christian Church. Some statistics say that between 2.000 and 3.000 churches are planted every week. The worldwide evangelical church has grown from about 150 million in the year 1974 to about 650 million in 1998, and is today, according to C. Peter Wagner and Ralph Winter, the fastest growing minority on earth.

And yet, at this time of great excitement - and even triumph in some groups, the level of dissatisfaction and frustration with "church as we know it" has probably also reached global proportions. We read of many people "coming to Christ" every day, and we rejoice. But we usually do not hear much of those numbers entering membership rolls of local churches, and even less we hear about the silent exodus of people slipping out almost unnoticed of the back doors of churches again; they were attracted, but not contained; interested, but not inserted into an enveloping fellowship; harvested and cut, but not gathered into the barn; touched, but not transformed; turned to briefly look at The Way, then turned away, disappointed with what they saw.

God yes, church no

In a research done in the early 90's in Netherlands, Amsterdam, young people have been asked whether they were interested in God. 100% of them answered yes. Then they were asked whether they are interested in church, 1% said yes, 99% said no. I remember that most Pastors who heard this story used to indicate that something is seriously wrong with those Youth in Amsterdam, since everything - can it be any different - is right with the church. Today I reluctantly like to consider it the other way around. Maybe the Youth of Amsterdam has some lessons to teach the church which we have been rather unwilling to learn. Maybe we have fallen so much in love with our own traditions that we are almost unable to truly "hear and feel" the world from our safe and "holy" distance.

Non-Baptized Believers

Another research conducted nearly a decade ago by Dr. Herbert E. Hoefer, former Director of Gurukul Theological College (Madras, India) reveals that more than 200,000 what Hoefer calls "Non Baptized believers in Christ" secretly exist in this city of 8 Million. This growing number would call themselves Christians, but do not go to church, for a variety of reasons. One reason they state, however, is that they are attracted to Jesus, but not attracted to the church as they have experienced it.

Ask almost anyone who is not yet a Christian what crosses his mind when he hears the word "evangelical Church." Chances are, you would not like what you will hear. It is amazing how well, many Christians are able to hide or brush over their own deep frustration with the church. "Look to Jesus, not to the church," they say. And we know deep down that something is desperately wrong with that statement.

There is a buzzing activity about the church and missions like never before today. But - also like never before - Pastors are swapping churches, dropping out of ministry or applying for "sabbaticals," missionaries are burning out, and many ordinary Christians simply leave their churches without returning back. Countless Christians have told me that after trying this model of church, that recipe of revival, riding this wave and catching the spirit that way, attending this "life changing seminar" and that "anointed conference" their lives and their churches are still dreadfully the same, and they are prepared to give up or just hold on for dear life.

The crisis of Missions is a crisis of the Church

"I don't like books on missions", says Stephen Gaukroger, President of the Baptist Union of England and Wales, in the foreword to Patrick Johnstones book "The Church is bigger than you think". "They usually tell me what I already know and then make me feel guilty for not doing more about it!" The traditional understanding of missions encourages churches or individual people to "go, give or send". But many times this leaves a bad aftertaste, because we never know when we have gone, done, spent or sent enough. Patrick Johnstone says it this way: "We live in a time when our perception of what constitutes the structures of the Church has been molded by inadequate theology and distorted patterns inherited over the centuries. Few realize the impact of these distortions on congregational life. We soon find out that bashing congregations with a mission challenge or attempting to prick consciences in public meetings bears meager fruit. We find that the church has inherited a mind-set or worldview which has excluded missions altogether". It is no surprise to me that churches who are not built on apostolic and prophetic foundations (Eph. 2:20) have no apostolic and prophetic mind-set. This is to be expected. The crisis of traditional missions is a crisis of the church. If mission is the natural heartbeat of an apostolic church, it is an expression of God's grace manifested in apostolic people, not a church trying to fulfill it's mission quota. We need to take the "legalistic whip" out of mission, and I suggest we start at the very heart of missions, with our understanding of the church. I suggest that the whip is not only evident in missions, it is at home in the church as a result of a lack of grace and an overdoses of legalism, which often creeps in where the apostolic and prophetic ministry are missing and are being replaced by dutiful teachers, beautiful pastors and daring evangelists.

But I intend to point out later that as church is reinvented, mission will be completely revived, too. "When the church rejects it's mission, the Church ceases to be the Church", says Donald Miller. But when the church again becomes the church and accepts it's apostolic and prophetic nature, then it can become God's instrument of transforming and discipline neighborhoods and nations. And an individual church can be used by God, in the spirit of global partnership, to pour it's oil on other peoples´ fire, so that the light increases and the world may see whom it has overlooked for all too long: Jesus Christ.

The Church-gap

Many Pastors know and even say "that the church we preach about is very different than the church we preach to. That's the very reason why we preach."

If even pastors admit that, what about new Christians?

"In the days of coffee bar evangelism," says English Churchplanter Terry Virgo, "there were conferences held on how to bridge the awful gulf between the coffee bar and the church. It was meant for new Christians to help them to cope with dead, irrelevant, formal church services. Once they were told that this cold, unchanging monotony was the people of God enjoying abundant life. Some, therefore, even suggested a half-way house, where people could be prepared for church life."

In the original days of Willowcreek Community Church in Chicago, which has seeker-oriented worship services - worship experiences tailor-made for those seeking God, where not-yet believers are specifically made welcome and given a comfortable, non-embarrassing and "safe place for a dangerous message", they were well aware of the "church-gap", the fascination of people with the person of Jesus, and the dissatisfaction of many with the local church. At that time, however humorously, they suggested a sevenfold strategy of Evangelism: 1. Spend quality time with Non-Christians; 2. Protect them from the church. 3. Witness to those new friends about Jesus Christ. 4. Protect them from the church. 5. Lead them to Christ. 6. Protect them from the church. 7. When they have matured a bit and are ready even for a culture shock, introduce them to the church for the first time.

Who follows up whom?

A missionary told me about a church of about 200 in Europe which wanted to invite Non-Christians for a "special event service". With the help of a lot of advertising, 50 new people attended this special event. "Of course, very few of them actually came back to church. But we are following them up," he said. I was amazed. If 50 non-believers attend a church service and go away fairly indifferent and not exactly thrilled with this experience, why is it that the church does not bear the consequences? Should it not be on its own knees trying to find out what has obviously desperately gone wrong with itself, that so many people can come in touch with it - and go rather untouched? Could it be that the church would much rather have to follow-up itself, than bothering unimpressed and indifferent one-time visitors with spiritual sales-techniques? After 1.700 years of post-Constantine Christendom, can we afford to still discuss how to change the world without being ready to change ourselves? Maybe we all need to follow the advise of Rick Warren in his book "The Purpose driven church", to "stop asking God to bless what we are doing, and start doing what he is blessing".

