Everything about true, biblical house churches is what true believers desire and enjoy.
All true believers long for genuine relationships with other believers, because God's love has been shed abroad in their hearts. Such relationships are part and parcel of house churches. It is what the Bible refers to as fellowship, genuine sharing of one's life with other brothers and sisters. House churches create an environment where believers can do what believers are supposed to do, which is found in the many New Testament "one another" passages. In the house church setting, believers can exhort, encourage, edify, comfort, teach, serve and pray for one another. They can provoke each other to love and good works, confess their sins to each other, bear one another's burdens, and admonish one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. They can weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. Such things don't occur very often during the Sunday morning meetings of institutional churches where believers sit and watch. As one house church member told me, "When someone is sick within our body, I don't take a meal to a stranger's house because I signed up for the 'meal ministry.' I naturally take a meal to someone I know and love."
True believers enjoy interaction and involvement with each other. Passively sitting and listening to irrelevant or redundant sermons year after year insults their intelligence and spirituality. Rather, they prefer having an opportunity to share the personal insights they gain concerning God and His Word, and house churches provide that opportunity. Following a biblical model rather than a cultural one, each person "has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation" (1 Cor. 14:26). In house churches, no one is lost in the crowd or excluded by a church clique.
True believers desire to be used by God in service. In a house church, there is opportunity for everyone to be used to bless others, and responsibilities are shared among all, so that no one experiences the burnout that is common among committed members of institutional churches. At the minimum, everyone can bring food to share for the common meal, what Scripture seems to refer to as the "love feast" (Jude 1:12). For many house churches, that meal follows the example of the original Lord's Supper, which was part of an actual Passover meal. The Lord's Supper is not, as a little boy referred to it in a previous institutional church I pastored, "God's holy snack." The idea of eating a small wafer and drinking a little juice among strangers during a few seconds of a church service is utterly foreign to the Bible and to biblical house churches. The sacramental meaning of Communion is enhanced manifold during a shared meal among disciples who love each other.
In a house church, worship is simple, sincere and participatory, not a performance. True believers love to worship God in spirit and truth.
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David Servant ( - )
David Servant is the Founder of Heavens Family, helping the least of these world-wide. David Servant has been serving in ministry since 1979 as a church-planter, pastor, teacher and missionary. When David Servant read the results of his high-school vocational aptitude test, he laughed. The results told him that he was best suited for a career in ministry or in entertainment. At the time, David's future goal was to live in a log cabin in the wilderness and live off the land for the rest of his life. The Lord, however, had different plans for David Servant. God didn't intend for him to run away from the world, but rather to play a part in changing the world by building God's kingdom. David received his call to ministry during his (reluctant) freshman year at Penn State, and one year later was enrolled in Bible School.David Servant is the author of eight books, including Forever Rich, and the The Disciple-Making Minister, a 500-page equipping manual that has been translated into more than 20 languages and is being distributed to tens of thousands of pastors.