Phil was recently in France on a day when the nation was celebrating the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. When he asked someone about it, they asked defensively: “How dare you challenge this festival, when people have celebrated it like this throughout church history? Who do you think you are to question two thousand years of church tradition?”

In response, Phil suggested that they Google the Assumption of the Virgin Mary together. When they visited Wikipedia, they discovered that it became official church dogma … drum roll … in November 1950!

One of the greatest challenges for most of us, when it comes to talking about House Churches, is that we lack a deep knowledge of church history. We allow other people to convince us that the way things are today is the way that things have always been. It doesn’t take much research to discover that this isn’t the case at all. The Lord has constantly raised up House Churches throughout the two thousand years of church history.

The Early Church. You have just read a section of The Growing Gathering of Jesus which points out that the churches in the book of Acts met in people’s homes. The New Testament could not be clearer about this. It even gives us the names of many of the homeowners who hosted the Growing Gathering within their houses. The church historian Michael Green insists that “The ‘church in the house’ became a crucial factor in the spread of the Christian faith.” This only started to change when the Emperor Constantine declared that he had converted to Christianity in 312AD. Many historians believe that this conversion was merely nominal; Constantine hoped that it might help him to gain power over a Roman Empire in which house after house was hosting a House Church. Constantine proceeded to assert his new authority by reshaping the church to mimic the power structures of the Roman Empire. He turned pagan temples into church buildings, managed by a sacred civil service structure of priests, bishops and archbishops.  A few decades later, the Emperor Theodosius went even further by banning any religious gathering in a private home. Christians across the Roman Empire were told that if they claimed to have a House Church, without permission from the new religious hierarchy, then their house would be confiscated by the government.

The monastic movement. The church grew rapidly during its first three hundred years in people’s homes. When it relocated its activities into special, sacred buildings, this rapid expansion began to slow down. The church became infected with a spirit of control, which quickly led to a situation in which a well-fed and corrupt class of clergy presided over a passive and worldly class of laity. The first of many House Church revival movements set out to change this. A few decades before the conversion of Constantine, Anthony of Egypt had withdrawn as a hermit into the desert to seek a closer walk with the Lord. Now great groups of people followed his lead by retreating to form monastic communities together. These were essentially House Churches that had found a way of stepping out from under the auspices of an increasingly power-hungry and corrupted church institution. The fact that some of these monasteries went on to become equally power-hungry and corrupted should not blind us to the fact that they were an attempt to return to the model of church that is described in the book of Acts. The church historian Mark Noll claims in his book ‘Turning Points’ that “The rise of monasticism was, after Christ’s commission to his disciples, the most important … event in the history of Christianity. For over a millennium, in the centuries between the reign of Constantine and the Protestant Reformation, almost everything in the church that approached the highest, noblest, and truest ideals of the gospel was done either by those who had chosen the monastic way or by those who had been inspired in their Christian life by the monks.”

Francis of Assisi founded his Franciscan order of monks during the heyday of monasticism. Like Augustine, who brought the Gospel to England; like Patrick, who brought the Gospel to Ireland; like Columba, who brought the Gospel to Scotland; and like Boniface, who brought the Gospel to the Netherlands, Francis of Assisi was inspired to become a disciple-maker by listening to the instructions that Jesus gave to the Twelve and to the Seventy-Two in Matthew 10 and Luke 10. Francis decided to take the Lord’s instruction literally – “Do not take a purse or bag or sandals” – by selling all of his belongings to become an itinerant barefoot preacher, relying on the kindness of the strangers who invited him into their homes, where he taught them how to become true disciples of Jesus. Francis attracted so many followers that the Franciscan movement quickly became a missionary phenomenon. So if anybody tells you that House Churches are a modern idea, then they simply don’t know their church history. They are repeating a myth that the leaders of traditional churches have tried to make us all believe.

The Reformation began when a monk named Martin Luther nailed ninety-five complaints against the leaders of the church in Western Europe to a notice board in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther was a man of extraordinary courage, who brought millions of people across Europe back to a clear understanding of the Gospel. But he was also a man of tragic contradictions. Most people know about his anti-Semitism, but what was equally shameful was the way in which he dealt with those who dared to start church gatherings in their homes. Along with John Calvin and the other leaders of what is known as the “magisterial Reformation”, he violently opposed the Anabaptists for their “radical Reformation”. Martin Luther was not interested in reforming the centralization of church authority in the hands of a clerical few. He merely wanted to relocate that authority into the hands of local kings and bishops, rather than the hands of the Pope and his cardinals. You don’t have to read much about the life of Henry VIII of England to start questioning whether the Reformation changed the top-down, power-hungry, reliant-on-riches nature of the European church at all.

More positively, the Reformation at least paved the way for House Church movements to become mainstream. It enabled the Lutheran pastor Philipp Jakob Spener to pioneer the Pietist Movement across Germany from the 1670s onwards, which encouraged ordinary people to gather in their homes for Bible discussions and for prayer. This greatly influenced John and Charles Wesley, who were both converted during Bible studies that took place in the homes of their friends. The two brothers placed this idea at the heart of their Methodist Movement from the 1730s onwards. They refused to invest their energies in creating formal Sunday services, but instead encouraged people to form “classes” and “societies” in their homes. In this way, Methodism grew astonishingly quickly. It was only after the death of John Wesley that the leaders of Methodism switched their energy into creating and running Sunday services in dedicated sacred buildings. As a result, movement began its slow decline into the small and elderly congregations that characterize much of Methodism today.

The Pentecostal Movement grew out of Methodism. It began in the home of Richard and Ruth Asberry on Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles. Although they soon relocated their activities into an empty warehouse on Azusa Street, the early Pentecostal movement was very informal and consisted of lots of decentralized gatherings in the homes of ordinary people. This is one of the main reasons why Pentecostalism spread so rapidly across Africa, Asia and South America. There were no Pentecostals at all in 1905, but within a hundred years Pentecostalism had become the second-largest branch of Christianity in the world. Only Roman Catholicism can now claim more adherents than Pentecostalism.

The Charismatic Movement was birthed out of the explosive growth of Pentecostalism from the 1960s onwards. Traditional churches had initially looked down on the Pentecostals as poor and ignorant groups of “holy rollers”. But even as Pentecostalism began to shift its center away from simple gatherings in houses and into sacred buildings, many people from traditional churches began to leave their denominations in order to form House Churches. Despite the name, these would soon transition their activities back into sacred buildings. They challenged some specifics of what ought to happen in a church service but they did not challenge the overall idea of everybody sitting in rows and listening to a leader standing on a platform. When Phil met with one of the best known charismatic leaders in his retirement home and shared with him what the Lord was starting to do through disciple-making movements, the leader looked at him rather sadly and responded: “That’s what we set out to do. I wonder what would have happened if we had stayed in people’s homes.”

This very quick overview cannot possibly do justice to two thousand years of history, but we hope that it helps you to respond the next time somebody criticizes House Churches as a dangerous new idea. We hope that it assures you that this simply isn’t true. It was the Emperor Constantine who injected a dangerous new idea into the church when he sought to turn it a Christianized version of the pagan temples and their pagan priesthood.

In the Netflix movie ‘The Two Popes’, somebody observes that “The churches of Europe are beautiful – and empty!” There is a reason for this and we should not be afraid to declare it. Unless we allow Jesus to build his church the way he wants it, he refuses to build it at all. When it comes to the Growing Gathering of Jesus, it really is a case of home, sweet home.