The Problem With Success

It’s so encouraging to hear stories of House Churches growing and expanding. In Jason Shepperd’s book, A Church of House Churches, he describes an initial group of forty people meeting in 2 House Churches expanding over time to thousands in 75 House Churches. They also started Church Project, a more conventional church that meets twice on Sunday and has about 4,000 people gathering. It seems there are other Church Project Network churches. Together there are 8-10,000 who consider Church Project their church.

Many of us that have established House Churches, have seen imperfections in the conventional church model and would never consider going back. It might seem odd for a House Church network to grow and become successful and start a conventional church. Jason Shepperd describes it like this:

All of this happened with no centralized office, no phone number. No receptionist. No office foyer. No mailers. No marketing.

The rest of his book, which is only around 100 pages, seems like a defense of his decision to incorporate a conventional church and a network of House Churches. He writes the following:

But, God has also seemed to value the large gathering of His people. There is a value to corporate worship. In the Old Testament, people gathered regularly for feasts and festivals and the worship was pretty phenomenal, planned out and prepared and had a ton of people present. In the New Testament, where House Church was birthed, large corporate gatherings still happened. The apostles taught people by the thousands. They were kicked out of the Temple courts and rented Solomon’s Colonnade, a lecture hall contiguous to the Temple, for weekly gatherings for thousands of people.

I’m not sure what smaller communities will look like in Heaven. I’m not sure what diversity will look like in Heaven with age, gender, skin color, etc. But, the glimpses that God has given into corporate worship of His people in Heaven, joining with the angels, will be phenomenal.

God seems to love the corporate gathering of His people in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and in Heaven.

One of my mentors, Teryl Hebert, was a conventional pastor that dissolved his church to pursue a more relational model. There are a number of House Churches he is overseeing. Teryl holds corporate gatherings about 3-4 times a year so new people can meet others, they can worship together and they can discuss material and spiritual concerns as a community. From my experience, this seems to be the trend for House Church Networks…not developing a traditional weekly corporate gathering but setting up meetings whenever the need arises.

The author claims there is scripture to justify the Church Project but never gives any except the references to the Temple court and the Colonnade. Maybe they rented Solomon’s Colonnade for a time, but Christ followers were kicked out of there also. Beyond that, there seems to be no Biblical references in the New Testament for the church meeting in large venues with thousands of people.

It would be interesting to hear comments from those that have experienced Church Project. From the book it appears that this movement is highly successful, vibrant, growing and financially helping lots of people.