Are House Churches The Way To Go?
NBC news just did a video report on house churches reporting that up to 9% of church-going Americans attend a house church. You can see it below:
I did a book review here on a book called “Pagan Christianity” (affiliate link) that attempts to show why any other form of doing church, other then house churches is unbiblical. As you can see by the review, I’m not a huge fan of their (Viola and Barna) analysis.
But I know some people are using them to good effect. What’s been your experience with house churches? What have you heard?
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Hey Rodlie…if it’s cool i might post this video on my blog…good stuff you know this topic always is interesting to me…but i have to agree i haven’t seen ‘house churches’ excel as maybe one would like, yet perhaps we (as a church) haven’t given them the proper time and time to succeed?
What about Milton Adams with simplechurch? how’s that going it’s in your neck of the woods? and our friend and colleague Anthony as he’s planting, spoke with him and he seems to have some success though i know it’s a bit different…
we all know the early church meet in houses not in buildings, their goal was always to reach others and disciple them…I guess the question is our system (SDA) allowing this to happen in different structures outside of the main stream system of meeting in a building?
could say more…blessings!
javi recently posted..Dont buy things you cant afford!
Absolutely. Use whatever you like. Concerning Milton and Simple Church that one seems to be going pretty well. Concerning Anthony’s house church, he’d have to tell you more, but I think they’re considering some transitions and possible changes to their structure.
I know in the state of Florida our denomination is giving them a fair shake and chance. I guess my questions is….is this the best vehicle and venue for discipleship and engaging our culture today? Perhaps I haven’t read enough about them, but in North America this does not seem to be the case.
Hey Rodlie, we interviewed Milton Adams and Darren Yates regarding their Simple Church at Home program on Hope on Fire this past season. Followers of your blog might find their interview helpful in getting answers right from the horses mouth so to speak regarding their program is and maybe more importantly what it isn’t! I know that personally I learned a lot from sharing time in the studio with them and found their vision and goals to be refreshing.
The link to the interview is here: http://tinyurl.com/hopeonfirehousechurchs
Randy Magray recently posted..There’s a Lot of Us… Extended Trailer
Looks great. Thanks for sharing, Randy.
Thought an update might be helpful given the dialogue:
Even though 2 years of work might be on the early side to fully assess the effectiveness of Simple Church discipleship, my observations are:
1) Extremely high percentage levels of discipleship are the norm across the network.
2) The priesthood of all believers (lay-people) are empowered to do all the work of disciple making.
3) Literally 1000′s of dollars are freed up to directly help people. Offerings donations are NOT spend on inventory items, asset items, or building maintenance.
It has been encouraging that AdventisMission.org has partnered with this global network. They have put the simple church logo and link on their web page.
Simple Church Global Network Development:
- 1,358 people visited the web page, coming from 55 countries in the past 30 days.
- 801 visit were from the US, representing 316 cities.
- 5.26% of these visitors have been refereed by the http://www.AdventistMission.org home page.
- http://www.SimpleChurchInfo.com is a new web page for people to share with their friends. This web page has been translated into Portuguese and is being translated into French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian, Japanese, and Finish.
- 35% of adult attenders are secular, unchurch, or atheists.
- currently 12 simple church locations, 6 conferences have partnered, $115,000 have come in YTD 2010, 5 conferences are exploring simple church partnership, 12 baptism in 2010, about 96 in training with 1/3 of these being Phase Two training, with a project 5 more locations begin by years end.
- Feb of 2001 the SPD has arranged a 3 week trip, inviting me to spend 4 hours with each conference administration explaining the global network.
- A simple church introductory DVD which will contain the simple church webinar should be available at the beginning of the year.
- 2011, program and test a new database that will serve the global network. The goal: to improve our existing internet-based database to simplify network management so that grass-roots “movement” characteristics continue exponentially.
If you have any questions feel free to email me.
Be faithful, Milton
That’s certainly a great report, Milton. Thanks for sharing those stats. Keep it up!