House churches biblical research
One of our elders, Dave Lewis, passed on to me an excellent study: House Church and Mission: The importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity by Roger Gehring. Ghering’s work challenges some American assumptions about how we think of church in larger gatherings. His in-depth biblical research can open our minds to fresh ways of doing church so that we can reach more people for Jesus Christ and multiply more rapidly. I am wondering about how megachurches such as ours could give brith to multiple smaller “house” churches.
This is an important and amazing work. The book published by Hendrickson in 2004 is a translation from a book published in Germany in 2000 based on a dissertation at the University of Tubingen. Gehring shows high level academic erudition in biblical and historical scholarship. I know of no peer to this work. He thoroughly analyses the evidence with scholarly objectivity and an eye to implications for church ministry today. I agree with his conclusions that the NT focused much more on individual local churches than on some notion of the church universal. Even most of those statements indicate the aggregate of the local churches rather than some other entity. He shows that there were more than likely house churches in a city who then gathered as the church of that city in larger gatherings. The conclusion is balanced and helpful in applying his research to today’s situation. It would be interesting to know how he responds to Neil Cole’s Organic Church.
Daron Earlewine – Young Adults Pastor at East 91st Street Christian Church (mega church) in Indianapolis (darone@east91st.org) beginning this summer is trying to do something with The Rising, a Thursday evening young adult service where they will meet once a month in the larger group and the other weeks they will meet in house church type groups.