Those Incredible House Church Numbers
Who would have guessed that, by some accounts, there are now more house churchers than Southern Baptists, the largest protestant denomination in the USA? House Churchers, therefore, are all around us, likely in every public place, even at every major intersection. If the “one in five adults” figure is accurate and you’re sitting in a restaurant, there are statistically several others present who could join with you for an impromptu church meeting.
These numbers mean that traditional churches have lost members by the millions, tithes and offerings by the billions. If “one in five adults” are participating in house churches, tens of millions of children would also be involved.
These new churches, we are informed, are not “cell churches” attached to a traditional church but real house church participants.
Is this the latter day glory or what? I am very optimistic in my prophetic views of the end times but I must confess that such figures exceed anything I could have ever expected. Oh me of little faith… The amazing findings of George Barna can be tracked in the articles below.
And somewhere, there must be a sizable group of “house church planters” who have been more fantastically successful than anything previously documented in the whole history of the church including the book of Acts. Might these please step forward and identify themselves? God will receive all the glory, of course, we just want to know who you are.
It should be noted that serious disparity does exist in the polling. The Time magazine article first mentioned it. Take, for example, the data reported in the Friday Fax, published by researcher and author Wolfgang Simson. About a year ago (May 13. 2005) it was documented that USA house churches “had probably doubled in the past 18 months, from 2,500 to 5,000.”
Hmmmm… Let’s take that “43 million” number of house churchERS and then double again the number of house churchES to 10,000 to represent another doubling for the year 2006 - this time in only a year, actually much less. That translates, I believe, into about 4,300 adults per house church!
What do YOU think about the implications of the alleged “70 million who regularly attend or have experimented with a house church?” What do you see in your corner of the world to confirm such an unprecedented shift in social behavior?
Me, I’ve gone door to door for 20 something years as a UPS delivery driver in more than a dozen counties in Tennessee and Virginia. I’ve gotten close to a lot of families along the way. Total number of known house churchers encountered? Zero.
Furthermore, I’ve read literally thousands of email messages, public and private, over the past decade from those within or interested in the house church community. Folks alooking for a local house church have outnumbered those who actually found one by a ratio of hundreds to one.
Where are all the house/micro/simple/home/nano/organic/family/nameless church bloggers, btw? If our numbers are greater than the Baptists (and all other denoms) why isn’t it reflected in the blog traffic and the tags? I see hundreds of reformed bloggers, for example, but hardly a few dozen house church bloggers who post regularly if even that many.
Question: Other than the Barna Group what other pollsters have examined this matter and what did they discover?
http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdateNarrow&BarnaUpdateID=241
http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=221
http://www.abpnews.com/1198.article
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50802
http://www.albertmohler.com/commentary_read.php?cdate=2006-02-13
