What I Saw in House Church

“I do not give to you as the world gives.” (John 14:27)

“If that there King was to wake,’ added Tweedledum, ‘you’d go out – bang! – just like a candle!”

So I attended a house church.

This was brought about by what had become the routine invitation by an acquaintance. My excuses for not attending finally felt uncomfortable enough that I accepted. I had no real experience with the conduct of house churches, and at the time my life had generally improved having worked towards a habit of not having an opinion, the labor of which being most directed towards events like church. By the time I had found a use for thinking charitably.

The story ends there. Any bald description of the events while at the house church is far less impressionable than the observation they inspired, which is that to question someone’s Christianity in their own home is akin to beating their mother with a shovel. Be apprised that God is an impossible topic among Christians. Perhaps especially between Christians, but certainly among those with whom we feel a need to belong. Performance will always be public religion’s deepest principle.

I can say with some confidence that my attending a house church a second time and with any loyalty to the concept will be because the government wants me dead. I will also say that any church which compares its methods to the New Testament as if it were a time capsule of vintage Christianity will fail to surprise me. The right to self-constitution is yet realized by the American church, which so far is bent on perpetually burning its bra against some formal parent structure.

The irony of any church calling itself radical or revolutionary is the assumption these words have broad appreciation. The invitation to church is rarely on the basis of being a bunch of people who think God is pretty cool, but it is upon this basis that the house church has real appeal. This appeal is with those for whom faith is not an ambition, who offer us great wisdom by keeping religion quiet and well assimilated into their mechanics. People who have settled the questions of what is God and of what is God like, and who have squared his activity with the direction and destination of their lives.

However, where house church sells short its potential for unsettling the Sunday morning usual is when the extent of its deviation is its format. Its deliberate infractions are of religion’s appearances rather than its rules, which is to say religion’s language. Even when speaking in turn to the text from first impressions, what loose interpretations we dared to carry the conversation that Sunday still attended to critical vocabulary. Rarely do we invest the opportunity to believe out loud with the adventure of why not.  

For our conversation, my use of the word religion drew sharp responses, correcting at first, with blind recitations of that terrible, clumsy plug that Christianity is more relationship than religion. I will never understand why people think they are more interesting without religion. It is, of course, religion’s affront to our consciousness that we are otherwise less interesting. But if we continue in its space, religion transfigures us, how we think and how we move, into a matter called spirit, and being available to this miracle requires we are not only distinct from but alien to human processes. Having only waited for this miracle offers its own lesson, but of course nobody wants to be that example.

Worse than religious is extremist, the latter an implicit negative. Evangelicals feel pressure to protect Christianity from this designation by making its body of metaphor more recognizable to pop culture. “The sermon,” as was first observed by Bonhoeffer, “has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events”. Further is the trend which insists the sacred is contained in the casual, deferring our curiosity to a religion that is agnostic to its own ideal. Churches, chapels, and cathedrals are built upon a metaphysical basis. Their purpose is to give us a look from this world and into the other-world which is quickly inserting itself into the former. The very best of the bunch overwhelm us with sights and symbols of this high drama, their elements arranged to make sharp distinctions away from the very human. House church retreats entirely from this poetic task.

A group is not ordered by belief but by behavior, and this is especially true of religious people. Don't believe me, then consider that Scripture makes no distinction between the moral and the theological, which builds the plot from creation to make Jesus the rogue Jew. His character is aloof to the emotions of the other actors, at times inappropriate, odd even. It is easy to observe this and to repeat the old line that ascending his character challenges the world order, but how we are most unfortunate to never join him and interrupt religion when we have become most used to it.

We project upon the cloth of heaven the dull colors of our solipsism. For what possibility exists for the house church, it never seems to shake the habit of doing church things to our own satisfaction. Church is a historical plot point bringing the world to the edge of the eschaton, and this fact, I suppose, is not even least affected by style or structure. Nevertheless, it is my hope that the artifacts of religious experience remain peculiarly religious, and that the imagination of assembly is lifted beyond the terms set upon it by forces other than our piety.