1.   On keeping it relevant: 

Youth Pastor:  So you’re the guy that disses the church, huh?

House Church Proponent:  No way, man, I wouldn’t “diss” God’s people—but I will come down hard on the layers of institutionalism and fleshliness that have been laid on top of us. 

Associate Pastor:  What do you mean by that?

HCP:  By that I mean, if I may put it into “theologianese” for you, that I strongly support the idea that what the church would benefit most from doing in these last days would be to return to a primitive ecclesiological structure coupled with a voluntary semi-communal lifestyle, and therefore recover the dynamic and effectiveness of the early church. 

AP:  So I guess then, that you don’t believe that we’re doing that already.

HCP:  Well, compare the way they “did” church in the New Testament days—especially in the book of Acts—with the way we “do” church these days. 

AP:  Well, we do the same thing here—at least where it counts.

HCP (rolling his eyes):  Hardly. 

AP (agitated):  What?  What do you mean by that?

HCP:  What I’m thinking about is all the many changes and alterations in the way the church has conducted itself throughout its history. 

Successful Pastor:  But times change, and we have to change with them.

HCP:  But did we really have to make such sweeping and lasting changes that would cause the church to lose our focus so completely? 

AP:  Look, we had to keep up with the times.  That didn’t mean we lost focus.

YP:  Yeah, man, we had to stay relevant to the people we were trying to reach. 

HCP:  But now, it’s obvious that the more you seek to be relevant, the more ineffective we all become.  Aren’t you aware of the statistics about how American churches are faltering in such things as different generations’ attendance patterns and in our overall effectiveness in the surrounding society, even though the population as a whole is getting more and more “religious?”  We’re failing to make real disciples, and as a result we’re allowing our culture to continue becoming increasingly hostile toward the genuine Christian message.

AP:  Well, at least our church is growing. 

HCP:  But are you really making this city a better place over all?

Worship Pastor (to the other staffers):  I see what he’s doing—he’s trying to make a point about quantity versus quality.

HCP (delighted):  Very good!  My point is that the fulfilling of the Great Commission is not the swelling of congregational numbers, but the making of disciples. 

WP:  Yeah, yeah, you know, I’ve heard of this thing going around (obviously trying to remember something) discipleship salvation … or Lordship salvation … or something like that, where all the people are supposed to become these high-powered followers and, like, no saints left behind …

HCP (chuckling):  Yeah, good one.  I just have a hard time imagining Paul accepting the idea of some of the saints being called to real discipleship while others are only called to mediocrity. 

Elder-at-large:  But for better or worse, it always turns out that a few may go on to be leaders or whatever, and most just remain regular people.  You can’t really help it.

HCP:  Well, I plan to help it as much as I can.  See, if you’ve got the right relationships in place, Christians will mentor others into real discipleship, who will then go on to mentor still more, and before we know it we’ll have the fulfillment of Second Timothy 2:2. 

EL:  Well, all that’s nice in theory, but …

HCP (interrupting):  … but it can become reality through the genuine fellowship and solid relationships that a neighborhood house church can bring about. 

2.   On location, buildings, and property: 

SP:  God’s people just want a place where they can all meet together as a church.

HCP:  Well, some of them can meet at my house if they want. 

YP (laughing):  You think you can hold a whole congregation?

HCP:  Well, maybe not your whole crowd, but my living room could handle a New Testament-sized church meeting. 

YP (grinning):  Could your driveway handle the traffic?

HCP:  That’s why I call it a neighborhood house church; hopefully, most folks will walk. 

WP:  So there’s only one per neighborhood, then.

HCP:  Actually, I figure that if you take all of the families in my neighborhood that get in their cars and drive to a church building on Sunday, and keep them in the neighborhood for a meeting at a nearby house, a subdivision the size of yours or mine might need a half-dozen or so places to meet to accommodate the two to three dozen families that would be involved. 

EL:  Some subdivisions and communities have an assembly room you could use.

HCP:  But that would defeat the whole house-church feel of the thing, now wouldn’t it? 

AP:  And look, where would your church offices be?  Wouldn’t you have to make some kind of arrangement with the management for office space?  I know some churches rent space in a strip mall—or would you expect your staff to all work out of their homes?

HCP (mumbling):  Wow, where do I start with that one?  (Back to full voice)  First off, there wouldn’t be a pastor and staff, but a couple of elders and maybe a deacon or two. 

EL:  You’re thinking plural leadership?  That’s not going to work; there’s always going to be one person with a strong personality that rises to the top.

HCP:  Well, I would hope that the one who is really in charge is Jesus … 

AP (rolling his eyes):  Oh, yeah, right!

