George Barna, a Christian pollster who has been gauging the spiritual lives of churches, families & individuals for the past couple of decades, has just release a new study on the growth of the house church movement within the United States. He finds...

The new study, based on interviews with more than five thousand randomly selected adults from across the nation, found that 9% of adults attend a house church during a typical week. That is remarkable growth in the past decade, shooting up from just 1% to near double-digit involvement. In total, one out of five adults attends a house church at least once a month.

Projecting these figures to the national population gives an estimate of more than 70 million adults who have at least experimented with house church participation. In a typical week roughly 20 million adults attend a house church gathering. Over the course of a typical month, that number doubles to about 43 million adults.

I think these findings speak volumes, not so much about church patterns, or people's structure/method preferences for how church is done, but really about people's desire for relationships (and beyond that to their desire for spiritual relationships). Some, I'm sure, have jumped aboard the house church bandwagon, so to speak, because they have something against the 'conventional' church. But I think it goes beyond that.

There is a dual focus re-emerging, from what I can see, among the ranks of the faithful. One is the desire to grasp ahold something that has roots. Where as the previous generation placed great importance upon the 'foundations of the faith' - pointing to the golden era of churches (according to them) within the 1950s. This generation desires to reach far deeper, and strikes a chord with more ancient practices and traditions that date back to the early years of Christianity. A renewed attention to creeds, communion and other church practices which have been around since the early centuries A.D., have caused many people to latch on to churches which offer much more traditional approaches to worship ('traditional' in the 'early church' sense, not mid-1900s sense).

The other trend is for this refocus on relationships. This generation is relational. They have witnessed the previous generations inward focus, the 'me' generation, where self-worth and self-gratification (and the focus on such 'me' things as materialism and status) were the norm. The reaction is a desire for 'other' focus, displaying itself both in the desire for relationships and in the swell of volunteerism & social justice issues within some of the newer movements of faith, especially within the young adult crowd.

House churches, I believe, hit at both of these focuses. A relational base of 'doing' Christianity & life that has its roots in the very foundational years of the Faith.

Some churches, some ministers, & some individual Christians tend to fear new expressions of faith, like house churches, but I don't think we need to. I see the landing place of more conventional churches reaching out in new forms of ministry and spiritual life & development via such house churches, small groups, community groups, etc. That is, when the focus is kept relational in nature and any spiritual instruction or Bible study is done within the context of community.

I see this in the community group that meets in our home. It has provided a place for people to connect with one another, to minister to & pray for one another, to encouragement & strengthen one another. It is spirituality in tandem, 'communal faith' that draws deeper than our all-to-often closet, personal, 'me' focused spirituality that is found throughout modern Christianity. It is the balance between the individual disciplines associated with our faith & the oft-neglected communal displines that can only be found and experienced within the context of community.

I think we are going to see a growth in the number of people who are both connected together in worship via a conventional church setting while also grower deeper via community in a house church, smaller group setting.