To Make a Long Story Short
Why House Church came from the hopes, and disappointments, of a group of people who had been practicing their faith in a house church setting in Indianapolis for years. We spent years yearning for more connection, more resources, and better representation. Too often, we found in the more public voices that either the heart or practicality of the house church scene was missing, sometimes both. Meeting a local network of house churches, we found others regularly experiencing the same. We all wished we had more support for maturing and more visibility into what the Lord was doing across the house church scene. We wanted to do that for the next generation, not just in our city but wherever people were following the call to reconsider what it could look like to be the church.
To Make A Long Story...Long
The long story starts with a few young adults on a college campus in Indianapolis, who experienced what so many Christians do with college ministries. A weekly extra-curricular turned into a community, a community that acted more like a family than a club. A family that sought to know Christ better every time any of them were together–which became much more often than the planned weekly meetings. Our faiths grew exponentially, immersed in what it meant to sharpen one another as iron sharpens iron, as well as to go and seek the lost where they were.
Because of this, that family grew outside of the campus walls as more of us went out into the world and found others who wanted to know Christ. Perhaps that growth outside of our campus is what changed us–why so many of us stopped seeing that community as a temporary season, a campus ministry, and instead saw it as a fundamental support to our faiths. We found ourselves worshiping together, studying scripture together, teaching and encouraging and challenging and admonishing one another. Eventually, as we studied the church in the New Testament, we found ourselves saying, “Our crew of goofballs looks a lot more like these books describe than any other church any of us have ever been a part of.”
That’s the story of the beginning of one house church in the city–the church that most of the Why House Church team comes from. The story of Why House Church begins a couple years later, when we met a house church network in Indianapolis, Beacon. We had felt alone for years in our city, though we’d been encouraged by a few mentors and people who had connections to house churches in other states. That loneliness doubled as we sought out popular house church voices and what they had to say and found that we had qualms with much of what they had to say, though at heart we saw them after the same vision for the Church. (We’ll share more about that, soon.)
And then we learned that people in quite a few other house churches felt the exact same way. They, like us, worried about the misrepresentation of the people in house churches by popular voices blaming the hearts of the people still faithfully serving in institutionalized churches. They were frustrated with how the simple church movement often turned into affinity groups who lost sight of maturing of the church and/or reaching the lost. They wanted resources that were not just cookie-cutter trainings, often not only inaccessible and expensive but also systematized and institutionalized.
On a local scale, we came together to fill those gaps where we could, to share our resources and experiences and challenges. To know that we were not alone in our deepest convictions that the Lord would have His Church look so different than it often does. And we began to dream of how God would move through the Church as it changed, of what He could do if we stripped our religion to its core, scriptural foundations and loosed it from the traditions the outside world had brought onto it.
Our team knows that a website, a podcast, and a repository of articles can’t replace the real life connection of a network like Beacon. We know that our team being available for phone calls across the continent or world won’t fulfill the desire for partnership and camaraderie with others you can build real-life relationships with. But we also know every church we’ve met through Beacon searched for something like Why House Church and came away knowing there was something missing. We all wished for someone, somewhere, to put their hand out in the virtual world and say, “Hey, we’re out here doing this! Here’s what it’s looked like. Learn from our mistakes, our studies, and our successes. And let us know how we can help.