House church
[3] In the early church, Christian fellowship, prayer, and service took place mainly in private homes, as described in the book of Acts of the Apostles.
[16] In the People's Republic of China (PRC), house churches or family churches (Chinese: 家庭教会; pinyin: jiātíng jiàohuì) are Protestant assemblies that operate independently from the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and China Christian Council (CCC), and came into existence due to the change in religious policy after the end of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s.
[20] Due to the changes in religious policy after the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1980, the TSPM was reinstated and the China Christian Council was formed.
[21] Recent developments in the house church movement in North America and the United Kingdom are often seen as a return to a New Testament church restorationist paradigm, a restoration of God's eternal purpose, and the natural expression of Christ on Earth, urging Christians to reject hierarchy and rank, and return to practices described and encouraged in Scripture.
[22] Some authors who are often associated with "house church" by others (examples are Jon Zens, Watchman Nee, T. Austin-Sparks, Milt Rodriguez, Wolfgang Simson, Frank Viola and others) consider the term "house church" to be a misnomer, asserting that the main issue for Christians who gather together is not the location of the meeting, but whether or not Jesus Christ is the functional head of the gathering and face-to-face community is occurring.
The church represented in the New Testament is based on this principle, and both traditional & contemporary versions of "Westernized" Christianity has reversed this order.
Many individuals and assemblies have adopted new approaches to worship and governance, while others recognize a relationship to the Anabaptists, the Free Christians, the Quakers, the Amish, the Hutterites, the Mennonites, the Moravians, the Methodists, the much earlier conventicles movement, the Waldenses or the Priscillianists.
[28] To facilitate relationship, discipleship (spiritual formation), multiplication, mobility, and member ownership, a simple church is usually a small group of no more than 20-25 persons.
[32] In the early twenty-first century a number of established Christian denominations and mission organizations have officially supported efforts to develop house church networks.
Adherents Paul Kaak (who began ministry in one of the largest and most systematized mega-churches in America) and Neil Cole originally articulated these values using the letters DNA.
According to him: These values have since been promoted by House2House Ministries[39] and DAWN North America, and have been adopted by various groups such as New York's MetroSoul[40] Adherents of George Barna and Frank Viola's book Pagan Christianity point out a number of reforms that organic churches often advocate.
In the early twenty-first century, books began to appear by those studying the movement from a more objective view, including George Barna's Revolution.
For example, J. Lee Grady (Charisma Online Editor) says such a movement wants to "reinvent the church without its biblical structure and New Testament order – and without the necessary people who are anointed and appointed by God to lead it.
To follow this defective thesis to its logical conclusion would require us to fire all pastors, close all seminaries and Bible colleges, padlock our sanctuaries and send everybody home..."[47] Grady and other critics worry that the simple church movement could encourage people to leave more traditional forms of church, which could lead to further collapse or decline of Christendom.
