Homes 4 Him (H4H): Home- A Natural Place To Begin

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Home- A Natural Place To Begin

Why not start at home?

The natural place for relationships is home. We bring our friends and our extended family into our home. Our neighbors relate to us as a local household. From the home we touch school kids, adults at work, and all ages in our community sports programs.

When, in our homes, we teach and live for Jesus Christ home becomes a place where our children are discipled to connect with God and reach out to the world. As a family, we can pray for our friends and neighbors. We can invite those that we have been reaching out to, to come in to our process and learn right along with us. They can then duplicate the process in their home and with those they are connected with.

It just sounds so natural. Why do we have to complicate it all by separating ourselves into same age clusters or by gender? I read in the Bible about whole households coming to Christ, and I realize that that rarely happens now. I realize that we have changed our focus from home centered to institutional centered.

Who will dare to change the focus?

Who will start at home?

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Me Starting a Church! Are you Crazy ?????

You can best reach into your friendship network for Christ, and we will help you! We are using this site to stretch thinking. We realize it's "outside the box" for how we do church right now. However, we feel it is time to explore simple, Low-Budget explansion movements that are working in North America, Africa & the World now. Continue to attend you current church. It's Ok. It's not either-or, rather both-and. Get people meeting in your home too. There are lots of people, for whatever reason, will not "Attend Church". You be their connection with Christ right where you are. Imagine this being part of a church, but also starting a simple one too! Wow!

Latest News on House Churches

This was in Standard Publishing's "LOOKOUT" November 29,2009

Americans splitting their church commitments

A recent Barna survey finds that 10 percent of adults surveyed attend a worship service in a home at least once a month. Ken Eastburn, founding minister of The Well, a church birthed in a building that transitioned to a network of home-based churches in Orange County, California, says the statistic invalidates the idea that some Christians are house church Christians while other Christians are conventional church Christians. “Christians sitting in a traditional bricks and mortar church on Sunday morning are often the same ones strumming guitars in someone’s living room Sunday afternoon,” he said.

Eastburn, who recently moderated the House2House national conference on house churches in Dallas, Texas, attributes the overlap to a reluctance on the part of Christians to completely abandon the customary structure of church. “It’s very common for someone to give his tithe and committee service to a congregation in a building because he feels it is too difficult to cast off all structure,” says Eastburn. “At the same time, [he may not feel he] is growing sitting in the pew, and loves the idea of dialoguing about Scripture instead of being on the receiving end of a lecture all the time.”

According to the Barna research, the number of those claiming to worship in a house setting depends on how the question is asked. When researchers asked the question in the strictest sense the number dropped to five percent. Eastbum sees this as an indication that five percent or more of individuals surveyed split their time between conventional and house church.

Says Eastbum, “We believe that a simpler model of church is part of the answer to helping people grow in Christ. Our challenge is to provide an environment where people can leave the building without feeling like they’ve lost all structure or accountability.”
—Evangelical Press News Service

Here's a recent quote from Wolfgang Simson that was brought to my attention by John White.

"The latest research indicates that the number of house churches in Europe have already reached or surpassed 10,000, Australia could have up to 10,000, and New Zealand up to 6,000 house churches. Research in the US shows that between 6 and 12 million are already attending house churches, making house churches one of the three largest Christian groups in the country. In the case of Bangladesh or India, with many hundreds of thousands of house churches, the various networks of house churches have already become the largest Christian movements in their respective countries." Wolfgang Simson
This, of course, isn't counting China where there are perhaps one million house churches.

Robert Reese

"Mission methods must be cheaply reproducible for maximum effectiveness. Americans have developed expensive methods that cannot be duplicated elsewhere. In fact, we have come to rely so heavily on borrowed money that many churches are seeing declining contributions to missions because of needing to repay loans for expensive buildings. Such luxuries did not characterize the early church, which had no buildings for the first couple of centuries. For Christianity to spread rapidly throughout the world, missions need to return to sustainable methods that do not require huge sums of money for success."

(Robert Reese. "Best Mission practices for the 21 century" Christian Standard, November 29,2009. pg844-45)

Is it Permissible, Safe or Legal For You to start Simple Church Fellowships? :-)

“You might say `I’m not called to plant churches.’ Yes, you are! It’s always the will of God to have a people who worship His Son in the nations. You’ll never have to worry about making God mad if you try to plant a church. It seems crazy to me that people are under the delusion they need a special calling to save souls, to disciple them, and to get them together to love Jesus”

("Apostolic Passion", Floyd McClung. "Perspectives on the world Christian Movement", 1999, William Carey Library, Pasadena California . Pg 186c)

New Church Paradigms

As the body of Christ grows from the infant to the toddler stage, it is seeking direction for its journey forward. It has gradually stepped around the barrier of old wineskins and has come to view different infrastructures.
Our view is often limited. Old paradigms are blinders, making it impossible to see peripherally. To describe it another way, we now “see through a glass darkly.”
As we step forward, we must see the emerging Last Days wineskin for Christ’s ekklesia. It does not yet exist. Should the Lord tarry, perhaps it will arise in the last half of this century. Can we set our vision to pioneer its lifestyle?

(Ralph Neighbour, forward of "Nexus, The World House CHurch Movement Reader, Editor Rad Zdero, William Carry, 2007 pp. Foward)

Economical Church Planting

"Mission methods must be cheaply reproducible for maximum effectiveness. Americans have developed expensive methods that cannot be duplicated elsewhere. In fact, we have come to rely so heavily on borrowed money that many churches are seeing declining contributions to missions because of needing to repay loans for expensive buildings. Such luxuries did not characterize the early church, which had no buildings for the first couple of centuries. For Christianity to spread rapidly throughout the world, missions need to return to sustainable methods that do not require huge sums of money for success."

(Robert Reese. "Best Mission practices for the 21 century" Christian Standard, November 29,2009. pg844-45)