The Third Reformation

German Church Growth researcher Christian A. Schwarz suggests that we are in the era of the Third Reformation. The first reformation happened in the 16th century, when Martin Luther rediscovered the core essence of the Gospel: salvation by faith, the importance of grace, and the centrality of scripture. It was a reformation of theology.

The second reformation occurred in the 18th century at the time of the Moravian and Wesleyan movements, where personal intimacy with Christ was rediscovered. It was, he says, a reformation of spirituality, which, born on passionate knees in front of a loving and personal Savior, gave birth to a whole new era of enthusiastic missions and evangelism.

However, all of this was still very much pouring new wine into old wineskins, and sewing new patches onto old cloth. The Roman Catholic Church and Mass System was very close to the Old Testament temple-centered worship patterns, complete with frankincense, priests, sections for the lay people and clerics, and an altar. Luther did reform the content of the Gospel, but did not change the basic structure of the "worship service". This reformed-Roman-Catholic-Jewish meeting-pattern was baptized by Baptists, anointed by Pentecostals, misused by Cults, renewed by Charismatic Christians, put into uniform by the Salvation Army, dry-cleaned by Quakers - but was never really radically changed. The "services" were still essentially performances, audience-oriented masses, usually formal and liturgical religious events, where many spectators and consumers observe a few very involved religious specialists performing for them and with them.

The third and last part of the Reformation is, therefore, a reformation of structure. It is not suggesting to make a few cosmetic changes or alterations here and there, but to build according to New Testament patterns altogether. If that means that we have to start all over again, then this is exactly what it means, and this will be what it will take.

Let me try to say this with a few illustrations and pictures:

Large cars during the Oil Crisis

During the oil crisis in the 70s it was fairly difficult to sell large cars, because petrol was so costly. Carmakers were scratching their heads, looking at the heap of unsold cars in their warehouse. This does remind me sometimes of the situation of the churches in a number of nations. Is the model of church we are offering simply too costly, too big? Does the market require another product?

Clogged assembly line

Along a similar line, I would liken the situation of churchplanting in a number of nations with a clogged assembly line. The product (new church) seems to be extremely hard to sell and sits figuratively on an assembly line clogging it up for lack of excited customers who want to buy that product. Result: The system shuts down, the work inches forward, people become more and more frustrated. Could it be that we have become specialists in reproducing assembly lines, but have failed to spend enough time in examining our prototype product?

Solving the Puzzle

Imagine a young boy, unwrapping a new puzzle and immediately trying to put together the pieces. He pulls out a piece of cardboard from the puzzle box, depicting a red race car (he loves red race cars!). All excited about this new toy, he tries to assemble the pieces according to the red race car blue print. But somehow or other the pieces do not seem to fit as they should. He manages to bend them and tear off an edge here and there in order to make them fit with a little "convincing force", but something seems to be very wrong. Finally his father comes to his rescue. Dad immediately spots the problem, takes the beautiful cardboard with the red race car on it - and turns it around. And lo and behold, on the "other" side is a beautiful tree, the "original" . The red race car was only the advertisement for another puzzle of the company! The boy sighed with relief, and tried to put together the pieces according to the new original - and within minutes he was done. What was wrong before? He had all the right pieces, but the wrong original. He had unquestionable and honest motives, but quite simply the wrong blue print.

Spiritual Xerox-machines

Could it be that this is, in short, the situation of a large part of Christendom today? We have all the right pieces. The word of God; People; houses; prayer; motivation; money. But could it be that we put them all together according to a wrong original? Our very own beloved red race car? Has the unthinkable happened that someone sinister has cunningly slipped us an unpractical blueprint? And could it be that here we stand, transfixed in front of our spiritual Xerox-copy machines (translate bible schools, publishing houses, seminaries or leadership-producing programs), and keep hitting that green button which says "Copy" and wait for it to make copies of what we are convinced to be a biblical, canonized, unquestionable Bible- and history proven first-hand "original."

I can imagine Satan, the enemy of the Church, having no problem with even the most frantic evangelistic or mission activities and programs - as long as it is all about making copies of "red race cars", of a pattern of Church which is not seriously endangering his satanic claims on mankind. Maybe it is time for us to stop scratching the surface of humanity and allow God to re-invent and recreate Church in all of us. It might start with us re-examining our blueprints and turning around our originals.

Stop starting with the church

Most of us will have grown up or decided to be part of one Christian denomination or another, and we will usually see and interpret Christianity - and even the Bible - through reading glasses of our own familiar tradition, "our way of belief and practice". Which tradition is right? As Argentinean Evangelist Juan Carlos Ortiz once pointed out: "There are more than 22.000 denominations in the world. How lucky are you, that you happen to be just in the right one!" Since then, not only has the number of denominations risen to between 24.000 and 30.000, but many start to understand that most problems of today's churches do not lie so much outside the system, but inside the system, that is, inside our inherited, learned and dear patterns of belief and practice, the way we "do church."

Who is to blame?

"Our bookshelves are full of Christian books and videos. We have churches on every major street, more staff people than ever before, large Sunday school departments, cell systems, mega- and meta-church seminars. We have Christian bumper stickers, political action groups, huge parachurch ministries - and in the midst of it all, we have lost every major city in North America", says Ted Haggard of New Life Church in Colorado Springs in his book "Primary purpose - Making it hard for people to go to hell from your city". He goes on to say: "Rather than rethinking our methods and challenging our own effectiveness, we try to escape responsibility for the eternal damnation of those in our communities by blaming others for our own spiritual ineffectiveness."

The traditional church - biggest barrier to belief

In a study in 1994 under the title "Barriers to Belief" in Scotland, says Rev. John Campbell, "many have indicated that one of the greatest barriers to belief in God is the Church itself." If the problem is the system, then even our best solution is part of the problem. That leaves even the most dedicated, visionary, passionate and revived Christians trapped in a system which is sucking their very energy and is simply overpowering. The way forward, therefore, may not be hidden in slight changes and adaptations to some new forms in "Church as we know it", but in a much more radical rediscovery of the very nature of Church itself. The quickest way to "Church the unchurched" may very well be to "unchurch the Church." Bob Hopkins, one of the initiators of the Anglican Church Planting Initiative in England, has therefore recommended to "stop starting with the Church". What this implies is that we might want to stop taking today's Churches and its "worship patterns" for absolutely granted. It seems, after all, that God has been waiting for a long time throughout history, ready to give the right answers to those asking the right questions. Housechurches, in other words, are the missing link between spirituality and society, between Jesus and his Body, between heaven and earth.