HCP (patiently):  … and that all the other church members are prayerfully backing up the leadership of the elders by helping to discern the will of the Lord and then following through with it.  And since there are no separate church facilities or stuff to maintain, the people in charge would have no trouble working out of their homes, since administration wouldn’t be such a big deal.

EL:  Yes, I know that a lot of people these days create little mini-office spaces in their home for their computer work and etc. 

AP:  But to run a church out of one of those …?

WP:  Yeah, and wouldn’t it be that the one who hosts the worship meetings turns out to be the one who mostly calls the shots?  After all, it’s his house, and the rest are all partaking of his hospitality when the meetings are held.

HCP:  Yes, the times of worship are essential, but they’re certainly not the only times that they all have together, especially if they participate in the semi-communal form of lifestyle which would bring them together at other times between the worship meetings to handle chores together or do yard work for each other. 

WP:  Don’t you believe that some of these churches would go into a fully communal sort of setup?

HCP:  Sure, and that would work out OK too, as long as they remain fully involved in ministry to the community as a whole, and keep a strong witness to outsiders, and don’t get cloistered into some kind of closed compound.  But I really don’t see that as being practical in most cases; but only in a relative few.  I personally would consider it to be preferable in most cases for members to maintain their own private property and then voluntarily share things. 

EL:  Well, other than that, do you think there’s any situation where they might have any kind of church-owned property?

HCP:  It may be that a church, or maybe several local churches, would get together and form some sort of parachurch outreach ministry that would require the use of a facility of some kind.  Then they could set up some sort of non-profit organization or maybe a type of charity situation that could accommodate the need that the Lord illuminated to them and gave them a heart for taking care of.  But such a facility should remain dedicated to the outreach, and not be co-opted or taken over for worship meetings. 

YP:  So you’re thinking about, like, a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter or things like that, right? 

HCP:  Right, or maybe something simpler like a youth center or day care, or even just a playground or a sports field.  It’s whatever the Lord moves you to do as a group, if any thing at all, to meet some need of the community without over-organizing the life out of it.

SP:  You talk about not over-organizing, yet your ideas would take quite a bit of work anyway.  So why not just do these sorts of things through an already established mega-church like ours? 

HCP:  You know, these concepts are so simple that it hasn’t taken me very long at all to explain them to you guys.  And I can imagine that a lot of the churches in most of the neighborhoods wouldn’t even feel that it’s necessary to go with the parachurch thing anyway, but most would just meet needs as they came up, like the early church did.  It’s not complicated unless somebody makes it complicated.

AP:  I still think it would be better if you had a place as a headquarters to operate out of. 

HCP:  And I still think that any church is better off if when isn’t suffering from some kind of an “edifice complex.” 

3.   On koinonia and semi-communalism:

SP:  You know, you’re a pretty idealistic fellow about all this stuff. 

HCP:  I know, and I mean to be that way.  I believe that the idealism presented in the biblical standard and inspired by the Holy Spirit is the best motivational force—much better than competition or mere survivalism.  And hopefully I can spread this good attitude before the epidemic of “churchianity” going around causes widespread jading of sensitivities, curbing of enthusiasm, and all the believers setting their hope on the shelf.

AP:  It figures that you’d say that.  It explains why you think everybody else ought to be as involved in ministry as you would be. 

WP (jumping in):  Anyway, you use the word neighborhood for your type of house churches because they’re partly communal and share certain common tasks, right?

HCP:  Exactly.  Not only does this give them things to do together for each other, it saves them some money when they can share resources, and they can give more to either parachurch charities or community work. 

AP:  But that’s not fair, is it?  I mean, not everybody’s going to be able or willing to give equally, are they?  And just suppose that somebody gets the idea that since they may contribute spiritually at a meeting that they aren’t obligated to pitch in on the other things.

HCP:  Has that been your experience?  Because mine has been just the opposite—when there’s something going on and it is seen as the “churchy” thing to do, most folks are eager to pitch in, either with goods, or else with good ol’ “elbow grease.”  And you know, that’s especially true when there are elderly people around to do these domestic type things for.  People like being involved in stuff; it’s a part of the whole feeling of being accepted and a part of the group. 

AP:  But don’t you think that some folks may get offended if they notice that some of the members aren’t giving as much as they are?

HCP (shaking his head):  I genuinely doubt if they would even care at all.  If they’re grown-ups they’d realize that life isn’t fair anyway, so they’ll develop an attitude of being givers within the context of the church’s common tasks and they’ll enjoy the times of being together and helping each other out.  If somebody develops a bad attitude, the rest of the church will just continue to try and model a better attitude while an elder or elders counsel that person.  In fact, Paul addresses that sort of attitude cropping up in their common meals when he writes to the Corinthians about some who act basically like pigs when they come together to eat the Lord’s supper—“one takes his supper before everyone else, and one is hungry while another is drunk…”

WP:  Yeah, and there’s a reference to that also in Jude, where he talks about the “spots in the feasts of charity.”

