A Book Review
Dan Trotter
I will get very quickly to the point and urge you to obtain this book. It’s very good, for reasons which shall appear. It is edited (and mostly written) by Steve Atkerson of New Testament Reformation Fellowship. This well-crafted volume has evolved since the time many moons ago when it first appeared as Toward A House Church Theology, and then was later released as Ekklesia: To the Roots of Biblical House Church Life. This latest version is the best yet. It still has plenty of theology in it, but it is also replete with lots of very practical advice for those who are interested in escaping modern church traditions and practicing the traditions of Jesus’ apostles.
The book has a sane, sober tone to it, and yet it advocates things which to the traditional evangelical church mind are quite preposterous: Christians should eat a full meal with the wine and bread when they gather. Christians should not listen to one preacher, they should all contribute verbally in their meetings. Elders don’t have dictatorial rights over their churches, the church members themselves should make decisions by consensus. Christians should gather in homes, not in special religious buildings. Christians’ children should meet together with them, in the meeting, and should not be bundled off to Children’s Church and Sunday School (in fact, Children’s Church and Sunday School don’t even have a right to exist!). Leaders don’t have the right to expect a salary, for their own good as well as for the good of the flock.
Note how many times in the preceding paragraph I used the word “should.” This is what makes this book so special among all the house church books in existence. Steve Atkerson and his contributors have the audacity to claim that his radical ideas for church life are normative, not optional. The implications that flow from this are somewhat staggering. If Atkerson is right, then the mammoth evangelical church structure which is part of our mental furniture doesn’t even have a right to exist. It reminds me of the cheeky blurb on the cover of Frank Viola’s and George Barna’s best-selling Tyndale House publication Pagan Christianity which states confidentally: “Most of what present-day Christians do in church each Sunday is rooted, not in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles.” Mr. Atkerson is interested in the Christian church life that happened before the death of the apostles, not in the pagan institutions which afterwards came to be known as the Christian institutional church. He emphasizes and develops a theology of apostolic traditions which I have not seen elsewhere in house church literature. His ideas for church might seem radical, but his theology is very conservative, based in the Christian Bible and the apostles who wrote it. Advocates for institutional church Christianity will be hard-pressed to answer him.
Though the book heavily emphasizes the scriptural warrant for church practice, it in no way neglects the many practical issues that arise for those learning to do church in the home. It contains much that is theologically original, but sprinkled through all of the theological creativity one finds generous applications of wisdom garnered by writers who have gone through years of education in the school of house church hard knocks. One will find practical advice on how to handle growth, how to deal with the children of the church, how to keep the host family happy, how to get the meeting started on time, how to eat the Lord’s Supper in a house, how to get everyone to participate, and much more.
One might object that perhaps because of the scriptural and “how-to” emphases of the book, that one might overlook more ultimate reasons for doing church in the home, such as union with Christ, intimate relationships with fellow-believers, and personal spiritual growth. Mr. Atkerson anticipates such objections in the Introduction:
“This book is thus about wineskins. What really matters, of course, is the wine itself, not the skin. We are writing to those who already have the new wine… However, if a church genuinely does have new life in Christ, then a careful study of wineskins is critical to insure that the wine is enjoyed to its fullest.”
This book’s critical attention to the ecclesiological wineskin of the New Testament church is what makes the book almost unique. I can think of one other house church book that does this, but most do not. Most talk about “relationships,” and “it’s just Jesus, not the programs,” and so on. All of that is quite necessary and good, but it takes more than that, and this book provides the balance. This book talks about apostolic patterns, things which we as obedient Christians ought to imitate. This idea is not popular, even among house church folks among whom it should be an article of faith. No other house church ministry that I know of emphasizes like this book does the normative, scriptural nature of the house church idea. As lonely as Steve Atkerson and his contributors may be in the modern world, he stands among giants when he calls for a return to normative New Testament patterns. He quotes an early Southern Baptist theologian J.L. Dagg:
“[apostles] have taught us by example how to organize and govern churches. We have no right to reject their instruction and captiously insist that nothing but positive command shall bind us. Instead of choosing to walk in a way of our own devising, we should take pleasure to walk in the footsteps of those holy men from whom we have received the word of life . . . respect for the Spirit by which they were led should induce us to prefer their modes of organization and government to such as our inferior wisdom might suggest.”
Atkerson quotes Roger Williams, the founder of religious liberty in America and the founder of the state of Rhode Island, to the same effect. He also cites Watchman Nee, the famous Chinese writer and founder of the underground “Little Flock” movement in Communist China:
“We must return to ‘the beginning.’ Only what God has set forth as our example in the beginning is the eternal Will of God. It is the Divine standard and our pattern for all time . . . God has revealed His Will, not only by giving orders, but by having certain things done in His church, so that in the ages to come others might simply look at the pattern and know His will.”