A stumbling block or a treasure

Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a man who finds a treasure while ploughing a field (Mt 13:44) and then goes on to sell all his possessions to buy the field - and the treasure. What first looks like a stumbling block, a misplaced rock, interrupting the daily routine and initially annoys and upsets the fixed agenda of "ploughing the fields day by day" even in traditional church life, may turn out to be the greatest find of a persons life. Let me forewarn you a bit: This may happen to you too, as God speaks to you about housechurches in His own ways. Maybe the answers to the questions of so many of us are hidden, but close, waiting to be stumbled upon, locked behind a forbidden door other people do not even think exists. We may find it out of unbearably agony with the status quo, because we seriously search and then find, or as a result of a simply accident. But at this point, housechurches may yet be something completely unthinkable, literally unheard of, something which even sounds almost heretical in the beginning, but becomes clearer and clearer as we move on through the fog of tradition and reread our bibles. However, take a piece of advise from the parable of the hidden treasure. As you discover it, do not go to town and make a big announcement on the market place. Hide it again in the field, go and sell all what you have, and then go buy it and do whatever God shows you to do.

"Reconstructing" the Church

Many Churches who are desperate for renewal - or at least change - tend to overlook that you cannot produce a new quality in the Church by changing the structures. Management-Guru Tom Peters says, renewal and reformation is out - revolution is in; a company does not really need a CEO- a Chief Executive Officer, but a CDO - a Chief Destruction Officer, regularly dismantling blocking traditions, because it is so much easier to rebuild according to a new pattern than to restore and renew an outdated one. Changing a church by changing some outward forms is as futile as trying to change your mentality by putting on another dress or walking backwards from now on to stop you from going to cinemas. Adding a new mission statement or any other cosmetic alterations without a radical genetic reformation of the church will only lead to frustration - like sewing a patch of new cloth onto old cloth, which, says Jesus, is bad advise. Revival and reformation truly starts with a complete rediscovery and reconstruction of the core essence of the church, with New Testament DNA, the genetical code of God, supernaturally empowered with growth potential from within (Mark 4:26). This spiritual seed material is, like any grain of wheat, equipped and able to develop it's own appropriate structures from the inside-out, without instruction from outside; it simply unfolds itself according to a creational blueprint within, it unzips. It's soil is literally the soil of nations and peoplegroups. The result of this incarnation, at least in New Testament times, was a housechurch movement, that swept the city of Jerusalem like yeast in a dough, or like an unstoppable virus, in maybe less than two years.

Biotic principles

Almost all life forms are based on the multiplication of organic cells. Unlimited growth is against creational principles; but not multiplication. My friend Christian Schwarz has studied what he calls "biotic" principles, patterns that operate within God's created order of organic life. This lead him to develop what he calls "Natural Church Growth". Many insights are drawn from agricultural and biological contexts where growth is definitely according to the divine pattern and method, and not like the humanly-devised artificial patterns of mechanical production and growth. These biotic principles stand in stark contrast to the "technocratic" methods which govern machines. They are as different from each other as a robot is from a human being. One is a machine while the other is an organism. The "machine" or "robot" model functions very well in the world of technology but fails in the world of biotic, organic growth. When we understand that the church is a creation of God, a "biotic" organism, we must look for God's natural, organic principles to understand how it grows. Biotic principles utilize the minimum amount of energy to produce the maximum results, an effective "all-by-itself" development. This avoids the church to become manufactured, but allows it to be recreated by the Spirit of God according to God's creational patterns. We simply labor in vain if we follow only man-made patterns or formulas, even if they are handed to us in the form of good and cherished traditions. Some biotic principles are

Structured interdependence, meaning that the way the parts of an organism are inter-related are more important than the parts themselves. All organic cells arrange themselves not in a chaos guided by chance, but according to a creational and inbuilt pattern were each cell or organ is linked with others. In terms of church multiplication this means that no issue or topic or aspect should be seen or even treated in isolation of all the other aspects and parts.

Multiplication. Unlimited growth is not the ideal - multiplication is. The fruit of an apple tree is not an apple, but another apple tree. The fruit of a church is not a convert, but other churches that plant other churches.

Energy transformation. This is the principle that observes how existing forces (even contrary ones) can be used positively towards a desired goal. This is also how an organism fights a virus; not in a head-on collision, but using much of the energy of the intruder to defeat the intruder. Through a vaccination process former health-destroying energies are transformed into health promoting ones. Many churches use the boxer-approach to life instead, using energy to reduce an outside "attack" to zero, and then, in a second strike, deliver it's own message.

How to break the "20-Barrier"

I have read a book written by Bill M. Sullivan, titled "Ten Steps to breaking the 200-barrier". The very healthy intention of Sullivan fits ideologically into the mainstream of the Church Growth movement of the 70s and 80s: Good churches grow big, and very good churches grow very big. Anything that stops a "healthy" church from growing is a barrier, and those barriers are bad and must therefore go. The idea of the "200-Barrier" is simple. Statistically most churches stop to grow somewhere between 100 and 300 people, on average at about 200. There are good cultural, sociological and even architectural reasons for that. One is structural, an inbuilt problem of the traditional One-Pastor-church: There are only so many people (in the USA: 200) a Pastor can personally and effectively care for. He may have a lot of space in his agenda, but a quite limited space in his heart; and people realize that. Result: The growth grinds to a halt, the church hits an invisible ceiling, the "200 Barrier". However, I suggest there is a much more important barrier to overcome: the "20-Barrier". How do we break it?

The invisible line: from organic to organizational

As any family get-together will teach us, we can accomplish the goal of fellowship without the need to be heavily structured. Families can get along quite well without a master of ceremony, a word of introduction, a special song, a sermon by father and a vote of thanks by mother. These things happen at weddings and other festivals, but not in everyday life. Church, however, is not an artificial performance, it is for everyday life, because it is a way of life. There is, in each culture, a very important numerical line we can cross: from the organic to the organized, from the informal to the formal, from spontaneous to liturgical. I call this most important line the 20-barrier, because in many cultures 20 is a maximum number where people still feel "family", organic and informal, without the need to get formal or organized. Organisms are structured, too, and I am not advocating a total absence of order and structure. But, different to an organized series of meetings which are typically structured from outside, organisms are usually structured from within. The nature of a meeting defines and therefore limits the size of a meeting. If we cross the "20-barrier", the group stops to be organic, and starts to become formal, and even feel the need to follow a set agenda. Effectiveness in relationship and mutual communication goes down, and the need for someone to coach and lead the meeting goes up. As a result, the housechurch looses it's main original attractions, changes it's values, and starts to develop totally different dynamics. It often simply stops functioning by itself, spontaneous and lively, lead invisibly and unobtrusively through the inbuilt family mechanisms of fathering and mothering, and needs to be literally "run", organized, and visibly lead into a new and organized life form - if there is such a thing. The original organism is then a thing of the past, still alive, but trapped into a formal structure that chokes it, conditions it, and ultimately could prevent relational and spontaneous fellowship in the name of organized fellowship. Biblical koinonia means fellowship or sharing, giving generously and participating and sharing something with someone. One of the fatal aspects of this line-crossing is that the original organic form of fellowship usually looses it's internal reproduction potential, and can only be cloned and copied or even literally manufactured and finally mass produced with huge effort from outside that greatly ignores and overrules it's own inbuilt explosive growth potential. It is a fact of church history that it has always been a swift step from organized religion to institutionalism and fossilization.

