"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."
"Don't look for the elephant in the room. Look instead at the colonies of mice that have burrowed inside the furniture and are now taking over the house."
FULL ARTICLE
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DOWNLOADABLE PDF DOC FROM WOLFGANG SIMSON
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God is up to something with His Bride.
5 comments:
I will ask you the same question I asked Tall Skinny Kiwi who also posted this and I am not reflecting on your own house church, which I imagine is excellent. However....
What is to prevent the young and the fit from abandoning the poor and old and unattractive to form house churches among their own selves, but leaving the widows and orphans back in the churches that now no longer have resources to sustain them? I keep noticing that the young and fit just want to be with each other and ignore the rest of the world. So what stops this from happening? I don't understand.
What stops this now? I mean, I see plenty of trendy, hip, young people starting traditional churches all over the landscape.
Our house church is mostly married couples with children. We're twenty, thirty and forty-somethings (one couple is in their 60's), and we have toddlers, teens and a full spectrum of believers.
If anything, the house church is about EVERY MEMBER of the Body being One and sharing together. It's not about breaking off the youth over here or the kids in that room or the adults over there. It's the BODY as a whole.
Hope that clarifies at least where I am coming from...and where most house churches I have personally obvserved are coming from.
That is definitely an interesting question from huetenan, because in my own experience, it has certainly not been the "poor, old or unattractive" who are the 'target market' of the vast majority of conventional churches...
Those types of "marginalized" people are not who the traditional churches try to pull in, but rather it is the "young and fit" people who are most desired, because they are the ones who are able to make the biggest financial contributions, in order to keep the whole machine running! But is all that revenue really being used to help out the "orphans and widows", or is it going to staff salaries and building funds?
The whole idea that needy people are being "abandoned" by a shift towards house-churches is a red herring. (in fact, it is just the opposite that is more true) What is being abandoned is the idea that you have to spends of thousands of dollars just to gather and have fellowship with other followers of Jesus. Slowly but surely, the Body of Christ is wrestling itself out of this corporate grip which has been holding it for far too long...
I suppose I should also mention that we would never have even started our house church fellowship if we didn't have a desire to give 100% of our offering to the poor in our community. We welcome any and all who desire to join the family of God and the fellowship of Christ Jesus.
See the comments on TSK re the NZ hc numbers - the number of house churches in NZ is more like 350-500, not 6000. The figures for NZ are way out.
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