The Church Without Walls
I just finished an interview with Craig Henningfield who is the missionary coach for the Church Without Walls in Denver. The Church Without Walls is a growing, loosely networked group of house churches. Question: Why the House Church?Every day I meet more people who are dissatisfied with the institutional church. Most of these people have never read the books like Pagan Christianity or the Barna research. I also run into many pastors who have been dissatisfied with the institutional church but still want to serve. We can’t throw the baby out with bathwater just because a churched tradition no longer serves a growing number of people.Question: How do you fund your ministry?Answer: Most of our pastors are bivocational. Some raise their support from congregations and individual Christians. Funding and giving are two of our biggest issues. People come out of the institutional church and join us thinking there is no need to give any longer. We have to rewire them to give out of grace to a mission rather than support of an institution.Question: What do you think will hold your movement together over the long haul?
Answer: Jesus. I know that is clique, but it is what we think we do it. We aren’t a church planting movement, we are a disciplining movement. We’re not interested in how many more house churches can we plant, but how many people can we disciple to be like Jesus. The key is longevity is to train leaders so if they move they aren’t lost and can start new groups wherever they go. America is a churched nation- everyone has some view of what a church looks like. So the house church needs explaining. When they get it, they will talk about it with all of their friends.
Question: What question haven’t I asked you that I should have?
Answer: I think getting more clarity on the relationship between denominations and the house church movement is essential. In the beginning our denomination supported our work with some start up money but as the project developed the denomination found it difficult to figure out how to relate to us since we didn’t resemble anything near an institution. Denominations need to continue thinking through the relationship with the institutional church to avoid the “us” versus “them” problem.
According to Henningfield most of the house churches are still along denominational lines. This fact surprised me.
March 21st, 2008 at 4:24 pm
The relationship between denominational and house church forms within the larger Church is somehting I think about a lot - especially since I resigned my position in a conventional ELCA Lutheran congregation in order discover how to serve the Kingdom “among the houses” so to speak.
The idea I keep coming back to is that a denomination could call and deploy a pasor as a house church planter in the same way they have often sent missionaries to plant churches overseas. The key would be to have the same kind of expectations for these new missionaries, and the congregations they would plant, as you have for the ones who traveled overseas. For example:
We don’t expect the evangelized people to join our congregation “back home.”
We don’t expect the new congregations to look like us, but to reflect their own, indigenous culture.
We don’t expect the new congregations to suport the missionary financially - that’s our job back home. But we do look to them to develop and support their own indigenous leadership in order to carry the work forward among their own people.
We don’t expect to see the missionary at the home chuhrch very often, except perhaps on occasion in order to share stories about the work and renew the partnership relationship. We certainly don’t expect the missionary to care for the members of the home church here!
We don’t expect the converts to become members of our denomination, but we hope and anticipate that they will be blessed by the theological, spiritual and cultural gifts we have as they gather themselves into their own “denomination” (or whatever fits in their context and culture.) We do hope and anticipate that they will emerge as a natural partner with us in the work of the Kingdom.
You get the idea, I’m sure. A lot can be harnesed in the parallel as long as people can accept that it’s mission work, not just another tactic to get more people into the church WITH walls.
Anyone else thinking or working this way?
Tim