One last word of praise. The book is balanced, and has a broad appeal. Not only is church life emphasized, but so also is the ministry which is done apart from the church (the “work,” to use Watchman Nee’s term). Apostolic and evangelistic ministries are covered, and the financing of them. In addition, family life is not neglected. The book clearly warns that without family order, there can be no church order. Another way the book is balanced is its generous use of scholarly work outside of the house church tradition. Even an Anglican author is quoted with approval. Also, the book is balanced in that its authors are geographically diverse. While most hail from the United States, one is from Europe, and one is from India, and several have had extensive experience traveling overseas teaching what is in the book.
The book’s balance, as well as its irenic tone, also contributes to its broad appeal. The book does not bind up house church theology with other modern theological controversies, such as Calvinism or Arminianism, or pentecostalism or cessationism, or feminism and complementarianism. The editor’s New Covenant theological biases against infant baptism and tithing might put off a covenant theologian, but such theological intrusions are relatively rare.
No book review would be complete without a few nits to pick. These criticisms are minor, and random. The first complaint I have might result from oversensitivity I have developed into listening to quasi-mystical complaints about how pattern theology is dead, lifeless, and “legalistic.” I have explained above how Mr. Atkerson deftly handles that complaint in the introduction, where he specifically warns against dead-headed application of New Testament patterns. However, I think that in one respect the book leaves itself open to thrusts from mystical types who recoil against normative patterns. In several places it is claimed that Sunday worship is one of the normative patterns for our church life. This is based on the three New Testament passages in which it is stated that a particular church gathered together to meet on Sunday. It is, of course, debatable as to how many times an instance of something needs to be mentioned for it to constitute a normative pattern. And, in addition, we know that at least one early church in fact met on the other days of the week besides Sunday (Acts 2:46). And we have to deal with the Scripture that warns against setting one day over another (Col 2:16). So although I think it is possible that meeting on Sunday is part of the normative apostolic practice for church practice, I would sure hate to get in a pillbox and defend that position to the death. However, the book takes it for granted that Sunday worship is normative. But even worse than that, in one place one of the contributors, after properly making reservations which deemphasized the importance of Sunday worship as a part of the normative New Testament pattern, gets into a discussion of whether meeting Saturday evening would be “biblical” or not, given that Jews start their days in the evening! I found myself thinking, “Who gives one hoot in Hades about whether the church meets on Saturday night or Sunday morning?” This is an example of hardening of the categories, an overemphasis on trying to work out the details of the pattern.
One of the contributors exhibits a pragmatism which militates against the book’s otherwise strong emphasis on biblical authority for church in the home. He states:
We don’t gather in houses, having a narrow focus, just because the early church had so gathered. There are many good reasons to understand why gathering in houses is a good choice, helping us especially to function biblically. The following are the ten reasons why gathering in houses is an effective strategy for a healthy church.
His ten pragmatic reasons are good, but he dissed the best reason of all to meet in a home. The early church met in homes, as recorded in the scriptures. That’s why I do it, not because of all the advantages. Those advantages sound wonderful, but what happens when trouble hits, and the advantages don’t seem as appealing as before? A lot of, if not most, house churchers will throw in the towel and go back to the institutional church when the inevitable people problems arise. Those who know that home church is God’s will, and not a modern fad like the emerging church or the megachurch, will continue to press on to maturity, and will not bail out when the pressure overwhelms the pragmatic advantages of doing home church.
Problems like this are inevitable in a book written by committee. But they shouldn’t detract from the overall excellence of the work. One of the excellent things I would like to leave you with is Steve Atkerson’s uncanny ability to find meaningful and unexpected things in the most obscure nooks and crannys of Scripture. Two examples will suffice. First, in his very creative article debunking the myth of “city church” as a concrete rather than an abstract reality, he sets out to prove that the whole church of Corinth, as a matter of fact, met in one house. I would have thought that to be an impossible task, and yet we see Mr. Atkerson quoting Romans 16:23a to prove his case: “Gaius, host to me and to the whole church, greets you…” Gaius, the Corinthian, hosted the whole Corinthian church in his house! And, in order to prove that the early church didn’t rotate its meetings from house to house (as home churchers love to say and do), Mr. Atkerson points out that the early church didn’t do that, because the New Testament refers to the church “at Nympha’s house,” (Col 4:15) and the church at “Prisca and Aquila’s house,” (Rom 16:3,5), and the church in Philemon’s house (Phil 1:2), all indicating that there was a known, unique locality for those churches. Alas, that runs counter to my practical experience, which is that no house church can survive if the meetings are not rotated from home to home, because of the wear and tear on the host family and house. So, once again, the creative genius of Steve Atkerson has challenged me once more. I suspect that you, whether you are an institutional church Christian or a house church Christian, will also be challenged down to your roots when you read this book.