How to Have a Home Church (Part 2) That Grows – Christ-Centered Church Life

What I want to talk to you about is growth, growth in numbers. If you don’t grow, someday you get a little inverted. So I’m going to talk to you about what we will be doing in one church, and I would admonish the rest of you to do the same in all the churches. In fact, this isn’t even up for debate. If you want to innovate, fine, but we’re going to do this. We’re even going to do this in Stade, England, and we’re going to do it in New Amsterdam, and we’re going to do it everywhere else.

I think the last time I talked to the brothers and sisters in this room, I talked to them about what kind of church you want to have, what kind of a church do you wish to be. So I’m opening this particular session with more than that, and that is for anyone who writes to us and says, ” We would sure like to have a house church. Would you like to help us?” This is what I want to say to you on a practical basis, but as an introduction, I am going to speak again to the people in this room about the follies of the house church movement.

It started about 15 years ago, and today it is dead and no longer exists. I’m sure two or three people have survived in it, and the only reason is that you’ve got some particular leader who loves to teach the Bible or the New Testament. I’ll speak frankly: you don’t know the New Testament. You just know some verses that somebody told you. You think you know the New Testament. None of us do. I’m a seminary graduate and much, much more. I know that what has been taught as the Bible is, in fact, a study in verses. I will tell you again: you will run out of things to say, and you’ll probably begin blaming God’s people for not doing what they should do because you were taught that if you teach God’s people the Word of God, it will transform their lives. The reason that will not work is point number two: the evangelical Christian faith is void of spiritual depth.

A church gets somebody to preach, somebody sits in the congregation, and somebody goes home. A guest comes in and speaks, everybody gets revived and says, “wow,” and then they all go home. I don’t know of a preacher in America, or in the English-speaking world, who could step down from his pulpit and begin talking to God’s people about how they could walk with the Lord Jesus Christ. I will tell you exactly what he will teach. He will teach them to pray, and teaching you to pray is not a spiritual walk with Christ. Furthermore, most of what I ever heard about prayer was very discouraging and very dry.

So I say to every group of Christians in the world who are trying to have an informal type of church, you cannot succeed. So I ask this question: what kind of church do you want? Do you want to be a group of Christians who come together, sing a few pitiful songs out of some hymnal that probably had songs that died a hundred years ago, and some murmuring little pathetic prayers, and then a little teaching from someone. He will still be teaching 10, 15, 20 years from now, and everybody will sit there nodding and thinking, uh-huh, and you have not changed the world? The house church movement does not reach out. You have to start somewhere else. Almost every day, I think one simple statement: we have to throw everything out and start at ground zero. You have to start all over again. Throw out everything that you consider to be what ought to be. The first need is not a teaching of the Bible. It is a revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ. The second thing needed is for those people gathered there to encounter Christ. That is the second thing that’s needed. Your functioning will die if you do not have a living relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. It will become pathetic. What’s that word when they put you in right before you die in the hospital? What’s that word? Intensive care. You will live in intensive care with a pitiful little Bible teaching that is centered on the Bible, that is not centered on Christ, and your people will not know how to function. You don’t know how to tell them to function or how they can function because you never function other than in your imagination, and you are not equipped to do this.  Now this is where we are right this minute.

I’ll tell you something real and true, and even I hate to admit it, and that is God’s people will not hang around with you very long if you’re dead. They will come to your meeting, and they’ll never return if you’re dead. So you better not be dead. You’d better be alive. Now the only way a small group of Christians can be alive is for everybody to come in here to fight a living, breathing battle. I mean a battle. For a meeting of God’s people is a demonstration and a display of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that cannot be done without a battle.

Christ is not displayed easily or for very long without a battle. After 1800 years, God’s people have almost no idea how to come into a meeting and take that meeting over, and that’s really hard to do when you’re 8 or 10 or 15 people. You have to do it anyway. There should be, in your heart, the desire to see 20 people, 30 people, 40 people, 50 people. After that, then you enter into a whole new stage. I can guarantee you, when you get up about that high, you’re going to be screaming for help from somebody who’s been further down this road than you have in a world that you know nothing of.

Now, where do we begin? Well, if you are ten people, there are a lot of things you need to do ahead of time that would take most of this meeting to address, even in the simplest terms. All I can do right now in this introductory meeting is give you an introduction. One of them is that you’re going to have to learn how to sing. You’re going to have to learn to sing things that have never been heard by people before. And you’ll have to do it with vigor. You’ll have to do it loud. You’re going to have to do it well. You’re going to have to do it in a coordinated way. And quite frankly, you’re going to have to do it practiced. Won’t we practice? God won’t like that. Look, I’m worried. Practice is not just what you’re supposed to do. You practice whether you want to or not. And practicing catches fire. You do it right two or three or four times, and soon you realize that what you’re doing is what your heart wants to do. You’re breaking the bounds, the chains of the quiet functioning, or even the dead functioning, or the non-functioning. So there’s a lot that has to be taken care of right here in the gathering, a great deal of work and a great deal of preparation. I’ll not touch on that any further except to say that if you’re 10, you’re 15, you’re 20, you’re 30, you’ve got much to do. You will live or die upon whether or not you are interested enough to learn the answer to that question: how, together, as 10 or 15 or 20 people, in life.

Now I’m talking here in a living room with a group of people so small I’m afraid to count how few there are. We live in an electronic world, so take advantage of it. You watch people’s habits. We no longer have a marketplace as in the first century, a marketplace where people gathered and lolled around all day and picked up the latest news and listened to anybody of any interest who came into their forum or their square and listened to them. What an advantage those who burned for Christ had. You can do that if you want to downtown in a park, but mostly you will get stares. They’ve got two television sets, both in color, with the latest gadgets that go with them, and they have an entire city given over to their entertainment. And you are a nitwit. No, you’re just a halfwit.

How do people do? How are they reached today? I hate to admit it, but I can only tell you what I watch: people turn on their computers to see what they can find. A single man wants to get married. He types something into a computer to find out where young, unmarried couples meet. The surfers find the surfers. The polo players, the hockey players, the race car drivers, the boat people, the hiking people, and the exercise people all look wherever.

But Christians also get curious and turn on their computer to find Christians. So for every one of you except Athens, you’re going to have to create the absolutely most wonderful, glorious website. Now you’re going to have to do this, and you better do it better than anybody else has. You’d better throw away your thoughts of how it’s going to be or what it’s going to do. That’s one thing you’re going to have to do.