House Churches. Changing the Paradigm

I. Introduction

I often see Christians posting memes on social media and quoting Ephesians 2:8-9:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.

Then, more often than not there is a discussion about what is meant by works, and is it grace or faith, or both which are the gift of God, etc. Sadly, I seldom see the next verse posted which tells us why we were saved and reads:

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10)

If God has prepared in advance specific good works for us to do, then obviously the Lord has a specific plan for every Christian’s life. I want to suggest that for the past 1700 years about 99% of those called Christians have left this world having never had a clue what they were called to do for the Lord, and therefore, never fulfilled the Lord’s plan for their earthly life, if indeed they really knew the Lord at all.

In the previous videos/articles on the topic of the Early Church model of house churches, we saw that Scripture states that everyone, yes everyone has spiritual gifts which must be used if the church is to function as God intended. In this video I want to show that unless we change the paradigm and model which has existed for 1700 years and still exists today, the church will continue to neglect the fundamentals of discipleship, and most professing Christians will meet the Lord having never fulfilled His purpose for their lives. 

Let me also state that I am not saying that large gatherings have no value. Christ-centered corporate worship can be inspiring and encouraging, and large gatherings also provide opportunities for preaching and teaching to ensure the unity of small groups. The early church also met in large groups in the temple courts to hear the apostles, but the emphasis on discipleship happened in homes.

So let’s begin with a short examination of Church history.

II. Constantine and the End of Discipleship

In the year 312 the Roman Emperor Constantine was fighting a battle at the Milvian Bridge when he reportedly had a vision. According to Eusebius of Caesarea:

‘About the time of the midday sun, when the day was just turning, he said he saw with his own eyes up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said, "By this sign conquer." (τούτῳ νίκα) Amazement at the spectacle seized both him and the whole company of soldiers which was then accompanying him on a campaign he was conducting somewhere, and witnessed the miracle.’

( Eusebius of Caesarea, Vita Constantini, 1.28.2)

Constantine ordered that his soldiers paint a cross on their shields, won the battle and in the Edict of Milan in 313, legalized Christianity, which later became the state religion of Rome. Constantine remained the head of Rome’s pagan religion, was considered a ‘converted christian’ even though he refused to be baptized until on his death-bed, and then by an Arian heretic.

In my opinion, this was a master-stroke of Satan, not a vision from Christ. The church had endured many seasons of severe persecution by Roman Emperors from the year 64 when Nero blamed Christians for the fire which devastated Rome. Persecution kept the church pure as there are few counterfeit Christians willing to be martyred for Christ. House churches were still the main place of meetings, although monasteries had started prior to Constantine as some Christians wanted to separate themselves from pagan Roman culture. These buildings were often seized during times of persecution, but Constantine had them returned to Christian ownership after his so-called conversion.

Constantine ordered church buildings to be erected, gave Christians prominent positions of power, and by the end of the century Christianity was the formal state religion of the Roman Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD. The Roman Catholic Church was officially born, an institution supported financially by the state and protected by the Roman army which, rather than conquering nations in the name of Apollo, would conquer in the name of Christ. Augustine of Hippo introduced his heresy of inherited sin and wrath in 396, which led to the veneration and worship of Mary as the ‘immaculate conception’ and teaching a Docetist Christ with a different human nature to our own. His heretical ideas became foundational in Roman Catholic and later Calvinist/lutheran tradition.

The next 1000 years are regarded as the Dark Ages. The RCC became one of the most powerful institutions in the world. The church which prior to Constantine had been persecuted, became the persecutor, labeling anyone who disagreed as a heretic, inventing the most hideous means of torture, murdering thousands of innocents, and building great monuments. Services were conducted in the so-called holy language of Latin, which few spoke. Evangelism was done by forcing the submission of kings and then declaring everyone a ‘christian’. The witch hunts saw thousands of innocent women tortured, violated and murdered, and in the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor. This man used his army to ‘Christianize’ Europe. People were given two choices; submit to the pope or lose their heads.

Doctrines such as purgatory were created to fuel the Vatican’s lust for money and power. ‘When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul out of purgatory springs’ was the cry which had the poor giving the little they had to save the souls of their deceased. Popes lived in luxury and debauchery, with many having illegitimate children to their secret mistresses. 

How many of the people labeled as ‘christian’ during these 1000 years had any real relationship with Christ? This was not a church in any biblical sense, but a grotesque counterfeit of Christianity which banned the reading of the Bible for 500 years, except for priests, and did all it could to eliminate those who wanted to know and love Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The new paradigm was firmly established. The Church and its structure of power controlled the common people, kept them utterly ignorant of truth and mere spectators or victims of unregenerate, power hungry frauds.

Then came the Reformation, a movement that merely emphasized the influence of Augustine’s heretical views which had become the foundation of the RCC. Luther was an Augustinian monk whose testimony and writings are an utter contradiction. Claiming to have had a revelation regarding justification by faith on the one hand, and writing in his ‘Bondage of the Will’ that all people were mere beasts of burden controlled by God or Satan, with no free-will, on the other. 