Person number 21

One of the most important decisions in terms of the structure and future of a church anyone can possibly make, therefore, is what you do when person number 21 walks through the door. Structurally, that brings the church into the red phase. You either continue growing upwards and become organized and loose your housechurch-dynamics, and may ultimately hit the 200-barrier, or you divide the housechurch into two or three units and multiply it, thus growing sidewards. You may not even notice a 200-barrier this way.

A wedding a week?

Life in any culture has two aspects, the private and the public, everyday-life and the special events, celebrations of weddings, function and festivals, funerals and traditional happenings. Both aspects of life have their own and valid ways of expression. Everyday life is usually expressed in the family, the basic cell unit of every society and culture. Families are usually very organic, informal, relational and consist of whatever it takes to share lives. Weddings and other functions are extraordinary events, for which everyone duly prepare; they are usually formal, need heavy organization and are often highly structured.

Imagine you would have to attend a wedding each week. It follows the same basic pattern, has even the same bridegroom and bride, and maybe even the food is the same. After some weeks the excitement would considerably wear down. You would know what to expect, and you know what's going to happen next. It still would remain a nice thing, a beautiful tradition, but it would feel odd to have the same type of festival each week.

We need to be careful not to do this with church. Jesus has shown us a way to live, not only a way to celebrate. Both aspects are necessary, both are good. But everyday life is not like a wedding, as any married couple can tell us. If we allow church to take on only "celebration structures", we will start celebrating "a wedding a week", and our behavior will soon be far removed from real life and cease to make sense to ordinary people. It would become an artificial weekly event and performance. If church is a God-given way of community life, and if life takes place in the basic unit of a family living in a home, there is nothing more appropriate for the church to be a housechurch, to be the church based in simple, ordinary, everyday homes. Housechurches are not only a way for us humans to express community, they are one of God's means to achieve community.

Small churches may already be far too big

Creation itself teaches us that nothing healthy grows endlessly, but stops growing at a point and starts multiplying. Bigger is not necessarily better or more beautiful. Could it be that in this perspective - to grow a church bigger - everything is right - expect the direction in which we look? Could it be that the problem is not so much to break the 200-barrier on the way up, but the 20-barrier on the way down? If real church growth spells m-u-l-t-i-p-l-i-c-a-t-i-o-n, then growth may not be upwards at all, but sidewards. Has all that talk about "big is beautiful" tricked our thinking? If yes, maybe we will have to cut out a Zero in our mindset: an average church would then be just 8, 10 or 12 people; a large church has 15, and a megachurch sports 21.

Could it be that the average "small church" of 25 or 45 people, which is trying to rent a hall, or sanction a building fund, just bought a pulpit and still saves for an overhead projector, is not at all too small, but already far too big? They have crossed the organism-organization line long ago, trying "to grow up like all those other churches", not realizing that they already have become quite heavy and inflexible, structurally bloated and deformed, just like someone with a waterbelly suffering from his own weight, and only kept going and inching forward by the relentless activities of a busy "Pastor" or leader with his co-workers?

Worldwide the average size of churches is around 100. Only a very small percentage of churches become bigger than 200, and many are in the 40-60 bracket. The average Sunday-morning attendance of the Lutheran churches in Germany, for example, was 23,5 people in the year 1993.

Shrink in order to grow

Maybe it simply requires a true apostolic gifting - which is statistically speaking fairly rare - to transform any given church into a megachurch. For many churches it could be a liberation to be allowed to become what many of them already are: slightly overgrown housechurches struggling with their own size and the unspoken original they are trying to become. Would it not be much more practical for them to head the other way, and become smaller, to move into the direction of housechurches, to "grow down" rather than keep on striving to "grow up"?

Elton Trueblood once said: "The church must be smaller before it can be substantially stronger." I agree. But if we take this one step further, this would also mean that the church of the future will have to become much smaller, before it can become substantially bigger, by becoming much more numerous. Statistically, it will have to shrink in order to grow.

Swiss Prophets about Switzerland

A friend told me recently, that God had shown him a prophetic vision of the Thunersee, the "Lake Thun" near Interlaken. There he observed many small groups of Christians baptizing people. "The Lake Thun will be the biggest baptismal lake in Switzerland", God told him. "But why are those groups so small?" asked my friend. "They are housechurches," God told him.

Another senior friend of mine, now in his 70s, told me of a vision he had, where God had shown him in prayer that a new form of church will spread in Switzerland like wildfire: housechurches. As a result of this move of God there will be a large gathering of approximately 200.000 Christians at an open-air ground near the city of Luzern in the year 2.001, where those Christians will form themselves into a unity and speak collectively with one voice to Switzerland as a nation.

Pastor Mike Bickle from Kansas, USA, once told that God had "revealed to him that he is going to change the forms and expressions of church within one generation to the degree that it will not be recognizable any more." That was in Cairo in the year 1982. The future will tell whether it was God or just a dream. Rick Joyner, a prophetic teacher from Charlotte, USA, says it this way: "I see such a sweeping return to Biblical Christianity coming, that the very understanding of Christianity, by both the world and the church, will be changed. This does not imply any kind of doctrinal changes as to what it means to be a Christian, but a change that causes us to live by the truths we proclaim. This will be reflected when we truly become known for our love for one another".

I do respect Amos 3: 7-8 and the biblical ministry of prophecy, and I am far from encouraging anyone to pick up stones of tradition and throw them at prophets. What if those visions - which are only part of a growing flood of voices amongst God's people today - are really from God? What would that mean for us as Christians? For our churches? Could we simply smile a bit about that nice - but surly absurd! - thought, turn the page, cut onions, water the garden, go out in the evening, finally order that overhead projector and carry on with "church as we know it?"

Cell - Congregation - Celebration

In Church Growth terminology we differentiate between three levels of church, 1. cell, 2. congregation and 3. celebration. I would very briefly like to explain what these terms mean.

The cell is typically housebased and sociologically small, between 3-20 people. It's purpose is relational fellowship, and it functions mostly organic, that is, members are often in direct contact with each other and therefore a natural part of each other's lives.

The congregation is sociologically of medium size, usually between 20 and 200, and functions more formal, organized, usually has a Pastor, co-workers, a type of worship service, and various programs. It often tries to serve a parish, and functions usually in a "sanctuary" of any type, a building specially used for religious purposes. Members do not have direct and natural contacts with each other, because the meeting is too large and not structured to allow for that.

The celebration is typically a large (200+) gathering of Christians of an area, expressing their unity in Christ, celebrating what God has done and will do for them, anticipating Christ's return, typically lead by Christians with apostolic and prophetic ministries. Celebrations can happen in the open air, in stadiums, conference centers or any other large area. People have no way of being in direct contact with all present, and are "happily lost in the crowd".

