Why Should We Plant House Churches

The churches around us are failing in many ways:

• Failure in really knowing one another

• Failure to meet each other's real needs

• Failure at plugging people into the church

• Failure of showing the significance of being in the church

In pointing out the faults of the church, I am not so presumptuous to assume that we will not have faults of our own. I am just examining what is going on in the hopes of somehow being shown a better way. Socrates wrote, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I think this applies even to the church. The unexamined church is not worth being. God wants us to strive for perfection and the only way to do that is to be honest about the situation we are in.

Somewhere along the road to being the Church God intended us to be, most people in the Church seem to have stopped trying to really know one another. We became content at saying "Hi" on Sunday mornings at the designated time and placed our spiritual lives a safe distance from everyone else. We have created an environment of individualism that ignores and, at times, condemns close community. This is an area where the values of American culture have infiltrated the church and almost wounded it fatally. The Bible does not address this issue directly because it would seem totally absurd to the early church to have a community of believers who did not know each other.

Another problem that the church faces today is that it has almost completely stopped meeting each other's needs. James wrote, "If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,' and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?" Imagine if the church was a place where people had their needs met and what the world's impression of us would be as a result of that. However, they see us acting just as they do. Meeting their own needs and trying to avoid making eye contact with those in need.

Those in the world who make their way into a church find themselves not being given the opportunity to use their gifts, both spiritual and natural, for the glory of God. Those of us already in the church need to utilize the gifts of those who are new to our group. We need to reevaluate who we are as a body every time a new person joins us because they have something new to offer. We are failing both God and them if we do not allow them to use their gifts to glorify him. Peter wrote, "Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received." No one's talents should go undiscovered and underutilized in the church.

We feel that house churches are a solution to these problems. It is impossible for people to hide in a house church. Individuals cannot just go to a house church and feel like they have done their weekly duty to God. All members of a house church will get to know each other in a deep and meaningful way, and members gifts are needed. Through house church people will join together and become the family of God, a fully functional family in contrast to the dysfunctional ones that surround us.