Imagine doing hospitality, pastoral care, community – building, worship, Bible study, hymn sing, teaching, theology, spirituality, learning, questioning, sharing, amongst much else, all at the same time. Not as separate activities but at the same time.
This is what happens in a house church—literally church in your home. That’s how church began, a long time ago, with people meeting in each other’s homes. That’s how church was here in Canada—we know the legends of pioneers meeting in living rooms and barns, without a pastor or a preacher each time, sharing the gospel, praying together, for and with each other.
Out of these meetings the thing we today call “Church” grew—rituals, liturgies, sacred spaces, divisions of labour, titles, hierarchies. But before all that, there was only the two or more gathered in His name. They read scripture. They shared the story; they discussed it. They brought that story into their own lives by sharing their own story—scripture and personal biography intersecting.
I witnessed this earlier this year when I visited the Cariboo House Church Ministries in and around Lac La Hache in B.C., where Rev. David Webber lives. We were in the home of a man who had just had an operation. Sitting across from him was his sharp – as – a – tack 90 – something mom. To his left, a young man who lived nearby with his severely alcoholic father. I had travelled there with a couple who had told me in the car they had first thought it a strange way to do church. I met them again the next day at another worship. It might have been strange but they took to it.
And it was strange; because it was very intimate. Sitting in a circle in a home, you cannot protect your vulnerability. There is no other or stranger in that room—that was blatantly obvious to me as I listened to them talking and joking with each other before worship began. Their lives seemed to intersect each day. Transporting mom, or doing some grocery errands for another. Small details which speak of community, of extended family, of love.
We sang hymns, some familiar to me, others not. I chose How Great Thou Art, and I was transported back 40 years to our apartment shortly after we arrived in Canada. There was no Urdu worship then for our little band of immigrants, so we made our own. Within a few years there were hundreds, then thousands, of South Asian Christians building a faith life in their chosen country.
Something like the very early church; how it grew from homes, and evolved into Christendom. All this flashed through me as I sat in that modest living room, singing an old familiar hymn.
It was all very personal and in that deep intimacy the relationships between the people gathered—a few in Jesus’ name—was a truly moving and spiritual experience. My vulnerability, as a sinner, as a believer, as a constantly failed Christian, as a deeply flawed human being, was on display. I couldn’t hide in that room—so, hospitality, pastoral care, community, worship, all became one.
I have seen the future of the church and it is rooted in the past and it is the house church. Wherever church needs to be born, or reborn, in Communist Soviet nations or China or Cuba, in 19th – century Canada, the first gathering place is the living room (or the barn).
Two or three meet, then another couple join them and next thing you know there are big buildings and complicated rituals. Which are all wonderful things, but they pale in comparison to the intensity of people worshipping together in intimate spaces. After all, this faith of ours is about relationship; with each other, and with Christ and through his grace to God. It is an intricate web of intimacies.
