Godgrown

Missional House Churches – J.D. Payne

Wow!  Trina and I have been taking a beating here the last few days!  We’ve both been fighting off sickness, the weather dropped like 35 degrees in two days, and we just got back from a FULL weekend!  Wanna see some rockin’ pics of my beautiful wife drawing at the Orchard?  Check out her site here, or see the post here and here.  Man, she’s so cool.

Today’s lunch was AWESOME!  It seriously made me question what line of work I’m in.  Really, who wouldn’t want to work at a hole-in-the-wall hot dog shop named “The Wiener…and Still Champion!”  Rockin’.  Take my advice:  Next time you’re in Chicago, look around and find one of the thousands of hot dog carts on any random street corner and find the one with the fattest guy with the greasiest shirt selling dogs.  Buy from him.  Cuz you KNOW that it’s gonna taste the best (he’s eating them too)!

I’m reading J.D. Payne’s Missional House Churches, which so far has been a more academic, statistical look at the surge of organic and emerging churches in North America.  I’ve scanned chapter 2, which gives a broad overview of the hundreds of house churches he interviewed across the continent, and as soon as I get permission from Payne, I’ll post it here or on my resources page.

One of the more interesting things I read is that in your standard-issue church in North America, it takes 86 Christians per year to bring one non-Christian to Christ.

That’s an 86:1 membership to baptism ratio.  Not so hot.

In Payne’s study, he found that the membership to baptism ratio among the house churches he interviewed ranged from 4.3:1 to 2.3:1.  WOW!  At the high end of the range, it takes about 4 Christians to bring another to Christ!  And in some churches, that ratio is more like 2 to 1!  He writes,

“The gravity of these numbers should not be passed over casually.  Ratios of this size automatically place these churches among the lowest baptismal ratios in the world.  Any traditional congregations manifesting such numbers would automatically be considered the most effective evangelistic churches in North America.” (page 75)

Thankfully, Payne is not out to get traditional churches – he attends one himself – instead he is making a plea for the whole Body of Christ to take notice of this missional strategy.  There is (sometimes for good reason) distrust of especially isolationist house churches, and yeah – they’re out there.  But there will always be a counterfiet from the Enemy when he sees the power of God at work.

The power is found in authentic relationships – a majority of these churches (67%) say the primary way they brought others to faith in Christ is through honest, serving friendships.  Christians made an intentional effort not to be a “come to us” church, but rather a “go and tell” church – living and speaking boldly among their friends/co-workers.

Maybe I’ll put some more of Payne’s findings up if its still interesting me in coming days.  Thoughts?