And Calvin, the lawyer, was merely a parrot of all Augustine taught, quoting the 4th century heretic 1700 times in his writings, laying a foundation of double predestination built on total depravity. Calvin’s Geneva was a police state. But in all of this, one group refused to submit to Augustinian heresies, refused to baptize infants for a doctrine of inherited sin and wrath absent in Scripture. They were called the Ana-Baptists, those who were baptized again. Their act of desiring to honor the commandment to be baptized as believing adults infuriated both Roman Catholic and Calvinists. They were hunted and drowned in their thousands, murdered as heretics for the crime of loving Christ.

Christianity became a religion of allegiance to doctrines, traditions and formulas. The RCC claimed that only Catholics were saved, and the so-called Reformers claimed the same. A thirty year war proved that none were willing to follow the Lord’s example as the Prince of Peace took a back seat to power hungry tyrants.

The Great Awakening saw Calvinists like Jonathon Edwards preaching sermons such as his famous ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God’, telling illiterate coal miners that God was just waiting to grab and torture them for all eternity unless they repented, whilst at the same time believing that no one had the free-will to choose. Wesley preached that men had freedom to choose, and established Bible studies to try to disciple people.

The twentieth century saw the rise of the Pentecostal movement, a movement which spawned the likes of Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, and others, peddling counterfeit christianity and healings, sucking in gullible people in order to line their own pockets. Prosperity preachers promised health, wealth and abundance, turning the gospel into a money making scheme for fraudsters. And these days the New Apostolic Reformation deceivers have convinced fools they can all be raising the dead, healing the sick, and that every hindrance in life is a demonic possession which, for a few extra dollars they can be delivered.

The Anglicans and other liberals embraced the LGBTQ, trans agenda, and same-sex marriage, and like most unregenerate people devoid of the Holy Spirit, but with a dash of religion, have become social clubs promoting sin and debauchery in the name of Christ.

The mega church movement spends millions building huge auditoriums with large live screens, hundreds of lights, smoke machines and state of the art sound systems to rival secular rock bands. Their pastors and musicians are celebrities and paid tens of thousands a year to entertain the goats, preach motivational ‘sermons’ thoroughly fixated on self, devoid of the cross or mention of sin so as not to offend those who pay their salaries. People come along for their weekly fix, enjoy the ‘concert’ and head home as empty as they left.

Others attend a small struggling church which can barely pay the bills or the pastor, trying to compete with the seeker friendly church down the road, but their congregations get smaller and smaller as young people are bored without the entertainment provided by the bigger churches down the street. At least in the mega church which has the cool tattooed lead singer with the label clothes and dreadlocks, they feel like they are participating in the worship, or are they actually worshipping the worship?

I grew up attending a Baptist Church with a fortress mentality, a church serving the local farming community. People arrived in their ‘Sunday best’, groaned their way through a few hymns, tossed a few coins in the collection plate, and if the weather was fine, stood around outside talking about the weather, the price of wool, politics, then went home to get on with life. 

How many of the people who attend church these days actually know and love Jesus Christ and desire to live as dedicated disciples, have a hunger to know God’s word and to live serving others. Only the Lord really knows, but I suspect that if the average Western ‘christian’ was faced with REAL persecution and had to choose between standing for Christ or physical death, perhaps 90% would choose to deny Christ. 

III. Can the Paradigm Be Changed?

Are there any churches in the world today which look anything like the church which changed the Roman world in the first 280 years after Pentecost? Yes, there are, and they live in countries such as China where no one is baptized unless they confess they are willing to be imprisoned or die for Christ. There are few hypocrites in the Church where severe persecution is present, but the Lord should not have to allow severe persecution in order to purify His Church. 

I will assume that those watching/reading this video/article are real Christians who desire to know and fulfill the Lord’s will for their lives and to see God’s people discipled. Can we change the current paradigm? I believe we can and offer the following strategy which, if you are not a pastor or elder, you can present to your Church leadership, and if you are a pastor, I hope you will seriously consider.

1. Recognizing the strategy of Christ. 

Jesus preached to the crowds, often crowds of thousands, but He invested His time in just 12 men, walking with them, sharing meals, asking and answering hard questions and sending them out to minister. Yes, the crowds heard the Lord and many experienced a miracle, but He sent them away and few of them were transformed. The Lord recognized that making disciples was about deep relationship. And this same strategy was used, not just for Jewish Christians who already had a deep knowledge of God, but was used by Paul in his ministry to Gentiles. Recall that Paul spent three years in Ephesus, supporting himself as a tent-maker whilst training elders and especially Timothy to be the main overseer of the Ephesus churches.

