Vol 6, No. 1 - September 2000

SPITTIN' INTO THE HURRICANE!
Do You Have the Guts to be a House Church Pioneer?

Do you have any idea how discouraging it can be to do house church? You figure, well, its in the Bible, and Christians are all the time talking about how they love the Bible and how they love to do what's in it, so there ought to be a lot of people who will jump for joy when you show them BIBLICAL church. Well, let me be the first to tell you, from the perspective of a mere seven and one-half years doing this, that the reality is quite different. I have come to be fond of a metaphor describing my efforts to do house church: I find it just as easy to spit into a hurricane to stop the wind from blowing as I do to oppose the institutional church's perversion of biblical house church. In this issue I am going to reverse the usual order: I'll give you the bad news first, and then I'll finish with some letters to the editor to show you that... YOU ARE NOT ALONE! YOU CAN DO IT! THERE IS HOPE! First the bad news. Here is what you are going to face. I'll discuss five of your most serious obstacles: (1) hostility, (2) indifference, (3) house churchers pooping out on you, (4) division within the ranks, and (5) messed up mindsets. (1) HOSTILITY! Why would your fellow Christians get angry with such a lovable, sweet puppy like you? Of course, after having read a few issues of NRR you can well understand why they might get mad at me. But even if you keep you mouth shut, disappear into a hole in the ground, meet with two other couples in absolute secrecy, somebody is going to find you and very pompously announce to you: "You are in rebellion! You are forsaking the assembling of the saints!" (As if the two other families in your church aren't saints.) It's inevitable. It's going to happen. And if you are a warm, sensitive type like your humble editor, it's not very easy to be called divisive, unloving, a loser. Even if you never ever point out the unscriptural ecclesiastical folly of the organized commercial church, the very fact that you are doing something that is so contrary to "normal" church practice will drive people ballistic. In other words, even if you don't make any direct, verbal criticism of the mercantile church, every day you will be making indirect, nonverbal criticisms by virtue of the church life you lead. (2) INDIFFERENCE! This is even worse than hostility. People will smile, listen to you for about seventeen seconds, and then start talking about the Really Important Stuff that's going on in their Constantinian church. They'll tell you about the five million kids their busing in every Sunday to Sunday School, or the myriad youth who've thrown away their rock CDs and drug needles at their youth ministry. And what they're really trying to do is marginalize you: by implication, what they're saying is that you are so, so insignificant. They inevitably use a logical fallacy to justify their unscriptural church set up, and to put yours down: if it's so successful, our church must be right. Of course, the answer to that is the multiplied examples of "successful" institutional churches out there: none of them agree on what's right for church practice. So, either one of them is right, and all the others are wrong (highly unlikely), or ecclesiology doesn't matter. Here is where you have to say at this point: if ecclesiology doesn't matter, than the words and practice of the apostles don't matter, and the Bible doesn't matter, either. As a matter of fact, the Bible doesn't matter at all to institutional church pragmatists: it never has. All that matters is "success," success being measured in every conceivable way but by this simple criterion: does your church conform to the example and pattern of the New Testament Scripture? "Ah, but," say the pragmatists, "God is using us!" To which I say, God used Balaam's ass to speak through, but I'll be doggoned if I'm going to use an ass as my example. (3) HOUSE CHURCHERS POOPING OUT ON YOU! There is nothing more discouraging to discover that people who with their lips tell you they love what you're doing, and who believe all the things you do about biblical home church, but who then go right back into the organized system. Sometimes this is due to the inevitable discouragement and difficulty folks will face trying to be house church pioneers, and so their backsliding is understandable. But if you're going to do this thing, there is an absolutely inviolable prerequisite: you have to tell yourself and everybody else that YOU AIN'T EVER GOING BACK! And the reason you ain't ever going back is not because you don't like the institutional church, but its because you are trying to follow the will of Christ as revealed to the apostles in the God-breathed, infallible, inerrant Scriptures. This will get you through the times of loneliness and despair you will sometimes feel as you try to find someone, anyone, with a mind open enough to listen to what you have to say. (4) DIVISION WITHIN THE RANKS! The tribalism of the human species never ceases to amaze me. And the tribalism of folks in the house church movement is probably worse than humankind at large. Let me pick a few choice entries from my catalogue of unpleasant