How to Have a Home Church (Part 1) – What a Real Home Church Needs

I am sitting in the room with a group of Christians. It’s a living room. I’m sitting in front of the fireplace. And this is a small group of Christians who want to have a church. Now, that’s not a church like a pew and a steeple. This is a church like a church. I’ll be talking to them, actually, out of 41 years of working with churches that meet in homes. And they’re more than just churches that meet in homes. They’re quite unique. But tonight I am going to draw upon 53 years of experience and talk to you about a lot of things. I’m going to pick up where I left off.

I want you to look at the kind of house church or home church you don’t want. In fact, you don’t want to be like all of them. If there’s ever been an exception to this, I’ve never met it. It’s a group of Christians who come together. They’re in a living room. I don’t know who the fellow is that leads them. I’ve met about seven or eight different kinds of people who start one. Sometimes it’s an amateur. Sometimes it’s a preacher who wants to start a church that meets in homes.

There are some things that they have in common. There are probably somewhere between 7 and 30 people. The man who’s speaking has been reading his New Testament. He probably really feels like he knows a lot about the Bible, which is the biggest problem he’s got at all. The people come in, and they bring an old hymnal, or maybe they don’t bring in a hymnal. They bring a Bible, that’s for sure. The singing is worse than I can describe it. It’s beyond appalling. It’s beyond miserable. Everybody’s stiff, just stiff, uncomfortable. But he believes in something, and he believes in this: he believes that he will teach them the Bible. They will respond greatly. The only problem with that supposition is that it started 200 years ago and hasn’t worked yet.

The reason is as simple as it can be. If somebody is wondering whether I believe in the inspiration of Scripture, the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. I’m reminded of a story a friend told me, and I think he made this thing up himself. He said he was walking along the road when he met three people sitting beside the road, crying terribly. One of them was the Bible. The second one was Mary. The third was the Holy Spirit. So, he came in and asked them why they were crying. And this is the answer they gave. “All three of us were intended to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, and because of the ways of men, each and every one is being glorified themselves.” Yes, and I think that’s really all I need to say.

Let me explain to you where we get this idea. It’s the Bible. And if we preach the Bible and teach the Bible, everything will happen, and it’ll all be wonderful. Modernism rose at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of America’s great seminaries and colleges at the time were struck by something called modernism. They came out with some of the oddest, craziest ideas. And they had no archaeological reason for this. They said, well, let’s see, Galatians was written in the year 250 A.D., and Matthew was probably written around 200, and Revelation was probably written around 300 or 150, and at best 90, and so on. They were all forgeries, and they don’t know this, that, and the other. And, you know, it doesn’t matter what archaeology turns over. They’re going to keep on teaching that until the day they die. Pepperdine Seminary, hello. You’re going to be doing that until the Lord comes, with everything in this world and a way of proof beyond proof beyond proof. And those students will be going out of there not believing in the Scripture.

So, there was a reaction to this, and the reaction was it’s the Word, it’s the Word, it’s the Word, it’s the Word, and Jesus slipped off the side of the stage. And you can hear men preach days and weeks and months and years, with the Lord Himself sort of like salt and pepper on your table when you’re eating; the Lord gets mentioned every once in a while. Maybe a parable is told or some moral story or something like that, but it’s the Scripture.

I’m going to tell you all something. I know a little Hebrew. I know a bit more Greek. I know a bit of Latin. I’m one of the most highly educated theologians the world has ever known. I have outlived just about everybody, and I have been in the Scripture…I can’t say every day of my life because I think sometimes I skip Sunday. And without the centrality of Christ out of those Scriptures, you don’t get anything. That’s number one.

Number two, the church today is spiritually dead. The minister’s dead spiritually. He is. His people are spiritually dead. They don’t know an experiential faith. I can almost hear one of them screaming at the top of his lungs, “We don’t trust our feelings; we depend only on the Word of God.” That’s not what you’re really saying. You’re saying that there are three things: those who are the doers, the feelers, and the thinkers. And you’re a thinker. You look down on the feelers and the doers. You have your own little world here, and you’re teaching the book…actually, it wouldn’t matter what you were teaching. You would be frontal lobe. You would be analytical. You’d put things together and use big words.

Now, there is something besides doing, feeling, and thinking. It has to do with the Spirit, and nobody has any idea what that even remotely means. Now, I honor my seminary professors. I think I’ve dedicated two or three books to them by now. I sat under one of the greatest Greek teachers in the world, and he also was my New Testament teacher. He was a godly man. But my seminary gave me absolutely not a single day of how to know and touch the Lord Jesus Christ. And you move that over into a home Bible—I’m sorry, not a home Bible class, but a home church—and you’ve got this man who’s been told all his life it’s the Word, it’s the Word, it’s the Word, because it grew out of this reaction to modernism, but Jesus got left out experientially and in centrality.

Alright, now that’s what we have in our home meetings. That’s about the same thing you have on a Sunday morning, except you sing better on a Sunday morning because you have a choir leader. Then you bring that into the home, and honest to goodness, it’s not like I’ve only met one or two. You’re looking at somebody who probably has known as many ministers as anyone living today, and I’m going to back that up and prove it. I know how we think, whether we’re at a dinner table talking together, or at lunch at a cafeteria in the seminary, or when we’re alone, or on the telephone. It doesn’t really matter where we are. We all look pretty much the same.

I just visited one of the oldest, revered seminaries in America a few days ago. I went into the seminary bookstore, and I never saw so many books with the word theology on them. We will refight the Reformation from then until now, and all the issues, and all the teachings, and so on. But if that seminary actually turned out men of Christ, that seminary would be on the lips of everyone.