Hidden Numbers of an Underground Movement
If you’re looking for the next big thing God is up to around the world – it might be harder to find than you think. [youversion]1 Cor 1: 28,29[/youversion] says that “God takes the unnoticed things of this world, and uses them to bring to nothing what the world considers important.”
Recently there’s been some discussion about the growth of the house church movement worldwide, and how seemingly unnoticed it all is to most of us. Its hard to notice something that’s underground. Tall Skinny Kiwi wrote a reflection article that Wolfgang Simpson recently published on the topic of the unnoticeable movement of house churches around the world that is rapidly growing out of control. TSK wrote 7 reasons why you aren’t seeing the house church movement as overtly as other world-wide movements:
1 Off-the-grid house churches that intentionally do not want to be known, listed or be on anybody’s radar. We find out about them by accident or through opinion polling or sampling, the kind of research George Barna does.
These OoCC (out of Church Christians) gatherings contain a lot of the God-yes-church-no crowd out there.
2 Business groups, either house churches within a company or those connecting folks in the business world. This number is huge but hard to track as many business folks believe it’s nobodies business whether they hang out with witches, freemasons or create or join their by invitations-only organic churches for support.
3 More and more traditional churches are changing their home groups or even transitioning their whole lot into house churches; some, in order to avoid misunderstanding and tension, intentionally misname their emerging or fully functioning house churches as “home groups” or even “cells.”
4 Inside the Roman Catholic culture (I said culture, not church) there is a surprisingly large amount of “small, little churches” that are intentionally set up to cut out the middle layer of clergy and directly connect the people with Jesus & the Bible. Behind this are some born again bishops and cardinals; actually, it goes right up to the top. Again, this development is far larger than most think. But only because it happens in an un-protestant environment does not invalidate it.
5 It is not only the Anglican Church that develops “small missional communities”, but many more denominations do that. Amongst them big ones like the Assemblies of God in certain areas of the world.
6 Insider movements. A staggering amount of under-the-radar-house churches are emerging within religious megablocks, the Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, the New Agers and even within certain cults. But they choose to stay within their religious culture for effectiveness and to build bridges of God. One of my friends is a former Hindu priest, fully painted up and in his safran dress, who now very effectively plants house churches amongst Brahmins in India. If “proper” Christians would meet him, they’d probably shower him with tracts…
7 There is a seventh version of hc’s out there that I do not bring up here intentionally because it kind of messes with the idea of a sixpack. It would be media-birthed house churches, initiated by TV, radio or folks like a friend of mine who became a guru and coach in a (huge!) online gamer community… So for sixpack reasons I would not mention it, but this actually might have the potential to become the biggest initiative of all: a facebookable, twitterable digital spawning of hc’s that emerge – but not stay – on the web.
What are your thoughts on these reasons? Are they accurate? Are they inflated?
