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

Do you have any idea how critical preachers are, how snooty they are about everything but their own ministry, how fault-finding they are about everything but their church? Can you imagine a ministerial alliance in a city agreeing to vote, a unanimous vote, to invite a perfect stranger to hold a citywide campaign in their city? I want you to know, and you don’t know this, that’s impossible and doesn’t happen.

Because of that book and the book that I wrote right after it, I was invited to some of the largest cities in America to hold citywide campaigns. I’ll tell you what we did. I’ll take Houston as an example. About 200 churches invited me to that city. We took the city and divided it up into four pieces. We took the four largest churches in the city in four different places, and for one week, I taught the people how to lead people to Christ. I taught them how to visit, go into homes, and talk to people face to face. That was one-fourth of the city, and they all went out and did door-to-door evangelism that led people to Christ. Then the second week, the third week, and the fourth week. I talked with the pastors about how to set up visitation and how soul-winning visitation works. It’s one thing to knock on the door and invite somebody to your church. It’s another thing to invite yourself in to lead people to the Lord.

I was standing with the man who was president of the Southern Baptist Convention—by the way, I have a picture of being with him, a gentleman named Dr. Autry, who was head of the Department of Evangelism for the entire denomination. We sat there discussing how this could be put into every church in the denomination I’m part of.

The book sold in the thousands. I walked door to door in cities all over this country and took pastors with me. We also came back and reported; you never saw Christians so excited in their life. They were almost speaking in tongues. “I led somebody!” And pastors the same way. I want to tell you something again. It takes an awful lot of confidence in a human being for a group of ministers to do that. And just for the record, in the six or seven or eight years that I did this, I don’t know of a single—yeah, I can remember one person who told me that someone else said something critical about me. Now, I never heard a single critical word about this man. I could still be doing that same work today. But now I’m talking to you, a little group of Christians here. And I’m just going to tell you a few things.

I’ve already promised you I’ll work with you and leave you, that you will hear Christ. You will be shown how to experience Christ. You will share Christ. Now that’s virtually unheard of. When’s the last time you’ve ever been to a Christian meeting when anybody and everybody in the entire building that was called church was free to stand up and talk and talk about the Lord? I’ve never been in that place. I tried to do it one time, and just before the meeting started, it was one of those mega churches. They booked everybody into different groups of 20 so they could feel free to share in 20, maybe 30, 40, 50. At the last moment, the pastor panicked, got his staff together, and put one in every group to make sure a leader was present, and it died right there on the spot.

Now, I’m going to tell you what else you’re in for. Stay with me and don’t get too shocked. We’re going to take a religious census of this entire area. We’ll keep on going out further and further. I needed to find a book on how to take a religious census. I wasn’t sure that one existed, and I finally found one. To my utter amazement, it was by…Gene Edwards. But we’re not going to do it that way. We’re going to do it differently. We’re going to leave a form if they’re willing to share some background, but most of all, would you be interested in meeting in homes with a bunch of Christians in a nondescript way? Christians who are not emphasizing anything. We’ll do that again and again and again until everybody in this community knows we’re here. We’ll take it to the end of the street and go to all these housing developments that the Lord just gave us personally to draw from. Do not say yes to me unless you’re willing to do this, because this is what we will do. I will go door to door. Will I be alone? I have one volunteer. He and I will go door to door. Don’t even think about it. Don’t even consider it. It is our business to win people to the Lord Jesus Christ.

I’m not through with my story. I’m going to tell a bit more. One of the books I wrote found its way into the hands of a gentleman named Bert Pierce, head of evangelism for the Assemblies of God. When I was in the seminary, the Pentecostals, the Assemblies of God, had no seminary. So they put their best-trained men in my seminary, and on the day I graduated, a whole flock of Assemblies of God ministers received their doctor’s degree in theology. They went back to Springfield to start an Assemblies of God seminary, accredited in all of those things. Shortly after that, I was doing what I did, and the Assemblies of God Department of Evangelism invited me to Assemblies of God headquarters. Then I began getting invitations more than you can shake a stick at, teaching the Assemblies of God how to run a visitation program and lead people to Christ.

So if you’re not Pentecostal, you’re looking at the guy who’s partly responsible for their explosive growth. I have to tell this in all humility whatsoever. I got off the plane. I had just left the East Coast. I got to the West Coast; I hadn’t slept in days, and we had plane trouble. I went to the cab driver, gave him a big bunch of money, and said, I’ll take any ticket you get. Get me to such and such hotel, and do it immediately. I ran up to the second floor, and there were all the leaders of the entire Assemblies of God and seasoned people, including people you wouldn’t even believe that were in there. There was a gentleman there by the name of C. M. Ward, who spoke on a national radio program. That was before television, folks. Not the kind of television we have now. It was still black and white back then.

Bert Pierce said, ” He’s not here.” I walked in the door to hear, “not here,” and I spoke to those people. They’re so genuine and so beautiful. They accepted me into their bosom immediately. Soon after, I was introduced as Gene Edwards, a spirit-filled, speaking-in-tongues Baptist minister. Man, I miss that part.

So, anybody who’s listening to this, I have two or three things to say. Teaching the Scripture is not going to do one bit of good. It’ll drive you and God’s people insane. Second, a large part of what we do, and what people doing home churches do, turns out to be legalism. I don’t know of any home church started in the last 40 years that is still meeting, except those who have settled down to a little 15 or 20 or 25 people with a man who considers himself some sort of Bible scholar, and he’s now into his 10th or 15th or 20th year teaching them the Bible.

Forget it. They are people stuffed with information, and this is not a church. The church is aggressive. She’s unrelenting. She’s doing everything they did in the first century. And you, sir, need to learn how to know the Lord, and probably somebody to teach you how to win people to the Lord. And, sir, you should start proclaiming Christ, not the Bible. And you, sir, should go ahead and have a fit, but you’re wrong if you think that I’m otherwise in this. I just saw someone having a fit. This is going to be the Bible, Bible. “I have put my word above my name.” It’s a Scripture you will often hear quoted. That’s an Old Testament passage. What “word”? The Hebrew scrolls? Not likely. In the days of Jesus Christ, it has been estimated that there were probably no more than 25 to 50 complete Old Testaments in all of the world. They were read on Saturdays, taken out of a locked box, and put back again until the next Sabbath. That just might be a reference to God Himself or His incarnate Son.

Now, there’s something else the church should do. She should take care of her members. Then I want to talk to all of you about this, because this creates a major problem. The world is full of broken people and broken lives, and needy people. When you all get together and get to know one another, you find out what Pogo found out. We have met the messed-up people, and they are us. Here comes that problem, that line. Do we interfere in one another’s lives? Maybe not. Do we reach out to help one another who are really, really in bad shape? And they need help.