(In a) Home Alone

Many of the books I have been reading recently have as their theme the idea of Biblical church practice, i.e. making church look like church looked in the New Testament contrasted with the traditional church structures we see in the vast majority of “churches" in America and through most of Western European history. I am all for that idea! I also have to wonder if that can be taken to the extreme where the only way the church should meet is in a house because that is where the New Testament church met. It runs into the “form versus function” issue. It is just as easy to read too much into the recorded church practices in the New Testament as it is to chuck them entirely in favor of “doing church” the institutional way.

There are some who will argue that the “house church” is obsolete because the earliest church just didn’t have the means or the numbers to build actual “churches”. Once they did, they started building “churches” with reckless abandon and hiring staff by the bucket loads! I have even heard it said by someone I respect a great deal that house churches are fine, so long as the goal is for them to “grow up” and become “real” churches (i.e. with staff and a building).

Then there are some who are pretty dogmatic that houses are the only way to go. The early church met in houses and by golly that is where we should meet too! It strikes me that some of that is focused a bit too much on the where the church met instead of why meeting in a house is healthy.

It is absolutely true that the church met in homes in the earliest days. It is also equally true that the church in the early days was in its infancy, experiencing massive growth at the same time it was experiencing incredible persecution. If First Methodist Church of Snodgrass, Iowa wants to build a new building, all they need are some building permits. In the first century, if you went and built a building in a large city worshipping some Jewish guy who claimed to be God and was raised from the dead, you better build it from asbestos. The church absolutely met in homes because they were frankly unable to meet anywhere else. Our modern gleaming edifices were unthinkable to the early church, if for no other reason than they didn’t have the corresponding parking lot full of new SUVs and mini-vans bringing upper middle class members to foot the bill for a multi-million dollar “church”.

So they argument is not about where the early church met. They obviously for the most part met in homes. So here is the real question, is the Biblical description of the church meeting in homes a prescription to meet in homes? In other words, certainly Christians can meet in a house, but must they meet in a house?

This is a tough one. It is easy to look at the institutional church and cry foul. All the money that is spent on bigger and better buildings, audio-visual equipment, lawn care, staff salaries and benefits, “educational” materials, denominational bureaucrats, etc. make them an easy target. Wagging a finger disapprovingly at them is picking the low hanging fruit. A lot of those charges stick and make perfect sense. The extravagant way that Christians pour money into buildings and salaries is sinful. But you can take that argument to an extreme. Making a case that homes are the only proper place to meet is a lot tougher case to make.

So that raises another question and another post on a topic I have been wrestling with for a while: how do we differentiate between what is prescriptive and what is descriptive? I am going to pose that question for a number of different topics/passages, give my thoughts and see what other people think.