Small-church movement is growing

— Megachurch, meet microchurch.

Growing numbers of Coloradans believe the tiny house church, also called a simple church or an organic church, might be the mightier transformer of Christian lives.

A recliner becomes a pulpit. A sofa and some armchairs serve as pews.

Where two or more people are gathered in his name, Jesus said, there he is. House churches range in size from two people to a dozen or slightly more.

Some prefer the name “simple church” because there are congregations that meet at coffee shops, parks or other venues.

The key element is that the group is small enough for everyone to participate fully and to connect intimately. In this, the new followers believe, they are like the earliest Christians, who also met in small groups in homes.

A house church is not about one person standing up and talking for 45 minutes, says former Presbyterian pastor John White, a consultant who helped launch the house-church movement in Colorado 12 years ago.

Back then, he couldn’t find anybody local doing it, and little was written about it. Now, the movement is flourishing.

“Traditional church works fine for a lot of people, but there’s a growing number of people for whom it’s not working,” White said.

Religion surveyors, theologians and other experts say millions of American adults are experimenting with new forms of spiritual communities. Many are abandoning traditional church because, among many reasons, the Americanized church has become, for them, too corporate and consumeristic.

“House church can be messy, but it’s never boring,” White said. “It requires you to be a spiritual grown-up. You have to do the work.”

Colorado, Southern California, Texas, Oregon, New Mexico and a few other Western states are some of the most fertile ground for the new organic churches, according to the Barna Group, a research organization.

These homemade churches are easy to find because of online directories.

Jesus and the apostles spread the good news by looking for a mature person or couple who could form a church, White said.

“Those in the house-church movement see themselves as reclaiming the early church’s vision of closely connected fellowship,” said Phil Campbell, visiting assistant professor of congregational studies at Denver’s Iliff School of Theology.

“The new thing is about the old thing. There was also a real move in the 1960s toward house churches,” Campbell said.

White, part of the Luke 10 Community, said he knows of about 50 house churches in Colorado and that he finds new ones all the time.

“There could be several hundred,” he said. “We just don’t know.”

The Barna Group, a Ventura, Calif.-based faith research and marketing group, estimated in 2006 that 9 percent of adults, roughly 20 million people, attended a house church during a typical week. A decade earlier, it had been 1 percent.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s massive 2007 study on American religious life found that 7 percent of 225 million adult Americans attend church in someone’s home. That translates to roughly 15.75 million adults.

Religion, Pages 27 on 07/22/2010

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