The Small and the Large

Biblically we find two of those structures or levels, the cell and the celebration. In the New Testament we read of the church regularly meeting in houses, that is in "cell-sized units", and meeting in Salomon's Temple court, or in the open air, in big numbers.

Of those two, the cell, that is the housebased church, was the natural habitat, the normal and most common form of Christians getting together. Once the Jerusalem Temple was declared out of bounds for followers of "The Way", they kept on meeting in homes. When the celebration was not possible, the cell lived on.

The risen Christ strongly identified with the church in the houses, and did not urge them anywhere to form "Christian synagogues" or build religious buildings. When Saul was persecuting the churches and broke into homes to drag out Christians, Jesus asked him in his Damascus encounter: "Saul, why do you persecute me?"

During the first three centuries after Christ, church historians tell us that the housechurch was and remained the normal and natural way of Christians sharing their new lives together. There will be a more detailed account of the housechurches throughout the ages in the next chapter, so I can be very brief here. Only after Emperor Constantine in the 4th century was there a radical shift in terms of church structure. The congregation/cathedral-type church was introduced, the church became an audience, housechurches were marginalized and ultimately forbidden. No one could function as Christians privately, without the sanction of the state and it's acknowledged and ordained "orthodox" church.

The mouse married the elephant

The result of this developments was a structural compromise, a marriage between the mouse (the cell) and the elephant (the celebration), giving birth to a most unusual creation, the congregational-type church. It was, in many ways, a strongly professionalized church, with priests fit for a king. It developed it's own specialized buildings for religious purposes, removing church from everyday life into relicts from the Old Testament religion, with priests, altars and heavily symbolic rituals, where most visitors were bound to become spectators, and could not really be participants any more.

As a result of this compromise the church lost two of it's most powerful dynamics. The congregational church was basically an overgrown housechurch and an undergrown celebration, and therefore missed out on both very important aspects of the cell and the celebration. The cell provided family dynamics, a private and stable home and organic place of belonging and accountability to Christians, whereby the celebrations were places charged with a somewhat grandiose and truly public atmosphere, were the small housechurches reconnected with the big picture and each other, heard apostolic teaching and encountered prophetic vision. This often created an excited pull-effect drawing in more people on a public level, and such gatherings could literally shake a city or region.

Fellowship without fellowship

The congregational-type church with it's semi-private atmosphere, it's limited fellowship possibilities and it's professional clergy was a political solution which suited the state and conveniently fitted into the religious "patterns of the world" at the same time. It was, in many ways, a triumph of the religious spirit, a return to the law and religious patterns of the Old Testament and even pagan religions, from which Jesus wanted to liberate mankind. Let me remind us that the problem is not the Old Testament at all. That is and remains a crucial part of God's revelation to mankind. The problem is carrying over Old Testament principles into New Testament times, ignoring the dynamic development of God's relationship to mankind, where He established the Kingdom of God over and beyond the ethnic focus on the people of Israel.

Since this new congregational structure was powerfully enforced by the state and church laws, it forced it's content - the quality - to adapt to the new structure. In the New Testament, the content defined the form, that is, the quality defined the structure. Now this process was reversed, and the form molded the content, the structure defined the quality.

This meant that organic and natural Christian fellowship had to be adjusted and fit into a new container, the formal church building, and therefore had to be watered down to fill out the new bigger structure. Ultimately, fellowship was thinned out to almost homeopathical doses, and started to loose it's impact on the Christians themselves as well as on society. The "fellowship without fellowship" was born.

The end of the Lords Supper

Another victim of this process was "the Lord's Supper". Since it is quite difficult to feed a cathedral full of people with real food, it degenerated into a religious and symbolic ritual, offering microscopic sips of wine and a small wafer, often enough only to the "clergy" while the masses looked on in pious amazement. This meant that the "Lords Supper" was a supper no more, and lost it's powerful meaning of a redeemed species doing the unheard of: people, irrespective of classes and caste, revolutionarily sharing real food with a prophetic meaning, having dinner with God, expecting his physical presence at any time just like after the resurrection. It thus became "the Eucharist", a pious and symbolic shell of the original meal of a tasty lamb that Jesus shared with his disciples. By AD 150 the Eucharist and the love feast were two distinct parts of the Lord's Supper. Biblical commentator William Barclay says it like this: "The celebration of the Lord's Supper in a Christian home in the first century and in a cathedral in the twentieth century cannot be more different, they bear no relationship to each other whatsoever."

Did Procrustes work over the church?

It reminds me of the famous giant Procrustes in Greece, who forcefully made travelers between Athens and Corinth to lay down on his big bed, and if they were found too short for his bed, they were cruelly stretched with ropes to fill the length of the bed, breaking their bones in the process. If they ever happened to be too long, they were unceremoniously cut down to fit the bed also.

The structural lie

Today, 1700 years after those developments, we have become so accustomed with the congregational-type church, that many find it hard to even imagine any other form of "real church life" or "worship services". Those historical events created a powerful system, a uniformed pattern, a sanctioned and later even sanctified structure, which has molded the experiences and the mindset of people over long centuries, and has created a distorted picture of church that is not any more true to its original. This whole process canonized and institutionalized a devastating mediocrity, a middle-of-the road-solution, simply functioning in religious and political correctness of the day. The congregational church became a "structural lie," because it paints the right message in the wrong colors, casts the right material in wrong forms, fills the water of life into contaminated bottles, takes the redeemed sinners and forms them into a harmless species of nice churchgoers and program participants. It makes heavenly promises, but does not deliver them on earth.

In short, it became a self-defeating structure, standing in it's own way, hindering itself, creating the very problems it wants to solve, frustrating and breaking the hearts of millions of people who searched for God and found the congregational-type church, a caricature of God's supernatural family on earth. Only true spiritual heroes and outstanding characters were ever able to rise their head above the polluted waters of this system and make a difference for some time, as we will see in the historical chapter. But whatever they changed, whatever they pleaded for, whatever renewal, revival or reforms they proposed until this very day, was swallowed up soon enough by the unchanging system of Christendom, by the structure of church they did not dare to touch.

Five elements of a cathedral-church

American veteran missionary and author Bill Beckham, in his book "The Second Reformation," describes a congregation- or cathedral-type church like this: "Since the time of Constantine in the Fourth Century the church has functioned primarily as a 'Cathedral'. At least five important elements are identified with this "Cathedral" way of being the church:

1. A Building (a 'Cathedral' or 'Church');

2. A Special Day (Sunday);

3. A professional leadership (priest, clergyman, holy man);

4. A special service, performed for the people (ceremonies, services, interpretation of dogma, motivation) and

5. A way to maintain itself (tithes and offerings).

In spite of different types of church government, different architectural designs of buildings, different titles and clothes for leaders, different worship form, and different theologies, churches for the most part have functioned through this 'Cathedral' form. Whether Catholic or Baptist, Presbyterian or Pentecostal, 'High Church' or 'Low Church,' urban or rural, large or small, rich or poor, Western or Eastern, churches have been 'Cathedral' in nature. This 'Cathedral' system has survived political upheavals, rearrangement of world maps, great social changes, theological heresies, the Protestant Reformation, and numerous movements. It's adaptability has been nothing short of amazing. Using a combination of the Roman governmental and feudal systems, Emperor Constantine developed a church structure that has lasted for seventeen centuries. The 'Cathedral' structure has had the capacity to absorb all major movements into its structure without changing its own basic form."

