Monday, July 30, 2007

The LA Times on House Churches

I was saved in a house church. I like them. I am a part of a body that has chosen to have a great contemporary worship service in our current location of a couple hundred people with home cells on Sunday evening to replace the traditional Sunday school. It seems to work.

House churches have a lot going for them and the most exciting part is the intimacy, the low cost and the easy proliferation possibilities. Worked in the New Testament!

At any rate, the LA Times piece.
The trend goes by several names: house churches, living-room churches, the underground church, the organic church, the simple church, church without walls. Although they disagree on whether it's a good thing, proponents and detractors say that going to church in a home has the potential of forever changing the way Christians worship.

"We are at the initiation point of a transformational shift," said George Barna, author of the book "Revolution," about the changing nature of worship, and founding director of the Barna Group, a Ventura-based research firm that tracks religious trends.

A 2006 survey by his firm — tracking developments for use by researchers and the media — concluded that 9% of U.S. adults attend house churches weekly, a ninefold increase from the previous decade, and that roughly 70 million Americans have experienced a home service.

Those most likely to attend house churches, according to phone interviews with more than 5,000 adults nationwide, are men, families that home-school their children, residents of the West and nonwhites, while those least likely to attend include women, people older than 60 and Midwesterners.

"We predict that by the year 2025, the market share of conventional churches will be cut in half," Barna said. "People are creating a new form of church, and it's really exciting."

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