Category: House Church
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Spiritual Gifts
Spiritual gifts are among the least understood subjects among believers, yet are one of the most important parts of church life. Paul’s writings are the main source of instruction regarding the gifts, and areprobably the best place to start is in 1 Corinthians Chapters 12 through 14. That these chapters be considered as a whole…
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Ordination
Does It Have Any Place in the Houses Church? The purpose of ordinations is to ensure that candidates for leadership positions in the church meet the expectations of the church calling them. Those include experience and theological training, and if the role includes preaching, the presentation of a sample sermon. Usually there is also an…
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Authority in the Church
When persecution against the House Churches eased early early in the 4th century under Constantine, Christians found ways to form larger assemblies, encouraged, no doubt, by Constantine’s aggressive church-building programs. It is not surprising that these larger assemblies formed hierarchies. This very human tendency is so common that one has to wonder why Moses needed…
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Hijacking the Church
The first to hijack Christianity was the Emperor Constantine, who used Christianity to unite the Roman Empire under his control. Carrying the Chi Rho symbol, the first two letters of “Christ” in Greek, his soldiers prevailed against Maxentiius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge of 312 AD. Constantine invited the “bishops” of the day…
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Separation of Church and State
While house church theology and the American political left may disagree on a long list of issues, they are in lock step on the question of the separation of church and state–but for completely different reasons. One might look at separation in a number of ways. We Christians are told that we must separate from…
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Home Church Confessions
One can’t understand the history of the home church without understanding the confessions that they wrote to guide their lives. A great many of these have survived, each containing a detailed statement of faith that almost always references the Bible to justify each statement. Confessions differ from creeds in purpose and format. Creeds are a…
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The Living Room
So wrote Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) even before he started his series of essays against the Institutionial Church of his day that came to be called his “Attack on Christindom.”. Excerpts from some of those essays appear below. Regarding Establishment Christianity The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening…
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Evangelism
EVANGELISM AND OUTREACH ======================== Subject: Why not the Yellow Pages? From: AB HCDLers: For years, we have been saying things like: “How can we get networked, how can people find us, when we don’t have a building on the corner and we’re not in the Yellow Pages?” I had a “Jack-Sims-esque” thought the other day…
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What to do with the children
I have seen over the last couple of weeks/days some questions pertaining to the children and “how to” incorporate them into the house church setting.Questions to ask yourselves.What is a house church?Who is the house church for?When a child joined the family, was it born into the life of the family, or was the family…
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Why Do People Home Church?
by David M. Hebden 1997 The reasons that people “home church” are as diverse as the people who make up the gatherings. This is not an exhaustive explanation and will no doubt evolve as time goes on. These thoughts originated from responses to this question on HCDL. Some of us simply came to the conclusion…