Barna House Church Trends

Today Barna released some interesting information about the trend of house churches. 9% of households polled attended a house church in a typical week.
That in itself is encouraging. Not that having church in a house is better that having church in a building, but it seems to me that you are going to have more committed believers in a home fellowship.

I believe in small fellowships
I believe in small fellowships for several reasons.

• Accountability. It is hard to hide a bad relationship with your wife when you have alot of close relationships with strong believers.
  
• Closer relationships. You have to work really hard to maintain only superficial relationships in a small church.
  
• Actual relationship with the Pastor. To me this is huge. How can a pastor pastor without having actual dialogues together with each of his flock. Pastors used to do home visits, now they have to juggle to schedule office visits.
  
• Real involvement in the meeting. Fathers should be deeply involved in the regular meeting of the church. Teaching, leading in worship, exhortation, preaching, praying are among the things that fathers should be asked, better yet, required to do. Pastors would take grow their people leaps and bounds if they would help guide men into leadership.
• Visitors get attended to. A healthy church has no nooks or crannies in which to hide. New people don't have to be sought out by a "greeters committee". Rather a more natural dynamic occurs.

This stuff is not necessarily doctrine but common sense. God wants us to live by the law of love not pragmatism or efficiency.

The Problem with large churches
Larger churches (read more people than a pastor can remember everyone's name) simply cannot have these types of characteristics. They try, mostly by trying to get people involved in small group ministry, but that fails for a number of reasons. I can't tell you how many churches I have seen try and try to get people into a small group dynamic and fail time after time.
Many large churches are committed to anonymity and a safe atmosphere for both false converts and "seekers". This is always at the expense of the true believers.
Large churches, especially Corporate Churches, for all of the above reasons, tend to draw those looking to get their "church fix" or tick on their belt to ease their conscience.

Men prefer home church
The other interesting thing Barna noted about the home church trend was that men and homeschooling families where the ones most likely to prefer a home church over conventional church.
My take on that is that committed Christian men are looking for those characteristics I mentioned in a church. They waste away in a youth culture driven corporate atmosphere. They want to lead and get their hands dirty.