2. Recognizing the Early Church paradigm.

Acts 2:42-46 tells us that:

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer… Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts…”

As we saw in the previous videos, the emphasis was on the Church as an eternal family. Yes, they gathered in the temple courts, but the heartbeat of the Church was in their homes, their kitchens, their back yards, because as Christ had shown, discipleship requires relationship, commitment and responsibility to each other. No one can grow in Christ simply by hearing a sermon once a week. We grow when people know us as family, when we pray together, open God’s word together, eat together, support each other and watch out for each other, carrying one another’s burdens. The Early Church recognized this reality of an eternal family much deeper than blood bonds, and the Church multiplied, not by building larger buildings, but by filling more homes.

Large gatherings have value and we can be inspired by corporate worship, but in such gatherings we can easily just be spectators, we can attendees for years and still not be known, stirred up on Sunday, but unchanged on Monday. We must not confuse attendance with discipleship and Jesus never said go and make attendees, but make disciples. If our paradigm is focused on large gatherings we will always struggle with just attendees with shallow faith.

3. Leadership must be on board.

Firstly, a successful paradigm shift must be led by the elders and pastors. There may be resistance as some pastors feel threatened by others teaching, and some are simply too controlling. So, firstly, your Church must have a detailed Statement of Faith that every small group adheres to and the pastors and elders uphold. This is absolutely essential to ensure that schisms are dealt with quickly so that house church gatherings don’t turn into weekly arguments about doctrine and destroy the purpose of relationship and unity. Leaders must understand and embrace the New Testament model that their role is to be guardians of the truth and overseers of every house church within the Church.

Secondly, the challenge to get attendees to open their homes and host others has to come from the top and the right emphasis be presented every week in the large gathering. If the idea of a small gathering is presented as an optional ‘bible study’ rather than a ‘house church’ people will get the wrong idea completely. House Churches are not a weekly Bible study, but rather practical and deep application of Scripture and love for each other with an emphasis on helping the weakest members of the Church become strong and active disciples and disciple makers. Leadership must take the time to present the Early Church model which is grounded in Jesus’ strategy to build His church. If leadership are onboard, the Lord will provide people who are ready to open their homes and host a House Church.

Thirdly. Once a few house churches are formed, the large gatherings can have a time of witnessing, of people sharing how their lives have changed, their love for Christ deepened, their relationships become family oriented, how their living rooms and kitchens have become sanctified for the kingdom of God. In this sense, leaders who are onboard can challenge attendees to get involved, to be more than just ‘Sunday Christians’, and to lead by example through having a house church in their own home. 

And of course it’s not just about challenging people from the pulpit to get involved, for the Holy Spirit desires people to be discipled and He will convict and call. As the paradigm shifts and more people become involved, those who have been in opposition will be challenged regarding their own commitment to Christ and the Church.

4. Expect Opposition

Sadly, there are many people sitting in Churches who want to do the bare minimum they believe will get them into heaven. Personally, I have serious doubts that such people have become partakers of the divine nature at all and are simply counterfeit Christians. If a person claims to be a Christian yet has no desire to be discipled or find their gifts and be a servant to others, then I doubt they have any real love for the Lord, or know Him at all. We are not called to judge individuals, but rather to lovingly challenge them using Scripture such as the warnings of the sheep and goats and Jesus’ warnings about those He proclaims, ‘I never knew you’. The main difference between the sheep and goats is obvious. The sheep were driven to serve others by the Spirit of Christ within them, but the goats were so self-consumed they never saw any need but their own. 

Coupled with this it the fact that our spiritual enemy does not want to see people living for Christ and doing the works God has prepared in advance for them to do (Ephesians 2:10) for this is a threat to Satan’s kingdom. You will need to put on the armor of God and stand against the enemy with prayer, truth and faith, and in the knowledge that the Lord fights on your side.

I also understand that some leaders may be very reluctant to write a detailed Statement of Faith. I’ve seen a great deal of opposition to this as some leaders refuse to make a biblical stand which may offend members of the Church. As I have pointed out in previous videos in this series, many churches have people sitting together who have fundamentally opposing theology and are completely devoid of unity. This is utterly contrary to the Early Church model in which for at least 200 years there was, at least in general terms, real unity of belief and practice. It is exactly for this reason that my Practical Systematic Theology textbook has the subtitle, ‘Reclaiming the Doctrine of the Early Church’.

There was no idea of inherited sin, that we are born sinners, no doctrine of double predestination or that human beings have no real free-will, no hyper-grace claims that we can ‘just believe and live any way we please’, and no prosperity doctrine. If we are going to be successful in changing the paradigm back to the Early Church, we must also have the courage to confront and reject Church traditions which are not biblical and began after Constantine’s counterfeit conversion.

In the next video/article I want to outline the many benefits of House Churches in detail, share some testimonies of lives that were dramatically changed through being a part of a real Church family, and show the Biblical emphasis on relational discipleship apart from the arguments of Paul in 1 Corinthians which have been previously discussed.

I sincerely hope that this video/article has been an encouragement for you and at the very least helped you to understand why we have the current paradigm and a basic strategy to change it. God bless.

Steve Copland