Principles, not procedures

I am not proposing to revitalize and reinvent the New Testament church straight out of the book of Acts, faithfully copying all it's cultural forms and expressions, because we are living in different times and places. Our cities look much more like Corinth than Jerusalem; many countries live in a postmodern and post-Christendom era; however, we can and should learn from New Testament principles, without copying all it's time-specific and cultural procedures; we should take the New Testament quality of church very serious, but develop structures, methodologies and procedures for our own time and cultures and people groups.

From inherited to emerging mode

"The West has compressed celebration into congregation, and forgotten the homes," says Rev. Bob Hopkins of the Anglican Church Planting Network in England, and goes on to ask: "Is congregation the concrete in which our view of church is set? And, I might add, is this view captured by national pride and church culture?" Europe now boasts of a strong residue of Christian history and structures, but the church has largely lost the people." That is why Anglican Robert Warren speaks of the "inherited mode of church" and an "emerging mode", a new - or possible very old - form of church reemerging according to New Testament patterns.

In order to point out some of the differences between the congregational churches and the New Testament house churches, here is a selective list of key areas were they differ greatly. I am sure this list could be prolonged further:

Cell church, BEC, Housechurch

Today there are three main movements, each advocating in different ways a return to a "cell-based" house centered church. Most of those movements would say: "You can do with cell and celebration, but the congregation is quite dispensable."

The three different streams are

1. The classic "Cell church" advocated for example by Ralph Neighbor, William Beckham, or Yonggi Cho.

2. The BEC (Base-Ecclesial Community), mostly within the Roman Catholic Church

3. the Housechurch Movement, maybe best known today from China and Vietnam.

While the cell church looks and sounds almost the same as the housechurch movement, it is not. There are very significant and vital differences, which I will point out later. The Base-Ecclesial Community is a long-lasting small group experiment within the Roman Catholic church, and might very well develop into a cell church structure within that church. This book focuses on house churches.

Advantages of house churches over traditional churches

I am aware of at least twelve advantages of a cell-based housechurch movement over a traditional congregational-style church:

1. Discipled multiplication

Housechurch is a model centered on multiplication and discipleship with huge growth potential, because the "cell" is the multipliable unit itself. Mentoring, multiplication and discipleship is the heart of the concept. Congregation is not by definition a discipleship model and structurally tends to prevent mentoring and discipleship. Discipleship never really is only "one-on-one", it is a function of community. Next to the Holy spirit, peer pressure may be the strongest teacher on earth, as any parents of teenagers will agree. The housechurches allow for a redeemed use of peer pressure, living out a healthy and loving accountability with each other, learning a new kingdom value from each other and, being friends and family with each other, helping each other to be collective do-ers of a new paradigm, were no-one is left to individual and secret struggles, and therefore quickly matures.

2. Persecution-proof structure

Through it's small and flexible way of life and it's "persecution-proof spirit", housechurches can develop into an almost "persecution-proof structure", as opposed to the very visible and immovable traditional "church with a cross on it's steeple."

3. Free from Church Growth barriers

Once careful attention is given to prevent housechurches from moving from an organic to an organizational mode, housechurches can be multiplied through mitosis, an organic cell-reproduction process, and the overall growth of a movement is virtually free from "church growth barriers."

4. Involves many more people more efficiently

Congregations are often program based, where most programmes are organized at the congregational level. They have proven to be quite inefficient and resource hungry, usually involving 20% of exhausted members of the church doing the work for the other, more passive, 80%. In the housechurch, almost everyone can be easily and naturally involved, and "dead wood is cut out". Since involved people are fulfilled and therefore happy people, the overall quality - and efficiency - of the church grows.

5. Breaks the pastoral care-dilemma

The housechurch model breaks the pastoral care dilemma - a known and self-defeating problem of the congregational church: as numbers grow, the pastoral quality usually goes down, because the Pastor cannot tend to all his sheep any more.

6. Provides a place of life transformation and accountability

The housechurch is an ideal setting to change values, transfer life and therefore transform lifestyles. An analysis of the western church shows that the congregational model is almost totally ineffective at changing basic values and lifestyles. Many Christians end up with the same lifestyle of people around, and therefore become indistinguishable from society and loose their prophetic edge. Housechurches provide a place of radical transformation of values, reordering life, offering mutual and organic accountability, where even a redeemed peer pressure, "the most powerful teacher after Jesus himself", is made to function for good, and not for bad.

7. The house is a most effective place for new Christians

Much has been written about the inward looking mentality of the congregational church, whereby the church and it's programs is the center, and everything else is rotating around this hub. This structure traditionally resents new people coming in, "messing up the order and the situation." The congregation is, statistically speaking, a most unfriendly zone for new Christians, also accounting for unbelievable large drop-out rates of up to 99% in so-called "evangelistic-follow-up programs". In contrast, the "cell" or housechurch is a most effective, natural and welcoming zone for new people to come and stay in touch with the Christian community. It provides spiritual fathers and mothers, not teachers and paper. It also reverses the general direction of the perspective of Christians: instead of getting people to the church, they are getting the church to the people.

8. Solves the leadership crisis

Housechurch-leaders are Elders, and they are just that: older than most, without necessarily being "elderly". Elders do not have to be skilled Masters of Ceremony and learned teachers, but modest and authentic fathers and mothers with obedient children will do nicely to start with. They are by then already many years into living a maturing life and passing the test of time, not freshlings from a seminary able to perform some religious functions. This leadership is easy to find and develop anywhere without time-consuming schools for religious specialists. It depends on initial and ongoing apostolic and prophetic input and support, ministries, which in themselves can be multiplied and therefore match and grow exponentially with a multiplying housechurch movement. Traditional Sunday- or Bible Schools and seminaries are mostly static and addition-based leadership development systems which grow linear, at best. They are an informational system, not a transformational system, as Beckham rightly points out. Therefore they cannot match a multiplying movement of housechurches with an exponentially growing need for elders.

9. Overcomes the clergy-laity division

"Nowhere in the New Testament do we find references to a pastor leading a congregation", says Barney Coombes. The housechurch does not need a Pastor in the traditional sense at all, because elders, functioning together with the corporate giftedness of the housechurch to maintain and multiply the life of the church. This therefore breaks the curse of the clergy-laity division, which the congregational system reinforces.

