[While I’m in Ecuador, I’m posting columns and articles that I wrote in the early 2000’s for Tabletalk Magazine, which kindly gave me permission to do this.]
This one was clearly written in the first decade of the 2000’s, but it cites a trend that, I believe, accelerated, though it may be in the first stages of reversal. Barna’s prediction that by 2010, as many as 10% of Christians will primarily go to church on the internet does not seem to have come true, since churches were just getting seriously started with technology in that year, with hardly any streaming live services. With the COVID shutdowns, beginning in 2020, that would change, with only 6% of American Christians saying their churches conducted worship as they usually did, while virtually all congregations offered online services. Today, though, just 6% of Christians do all of their church activities online.
More interesting to me, though, are house churches, home churches, and the professed Christians who think they can dispense with church altogether.
Doing without church
The seven churches of Asia addressed in the book of Revelation had their problems. One of them looked quite lively, but it was actually dead. Another was so lukewarm that the Lord was ready to spit it out of his mouth. And yet the Son of Man did not tell the Christians of Sardis or of Laodicea to pull out of their congregations.
Today, though, a growing number of Christians are doing just that. Despite the continued visibility of megachurches, the new trend is for minichurches, microchurches, or no churches at all.
According to Christian pollster George Barna, the era of the institutional church is over. In his books Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary and The Second Coming of the Church, Barna hails what he calls the “revolutionaries” who are abandoning the established church in favor of small group fellowships and individual devotion.
An increasing number of Christians have dropped out of congregations to form their own “house churches.” These typically consist of a few families that meet together in someone’s home. They are essentially Bible studies and fellowship groups whose members belong to no other congregation.
A house is indeed a good place for a church. Persecuted Christians have met in each other’s homes from the days of ancient Rome to contemporary China. House churches may be worth reviving for American Christians, whether in face of a new persecution or just because a congregation wants to do without a big expensive building.
But even house churches still need to have the marks of the church. The house churches Barna is lauding typically have no structure, no doctrines, and no organization. They usually have no ministers or elders. Instead of calling a pastor who has studied God’s Word in depth and who knows how to exercise pastoral care, the practice is usually to just take turns leading the discussions. The house churches have no affiliations with any larger church body. Nor do they have specific doctrines or confessions of faith. They do little, if anything, with the sacraments. No one is subject to church discipline, as such. If conflict breaks out, people just don’t come back. They can just worship at somebody else’s house.
House churches, though, are too institutional for some people. Many Christians are taking home schooling a step further and establish a “home church.” In this arrangement, a family is its own congregation. The father might teach from the Bible, with the wife and children listening. They then adjourn to the dining room for Sunday dinner. No outsiders intrude.
Having family devotions is a salutary practice, but they are not supposed to take the place of public corporate worship.
But even home churches are too institutional for some people. Why does a Christian need other people around at all? “Based on our research,” Barna says approvingly, “I have projected that by the year 2010, 10 to 20 percent of Americans will derive all their spiritual input (and output) through the Internet” (Revolution, p. 180).
But even worshipping at such an electronic shrine may be too much human contact for some. Why not just contemplate God by myself? After all, isn’t the inner life more spiritual than all of these externals? Isn’t the personal relationship with God all that matters? In the words of country singer Josh Turner, it’s all about “Me and God.” And for that, I need no one else. As Turner sings, “Ain’t nobody come in between me and God.”
But actually I do need someone to come between me and God, the intermediary Jesus Christ; otherwise, I would fare about as well as a mosquito in a nuclear reactor. To know Jesus Christ, I need His external Word and His sacraments. I need someone other than myself to apply these to me. I need someone to teach me and to keep me in line. I need to worship God and receive His gifts. I need the body of Christ; that is, His church.
“Ours is not the business of organized religion, corporate worship, or Bible teaching,” says Barna says of his fellow anti-church revolutionaries. “We are in the business of life transformation” (The Second Coming of the Church, p. 96). But, as Michael Horton has shown in his critique of this movement, such an emphasis on “transformation” is mere moralism and mysticism. The Gospel, though, involves proclamation. Preaching requires preachers. The grace of God demands the means of grace: Bible teaching, baptism, the Lord’s supper. Such necessities beget corporate worship and, yes, organized religion. (See “No Church, No Problem,” Modern Reformation, July/August 2008.)
“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works,” says the Apostle Paul, “not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:24-25). It was not good for man to be alone even in Paradise, and it is certainly not good to be alone in a fallen world. God did not design us to be self-contained; rather, He made us dependent on others, both for our daily bread and for our spiritual nourishment.
Furthermore, God calls us to love our neighbors. For that, you need other people. Specifically, we need people different from ourselves. Christ calls us into His body, the church, which consists of lots of different kinds of people. “The body does not consist of one member but of many” (1 Corinthians 12:14). And far from being a collection in which everybody is alike, those members are as different as hands, ears, and eyes.
What the Son of Man said to the Seven Churches of Asia, for all of their faults, He says today: “’He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches’” (Revelation 3:22).
Illustration via Wannapik, CC BY 3.0
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