AP (smugly):  You see, things don’t always work out smoothly.

HCP:  No, they sure don’t—and we should expect some problems like these to come up from time to time.  But the difference is that when they ran into this kind of trouble in the New Testament, they worked it out; they didn’t just scrap the whole system over a few peoples’ mistakes.  And neither should we.

4.   On missions and evangelism:

EL:  So how would you send people out to the mission field?  You know that we have trained professionals who have made cross-cultural relations their life’s work.  They spend many years studying the language, societal norms, and other sociological factors of a place very carefully before they take the gospel there. 

AP:  Yeah, do you think that somehow a totally lay movement could be as effective as our specialists?

HCP (sarcastically):  This elevation of some of your leadership to a more exalted level of usefulness to God sure sounds to me like indoctrination to the gnosis … 

AP (moving to the edge of his chair):  Hey, watch that!

HCP (gesturing for calm):  But really, I know that you have some intelligent people in your congregation, don’t you? 

SP:  Well, certainly we do.

HCP:  So have you tried giving them a taste of some of the deep concepts of the Word from the pulpit, so as to engage their thinking and maybe stir their interest a little more than normal? 

AP:  What good would that do?

YP:  Yeah.  People would think that stuff’s boring. 

HCP:  Did you think it was boring when you had it in Bible college?

YP:  Well, yeah, some of it was. 

HCP:  … which I’ll bet had more to do with the lecturing and the way it was presented than with the nature of the content.

YP:  Sure, I guess that’s true. 

HCP:  So, if it were presented in an engaging way like the meat of the Word that it really is, and not like dry philosophy or theology, it would probably be interesting to you and to everybody else.

AP (impatiently):  Hold it, hold it.  What’s all this got to do with missions? 

HCP:  OK, I’ll get to the point.  Folks are motivated in different ways; and a lot of them are attracted to more active service when their intellectual curiosity is stirred.  Then they would be more likely to keep scriptural things in their minds, and would let those things spill out in regular conversation.  So that would tend to lead to more evangelism over the backyard fences and among workplace relationships.

EL:  You mean because they would feel more intellectually equipped to deal with people who are skeptics or are obstinate. 

WP:  But a lot of people these days don’t even know their neighbors, especially if they live in an apartment building or a condo.

HCP:  I know, and most of that is just plain fear.  Christians are just going to have to be friendlier whether they like it or not.  I know they don’t want to, but … 

AP (still impatient):  I still don’t see what this has to do with missions!

HCP:  All right, all right.  (Sighs)  All this is how we get Christians comfortable with the idea of being vocal and sharing their faith.  People who aren’t comfortable doing that at home certainly won’t do it in a strange place like a foreign land. 

AP (stressing his point):  Yes, and that’s why we train them!

HCP:  And along with that, take into account the changing nature of the mission field.  We can’t afford to look at mission work the way we use to; where some group of guys walks through the jungle until they come to the point of some native’s spear and then start preaching to a crowd of people who all have bones through their noses.  For one thing, most of the biggest mission fields are right here in our cities.  Then, think about the continuing urbanization of the Third World; nowadays even a lot of those jungle natives are coming to the cities to look for work. 

EL:  So you want to stick with the urban areas.

HCP:  Or, to be more accurate, we should start there and work our way out. 

AP:  So how do you propose we get started with those Third World cities?

HCP:  A lot of businesses have “gone global” lately, and a lot more probably will before long.  One means of spreading the gospel to these places would involve Christian businessmen doing evangelistic work and maybe even planting churches in the places they go on their travels—depending, of course, on the length of their stay, or perhaps even on whether they relocate.  And sometimes the reverse would be possible if foreign business workers come to America and are exposed to the Gospel while they’re here. 

YP:  You know, that’s a little bit like the day of Pentecost, when there were a lot of people from all over the place in Jerusalem for the feast.  Peter sure took advantage of that opportunity, didn’t he?

HCP:  He sure did.  And one other way that I’ve seen at work first hand is evangelizing foreign students who come to American colleges and universities for an education.  I’ve heard about a lot of young students who have either started churches in their home countries after they retuned or have helped out fledgling ones. 

EL:  You’re making it sound so easy.  You must realize that there are a lot of problems with all this.

HCP:  Of course there are; I’ve never claimed that this was a perfect way, but only that it was a more true way to the biblical example, and as such it has a lot of advantages that we would do well to recover in our day. 

SP:  It sounds like you’ve thought about all these things quite a lot.