10. It is more biblical

We cannot afford to ignore biblical revelation for too long and get away with it. Tradition is a strong teacher, but God's word is more reliable and simply better. Even in an age of Postmodernism and relativity, the Bible still teaches absolutes. However, the Bible absolutely does not teach us to call a holy crowd gathering on a holy day at a holy hour in a holy sanctuary to participate in a holy ritual performed by holy men in holy clothes against a holy fee to be the New Testament church. God's work done God's way still attracts God's blessing. Even in Moses' time God exhorted him to build "according to the pattern". It is worth to struggle even with our own trusted tradition for the purpose of regaining biblical truth, because it is not tradition which sets us free, but the truth of God's word.

11. Undeniable cheaper

The congregational church can be defined as "plot plus building plus priest plus salary plus programmes". The housechurch is "people plus ordinary houses plus faith plus shared life", which is undeniably cheaper. As congregational or cathedral-type churches cost enormous sums of money to establish them, and more money to maintain or even propagate the system, the cells and housechurches literally make money, because they produce more than they consume. In an age where there seems to be an endless battle cry for more money for "the church work", we should not overlook alternatives and be good stewards of God's financial talents he gives us.

12. It resurrects the City church

The church in the New Testament was named according to it's location, not denomination. With a new wave of housechurches, this also opens up a way back to the "city church," literally the church of the city, all Christians of a city or region together, meeting regularly or irregularly in city-wide celebrations, were the cities most gifted Christians and humble servants of the Lamb forget all the titles and politics, and in a new maturity sacrifice their own name, denominationalism, reputation and single-handed success to the single advancement of the Kingdom of only one King, the Lamb of God. Imagine the thrill of the public when this collective city-based and authentic leadership regularly casts prophetic vision, teaches apostolic standards, stands united, blesses each other and speaks to the world with one voice. What the devil has tried hard to prevent at any cost will again come true: that "the Romans," "the Ephesians," "the Corinthians," "the Church of Jerusalem", Vienna, Singapore, Baghdad, Khartoum or Montevideo will reconnect with each other, form itself into one supernatural corporate identity and movement under one single lord and master, and speak with a collective and powerful voice to their city and nation. What happens at the small level of housechurches will eventually spill over on a larger city-scale, where the church will "excel at the small and therefore excel at the large". Instead of Christians being regularly excited top-down through imported motivators and speakers at artificial conferences based on names and topics, the healthy, authentic and infectious joy and excitement at the house level will bubble up and express itself citywide, where no one can overhear it any more, and people will repeat the statement made first in Jerusalem: "You have filled our city with your teaching!" And if ever God should choose to repeat instances like at Pentecost, where 120 upper room Christians suddenly face the challenge to accommodate 3.000 converts in one day, they would be prepared, because the flexible structure of multiplying housechurches would already be in place.

2. Housechurches in History

Rediscovery through the valley of the Dark Ages

The New Testament church was a growing church, says Dr. Alan Kreider, and from history we know that it kept growing for quite some time. According to an Epistle to Diognetus written in the late second-century "Christians, day by day increase more and more." In the middle of the third century Origen exclaimed: "Multitudes of people are coming to faith". Ramsay MacMullen, ancient historian in Yale, has estimated that in each generation some 500.000 people were added to the church up until the conversion of Emperor Constantine in AD 312, until the church finally made up between 5 and 8 percent of the population of the Roman empire.

Multiplying housechurches

The Christians during the New Testament times and immediately after that were literally meeting in house churches, usually in the largest rooms of its members. Church Historians agree that they could have rarely been more than fifteen or twenty people. Once a housechurch grew bigger than that, it usually multiplied by simply starting another housechurch nearby. If not, this growth immediately caused problems. Origen, preaching in a home in Ceasarea, once complained that "some have hidden in remotest corners of the house to occupy themselves with profane stories."

Join the candidates for death

Although Christians were not constantly persecuted, and times of relative freedom was interwoven with subtle or fierce persecutions, every Christian knew that persecution could break out at any moment, due to a local crisis, an imperial edict, or a "wolf" that had penetrated the lambs as a lying informer like Judas, about to betray the followers of Christ to the Herods of the day. This was what Paul calls "the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ", as he writes from his prison cell to the Philippians (Phil 3:10). Tertullian writes: "We are besieged and attacked, they kept us prisoners in our own secret congregations." Every Christian was, by definition, a candidate for death. If one wanted a soft life, or go ahead in respectable circles, one simply did not become a Christian. When a Christian, under pressure or interrogation, simply affirmed: "I am a Christian!", it had a powerful ring of authority to it. The power to face persecution, however, came for many Christians from a vivid vision of the future, the living expectation of the imminent return of the Messiah. People knew that this person was ready to die for this statement, and that caused awe or consternation. Persecution was so much part of the lives of the Early Christians, that it molded their thinking - and their structure! In a separate chapter further down, "The Persecution proof church", I will discuss this further.

History: more than propaganda written by the victors

There are two ways to read the Bible: we can read our experiences into it, and search for "confirmations" from the Bible to underline what we already "knew"; or we can read the Bible even against our experiences, which can be substantially more painful - but liberating in the process. The same way we can approach history. Either history will be, as a common communist slogan says, simply "propaganda written by the victors," an interpretation of history to fit and justify the present rule or Status Quo; or history becomes the science to truly discover the facts of the past, even if they do not seem to fit the picture we have of our own history.

If we now look for reasons for the multiplying and growing housechurch movements in the New Testament and the first few centuries, we might be surprised to miss what we expect to be there, and startled to find some quite different dynamics.

No Evangelism

A case in point is Evangelism. If we are convinced, for example, that "Evangelism" is what we all need to do, we will soon start to see Evangelism literally on every page of the Bible, even if it is not there at all. Except for Philip (Acts 9) and the five-fold ministry (Eph. 4:11) there is almost no mentioning of "Evangelists" or "Evangelism as we know it" in the New Testament and the records of the Early Church at all. Alan Kreider speaks of a "telling silence of encouragement to 'evangelize'. The New Testament does not speak about evangelizing as a "plain preaching activity," and Jesus seems to be, in fact, outspoken against going "door to door" (Luke 10), a very common "evangelistic method" in some countries. There is, however, much emphasis on the "making of disciples". Arthur Darby Nock says that in the history of the Early Church "there was little, if any, direct preaching to the public masses; it was simply too dangerous." The church not only had a message, it was the message. And because the church in itself was "good news", there simply was no need for proclamation style Evangelism or going door to door. Only when the church as a structure became "bad news", an ill-matching structure for an explosive message, did the need for special "good-news"-enterprises emerge. Evangelism without a functioning church model is Evangelism because of the lack of a working church model, which provides literally out-of-body experiences and even out-of-body conversions.