experiences. At our annual Southern House Church Conferences, which Les Buford, Steve Atkerson, and I sponsor, we have had the following comments: only get American speakers, no foreigners. One of our speakers was full of the devil. No more charismatics. The non-charismatics aren't spiritual enough, I'm not coming any more. One of the speakers wanted to keep women barefoot and pregnant. Outside of my experiences at the Southern House Church Conferences (which, incidentally, didn't prevent me from having an overall wonderful time), through the internet and doing seminars I have run into house churchers who hold to the following beliefs: King James Only. Fundamentalism. Reconstructionism. Torah compliancy. Preterism. Amillennialism. Women should be completely silent in the meetings. Women will rule men with whips in the millennial kingdom (all right, I admit this one is a little exaggerated, but you get the point.) The world's going to end in the year 2000. Gene Edwards is the Antichrist. Gene Edwards is the fourth person of the Trinity. A web site that doesn't believe in conferences, even though the author believed in house church. A house church web site that believed that all charismatics and predestinarians were going to hell (I am not kidding about this). Just writing this paragraph has made me depressed. At this point, we don't have enough people who have seen the ecclesiological light to put into a phone booth, and we've sliced ourselves up into molecular-sized factions. WE HAVE GOT TO LEARN TO GET ALONG WITH EACH OTHER IN CHRIST!!!! (5) MESSED UP MINDSETS! I once heard about a talk given at a house church conference called "Getting the System Out of You after You Get Out of the System." There's a "house church" near my hometown that, every time I pass it, I am reminded of that seminar title. The house is just like any other modest, one-story ranch house, except for one thing: there is a monumental white cross guy-wired to the center of the roof. Aaarrrggghhh!!! There's a lot of folks who leave the institutional church and start trying to do house church, and they end up trying to create a little system in their house. They line the chairs up, put a lecturn up front, and worry about who's in charge. They come expected to "be fed," but nary a thought of coming to feed others enters their head. Some of the deadest meetings in the world occur in houses. The advantage of going to a dead meeting in an institutional church is that you can tough it out without anybody knowing you're bored silly. But it gets real embarrassing when your bored to death staring eyeball-to-eyeball with your close brothers and sisters. And boredom is not the only problem that occurs when the problems of the institutional church are imported into your homes: power struggles, domination of the strong over the weak, etc., are equally unpleasant. We need to completely erase our minds of all of our church experience. All of it; make it a tablula rasa, void, empty. And then we need to fill ourselves up so full of Jesus Christ that the very thought of all that stuff we left behind is vile and nauseating. A new church order is not going to come from believers who are not radically crucified and resurrected, and whose minds have not been radically transformed into the mind of Christ. AND NOW, THE GOOD NEWS... Now that I've got you so depressed you can hardly muster up the energy to click the "Back" button to get out of here, let me point out to you that, despite all the terrible obstacles you will face, you can do ALL things in Christ Jesus who strengthens you, and "all things" includes blossoming into the expression of the life of his body that he has planned all along. Let's face it, if Jesus Christ can figure out how to save you from being a jerk, he can plant you and your fellow redeemed ex-jerks into a biblical church, and if you and they will just fill yourselves up with the knowledge of Christ (and note I didn't say knowledge "about" Christ, although of course that will come as a byproduct), Jesus will succeed in and through you. And I don't care about the obstacles. Let me try to lift you from your depression with some emails to the editor...

Notes from Cyberspace...

John

YESSS!!!!!!! YES!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks, Dan, for the new editions of NRR. I have been about crazy reading the older ones over and over...

Lloyd

Dear Lloyd:

Actually, I have been quite concerned that there were many others in your situation, slowly losing their minds as they awaited new issues. Therefore, I have resolved to put up at least one issue every two years. You can make it two years, can't you Lloyd? If you can't, just remember: you can always go back and read old issues. I do that myself every now and then so I can see what kind of irresponsible stuff I have put out there that causes such bipolar reactions. Hang in there...

Dan

Comments...

You may send your opinions, flames, weighty observations, etc., to

Dan L. Trotter

work e-mail: dtrotter@pascal.coker.edu
home e-mail: dantrotter@yahoo.com

Since 09/30/00 this number of people have ignored the Surgeon General's warning and have read this thing, resulting in gosh knows how much mental and emotional trauma: