You Don’t Need an Apostle to Start A House Church
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who are considering joining or starting house churches. One of the odd realities of the house church movement in the United States is the belief that apostles (sometimes also referred to as “workers”) are needed to start legitimate house churches. I hear this a lot, but I believe it’s harmful.
So I will fairly often get a question that goes something like this: “I live in ___________ City. I don’t have a group believers who want to start a house church and no apostle will come help me. What should I do?”
I understand why people would look at the Scriptures and think that apostles are the only ones who start churches. But it’s a fairly odd belief for a movement that has based much of its identity around the idea that Jesus shows up wherever “two or three are gathered.” If Jesus meant this, and I believe He did, then church begins when two or three legitimate believers gather in his name, not when an apostle shows up to pronounce them a church.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think apostles are incredibly important, essential really, to the building up of the body of Christ. I also think that apostles do plant churches and probably plant more churches than people with other giftings in the body. It’s part of their nature. But to say that an organic church must be started by an apostolic worker is a great way to get less house churches started.
An argument could be made here that more house churches could be started without apostles, but they would be of lesser quality, less focused on the glory of God and more prone to be outside of what the Lord intended. Except the Scripture doesn’t paint that picture. Here a few places where it seems that Scripture shows us hints of non-apostolicly founded churches:
- Acts 2:42-47- This is the Jerusalem church that was birthed after the Holy Spirit fell on the 120 in the upper room. Now I won’t argue that the apostles didn’t help form the house churches described in this passage, obviously they were a vital part of the community. But they were 12 men out of 3000 people. There was no way the apostles could have spent a significant amount of quality time with each house church there, especially not in the way many understand the modern apostle/worker starting a house church.
- Acts 11:19-21- Here is a church or a number of churches (“a large number of people”) that was formed by “those who were scattered because of the persecution.” We know that this doesn’t include the apostles, because Acts 8:3 tells us the only people who stayed in Jerusalem were the apostles. Now, apostles were eventually involved. I think apostolic input into any church is important. But this church started when believers scattered by the persecution started preaching the gospel and people came to the Lord.
- Colossians 1:7- The church in Colossae was started not by Paul, but by Epaphras. Paul had never been to Colossae but wrote his letter to them to encourage them in their walk. I would actually argue Epaphras was an apostolic worker, but if you want to get super technical about it, Paul never calls him that.
- Revelation 2 & 3- Again, we don’t know a lot about most of the churches mentioned in Revelation 2 and 3 other than the church in Ephesus. What we do know is that Paul started the church in Ephesus, but other unnamed believers started the churches in Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philladelphia, and Laodecia. These were most likely churches that were established as the Gospel went out from Ephesus into all of the region. These were all affirmed as churches by Jesus himself, even though Paul only planted the church in Ephesus.
I say all of this to make the following point: If you can’t find an apostolic worker to help you start a house church, you are not abandoned by God. Quite the contrary, you could be a vessel the Lord uses to lead unbelievers to Christ and see a church formed. This is why I want you to plant a house church.
And given what we see in many of these Scriptures, I think it’s very appropriate for apostles to help with the ongoing maturing and equipping of house churches they didn’t start. Part of their role as a bond-servant of Christ is to serve churches in just such a manner. Paul tells us explicitly in Ephesians 4 that God “gave some as apostles…for…the building up of the body of Christ.” So to say we don’t need apostles would be silly.
But to despair, to give up hope, to stop believing God for the formation of churches without an apostle ready and willing to help is just not what I see in the New Testament. I see a whole people learning to follow Christ and willing to risk even their physical lives to share the gospel with those who have never heard it. And when those souls come to Christ, there should be no wringing of hands because no apostle is present. There is simply a confidence that the God who has led them this far would continue to empower and sustain them.
And in this way, we don’t just gain apostles, but we embody the kind of apostolic Christianity I believe God wants to restore in the Earth. May it be so, even for those who are reading this today.
Photo Credit: &Koeln6b1StAposteln by Olaf Peuss
Awakening, Harvest, and Broken Nets (Part 3: Conclusion)
By and large, the church that is contending for revival and awakening isn’t ready for it. Yesterday, I gave at least one contemporary example of the problem. The question is, what do we do?
First, we don’t stop contending for revival and awakening among the lost. Holy messes that God sends are better than any dead answer to the problem of not being ready. Keep contending. We need more people coming to Christ! We need more of the church awake to what God is doing in the Earth!
But beyond that, we have to ask ourselves how do we prepare? I’d like to put forth at least a few suggestions for your consideration:
- We fix out eyes on Jesus and continue to cultivate our love for Him. This seems so logical, so basic that you would think it would go without saying. But in times of pressure like what revival and awakening cause, it’s easy to let our eyes get off of the Lord and on to the pressure. The only answer for this human condition is to continue to give time and attention to our relationship with Jesus. Become so rooted and grounded in Him that nothing can tear you away.
- We devote ourselves to practices that multiply, not just add. Paul tells Timothy “The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also,” (2 Timothy 2:2). We have to constantly be training people and training those people to train people. Much of the church is not equipping the saints for ministry and those who are are doing it by addition. They equip one or several men to teach or care for the body. Multiplying practices are principles that allow us to not only to train a few saints, but train those saints in concepts that are easily transferable to other believers who can transfer them on even further. Neil Cole’s LTG is a great example of a transferable, multiplying discipleship plan.
- We make revival about more than the meeting(s). I know this isn’t exactly what we mean, but often we declare a revival to have started when we extend a series of meetings and we declare it over when there isn’t enough people any more to keep the meetings going. All of it revolves around a church building or meeting space. In reality revival and awakening have much more to do with what God is doing in human hearts in a particular location. Are people coming to Jesus? Is the church becoming more alive? Then it doesn’t matter how many meetings are being held or whether there’s enough people to fill them. God sent an angel to tell Phillip to leave the revival to share the gospel with an Ethiopian (Acts 8:26) and this tells me that God is more interested in His ongoing plan than continuing a series of meetings.
- We practice spiritual family. I can’t emphasize this enough. Spiritual family is the wineskin Jesus designed to carry the new wine of the gospel. God, who is a father, builds his Kingdom on the building blocks of family. So it shouldn’t surprise us that Kingdom-oriented spiritual families are the “mechanism” He uses to raise spiritual sons and daughters that are birthed through a move of the Spirit. And while spiritual family can mean many things, I find the apostolic nature of house churches lend them to being the best context for spiritual family to be expressed.
- Remember that Jesus wants the gospel to go forth to the ends of the world. The revival in Jerusalem after Pentecost was ended when God allowed Saul to persecute the church and scatter it. The goal had always been for the gospel to go from Jerusalem, to Judea, and then to the ends of the Earth. Saul’s persecution was the mechanism used to trigger that movement. Many of the great revivals of history were catalysts for missionaries going to people who had never heard about Christ, but recent church history is silent on the subject of new converts and revived souls planting churches and taking the gospel to places it has never been. We must always remember that Jesus launched a movement of the gospel that is destined to travel to the ends of the Earth, not wait for the ends of the Earth to come to it. We have to have faith that the same Holy Spirit who moves on us here and now will empower us in the same way where He is sending us.
I believe that the greatest moves of the Holy Spirit are still ahead of us. I think we should pray and ask God to move again in our day. But only a people with hearts fixed on Jesus who are multiplying ministry, not meetings, and living in spiritual family will be able to contain what the Lord wants to do. And these coming moves of the Holy Spirit must not just stay with us, but touch those who have never even heard the name of Jesus.
Friends, these are not little changes. These sort of statements can be said quickly but it can take years to unlearn old habits and learn Kingdom ways that need to replace them. The time to begin is now. Let’s continue to ask for God to awaken the lost and revive the church. But even today, let’s begin to by faith build a different kind of church–a better, sturdier net–that will be able to handle the harvest when it comes in.
The time to prepare is now.
Photo Credit: Prayer – Jesus Culture by Adam Rozanas
Awakening, Harvest, and Broken Nets (Part 2: A Case Study)
Years ago, I read a prophetic word by Rick Joyner about the future revival coming to the church and it sobered me as young man. It described a still coming revival that was so immense that it broke every structure that existing churches had. It compared what is coming to what we saw happening to the book of Acts where a huge influx of new believers actually put significant stress on the church and its structure. He compared revival to an ocean wave that a good surfer will catch and ride, but could also injure a surfer who was unprepared. And I’ve seen this happen over and over again in times of awakening and revival.
Yesterday I wrote that the church that is praying for revival and awakening probably isn’t ready for it. I even borrowed a story from the life of the disciples and used it as analogy for where the church is in this hour. So we need to pray AND prepare nets that can truly hold the harvest God is going to send. Today I want to share a case study* to show you why it’s so incredibly important.
When I was in Bible College I came across a surprising number of people who had been part of a significant revival in this country. This revival began as a fairly localized move of the Holy Spirit in a congregation during the visit of an itinerant minister and then went on to draw attention all over the country because of some dramatic signs and wonders and a massive wave of repentance that was attached to the meetings.
Needless to say, things changed significantly for this congregation during that season. People were driving from all across the country to take part in what God was doing. The numbers were so large nightly meetings began happening. Soon a bible college was established to equip the new believers who were wanting to join the ministry. Everything was pretty intense.
And that’s where the problems began. All of my friends that I had met who were part of this move of the Holy Spirit had been changed by their time there. Most of them had been through the bible college. But all of them told me the same story: We loved the revival. But we got burned out. We were in meetings six nights a week but we never learned how to live lives outside of the meetings. And we never learned to be the body of Christ. We never learned to be family.
I’ve met more than my fair share of people who have tasted of the work of the Spirit in a series of meetings but were never raised to maturity in Christ. Some of them have even grown bitter and disillusioned by the phrases revival and awakening because in the end, though that season was great, the end goal they were hoping for never came about. Many of them never became part of a true spiritual family. Many were just individuals in a meeting during the season of revival. And while I’m in awe of the numbers of people who came to Christ during this move of the Spirit, my heart aches for those who grew disillusioned when the meetings ended because their hopes were deferred and their hearts were sick.
This wasn’t the last revival that this has happened. Several others have happened in the time since. And to differing degrees, a similar story emerges.
Friends, Jesus has a plan for His church. He is both the one who draws us to Himself and the One who builds His church. He is the one who is fashioning His church into nets that won’t break under pressure.
We’ll talk more about what that looks like tomorrow…
*Out of honor for the place(s) described above, I’ve remained intentionally vague about details.
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 