Many historians therefore disagree with English writer Michael Green, who states in his otherwise excellent book "Evangelism in the Early Church: "There can be no doubt that ... open air evangelism continued through the first two centuries". The pagan Caecilius, a contemporary of the early church, reported that Christians were "silent in public, but chattering in corners." This also meant that in times of illness or crisis their neighbors, who have learned to trust them, would feel free to turn to Christians for help. Baptist Mission Professor John Mark Terry, in his book "Evangelism, a concise history", reflecting the thinking of our present time, sees Evangelism as something do-able, then re-interprets the Bible and history from that perspective and goes on record to say: "Wherever Jesus went, he presented the gospel." The evangelism-worldview Terry describes is full of "evangelistic keywords" and methodology: touching, witnessing, sharing, ministering, preaching, telling the good news, and doing Evangelism; he even goes as far to say that "Jesus was using a number of different evangelistic methods". We need to be careful not to reinterpret Church history through the reading glasses of present styles and methods of "Evangelism". Jesus, as well as His Body, the Church, did not only have a message, He was the message. He did not have the gospel, He was the gospel. The gospel is not a set of doctrines, but a redeemed lifestyle reflecting God's qualities. What the early Christians did was not "life-style evangelism" true to a proven method, but their normal everyday life had powerful in-built evangelistic implications, true to a loving and compassionate God.

No Missions

Georg Kretschmar points out, that "the recruitment to faith was never institutionalized, there was no organizing the congregation for missions." The impact of the church as an entity was so strong, that most early Christians did not even pray for the conversions of pagans, but, according to Yves Congar, a Dominican scholar, they prayed for the prosperity and peace of the people. There is, says Norbert Brox, an "astonishing absence of thinking and talking about missions." The reason for this "absence" is very much the same as for the "absence" of Evangelism: the church in itself was the mission. The "Missions Journeys" of Paul and his companions were not understood as "Missions as we know it" by Paul himself, but emerged as titles in the appendix of Bibles to hand drawn maps of the Mediterranean centuries later. Paul was simply doing apostolic and prophetic ministry, and so was the church that had been planted and emerged through these ministries. Since the church was the mission, it did not so much send out special "missionaries" - it literally sent out itself, in the form of multipliable units, by sending out embryonic units of a local church of two and three, which carry within themselves the vision and virus of church, ready to infect whatever they touch.

No attractive worship services

Although the church in Corinth was still open to outsiders, from the mid-first century onwards pagans were usually neither admitted to Christian meetings nor invited at all. After the persecution under Nero in the 60s of the first century, most Churches closed their doors to outsiders. One of the functions of the deacons even seemed to have been that of an "ecclesiastical bouncer", the typically heavy set person who in today's world stands at the door of private clubs and bars to evict, if necessary by force, unwanted elements. They had to screen the wolves from the lambs, as the "Testament of our Lord", a mid-fourth century document describing the functions of the deacons, explains. Paul was warning the Galatians against "false brothers, sneaking in to spy out our liberty in Christ" (Gal 2:4). The fellowship meetings of the Christians were not meant at all to be attractive for outsiders, because they were not designed for them. Mid-third century Bishop Cyprian in Carthage compared the church with the "enclosed garden" of Songs of Solomon (4:12). Even a catechumen, someone in daily Bible training under an instructor/teacher was firmly dismissed before the Christians did their secret rites, the prayers, the Holy Kiss, baptisms and the Lord's Supper. The Christians were very much what Celsus, a critic of the early church, called a "secret society."

Worship in the New Testament is never mentioned to be the reason Christians gather together, and surely not consisting in singing a number of songs. It is an obedient and sacrificial lifestyle of a person which, yes, sometimes does sing, but does this because the whole life is living worship. Abraham knew this well, and as he went up to Mount Morija to sacrifice his only son Isaac, he told to the waiting servants that he is going up "to worship" (Gen 22).

No mainstream

Christians in the early centuries often called themselves "paroikoi" (1. Peter 2:11), resident aliens, or "the alien next door". The understanding they had of themselves was not to be settlers and dutiful citizens with a special religious persuasion, but to be "a colony of aliens", at home everywhere, fully at home nowhere. When people became Christians they were "converted to marginality", as Brazilian Eduardo Hoornaert said. Rather than being part of the main social establishment they were part of a "counter-culture", an anti-society, secret and mysterious to many, loyal to "another king", a distinctively different spiritual tribe. Paul describes himself to Felix: "I admit that I am a follower of The Way, which they call a sect" (Acts 24:14), and was known as the "ringleader of a sect, a troublemaker" (24:5).

How and why, then, did people become Christians?

If it was not for systematic evangelistic programmes, mission outreach and invitations to attractive worship services, how did people become Christians? And if becoming a Christian meant to join an outcast and secretive society, endanger their social success and potentially end up as a candidate for death, why did people want to become Christians?

As we will now look at some of the historic reasons for large numbers of people who decided to join the church then, we might find clues to similar developments now. Again we should not fall into the trap and copy historic methodologies and procedures from another time and space 1:1, but learn from the underlying principles and be highly creative and flexible in their outworking in today's cultures and people groups.

Beyond the fact that Christians lived in organic and easily multipliable housechurches, equipped and guided by the five-fold ministry (Eph. 4:11), some of the main reasons for people becoming Christians in ancient times, according to numerous historic studies done by Alan Kreider and others, include:

1. Curiosity

Quite opposite to many of today's churches which are trying to be attractive to the world, welcome visitors with sweets and visitors cards, display signs at the entrance reading "Everybody welcome!", have outreach campaigns of any size and type, focused on getting outsiders to come to church, and are generally trying to be at least seeker sensitive or even seeker driven, the early churches worked on very different dynamics. One of them was the insatiable curiosity of people. People are by nature adventurous and curious, seeking "to go where no one has gone before". Many today wonder why the occult movements and secret circles and societies like the Freemasons are still flourishing. The answer is: they appeal to man's basic instinct to be a tribal being, with the strong need to be part of an exclusive family, group and tribe, for which humans are ready to undergo almost any sort of initiation process. Jesus knew this, and had something like a dual communication style, one for those "inside", and another for those "outside", "Jesus spoke to the multitudes in parables, and He did not speak to them without a parable." (Mt 13:34). This pattern seems to continue in the church: preaching was for those outside, teaching for those inside the church. Jesus was very firm on this dual pattern: "To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is in parables, in order that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand" (Luke 8:10). Even his words about the "narrow gate" created a powerful curiosity and an almost feverish excitement amongst many to know the mysterious message and movement of Jesus. Do they know something we do not know? Jesus knew that the "Mystery of the Gospel" is not like "pearls thrown before the pigs", but duly discovered, sought out, and only then found, quite by revelation.

People were not admitted to freely enter churches, and it only sparked and heightened their interested.

If I tell my four-year old son not to open that drawer under any circumstance once I leave the room, I prophetically know, which place he is almost magically and irresistibly drawn once I go out: that very forbidden drawer.

Today we are sometimes in the danger of pressing home answers to people who have not even asked the r