Is a House Church Legitimate

Fifteen years ago, Nathan Smith and his parents opened their home for a worship night. What they didn’t know is that they were homesteaders, and their living room would become a house church.

With his YouTube channel The Worship Homestead, Nathan provides resources to empower and equip others. He shares important tips for those who are leading an established house church and for those who may wish to begin or join one.

Transcript

Is a House Church Legitimate?
Season 3, Episode 12

Announcer (00:00):

Welcome to the DoorWays® Ministry Network podcast.

Ric Shields (00:12):

Thank you for joining us on this podcast. I'm Ric Shields, your host, and the director of the DoorWays® Ministry Network. I'm speaking today with Nathan Smith in Eugene, Oregon. I've known Nathan's family since his father was a youth pastor in Tulsa over 40 years ago. So, here's a shout out to his parents, Jonathan and Lynne Smith. We love you guys.

(00:34):

Nathan, thanks for joining me on this episode.

Nathan Smith (00:37):

Thank you so much, Ric, for having me. It's a pleasure to be on your podcast, and especially you being an old family friend.

Ric Shields (00:44):

The old family friend. I'm not sure about that.

Nathan Smith (00:45):

How about a seasoned family friend? An experienced family friend?

Ric Shields (00:48):

A family friend for many years? Yeah.

Nathan Smith (00:49):

There you go.

Ric Shields (00:50):

That's the way to say it. The truth is, I am an old family friend.

(00:53):

It's been around 15 years ago, Nathan, that you joined your parents in starting a home church. For those of us who have never started the home church, it may seem simple. I mean, invite some friends, have some food, sing a couple songs, share a scripture, bada-bing, bada-boom, you're done. Is that how it works, Nathan?

Nathan Smith (01:14):

Yes and no and yes. It is that simple. And it also is that hard to keep it that simple. When you think about the church and its long history. There's been a, a lot of occasions for things to get more complicated. And so, some of the things that you mentioned, you know, like, like having food together and, you know, sharing a meal and praying together, those things that seem so simple and that you even read about it in scripture.

(01:39):

We did, we kind of fell into that naturally with a house church. And then you look at, you know, the way that brick and mortar church operates, and you're like, well, well, why not do that? That's a, that's a great idea. And that's, that comes from scripture. And there's actually a lot of brain science to show that that really helps people connect with one another and, and in fact, change people is by, is by sharing a meal together. And so, it is very simple and yet to keep doing it and not get tempted by adding more layers of complexity. Keeping it simple is good.

Ric Shields (02:09):

So why did you and your parents start a home church?

Nathan Smith (02:13):

Well, it actually started as a worship night at the college I attended. So, I went to a small bible college in Eugene that my parents both worked at. My brothers went there too. And when I got there, there was already a worship night in progress that had been started by my parents and a few other students, you know, just acoustic guitars, maybe some drums, and, you know, a bass every now and then. And so, I joined in on that and led worship for that all four years and just was just a wonderful experience.

(02:42):

When I graduated, my parents left the college, and nobody really wanted to be done. So, the students who were still in town, we just moved it from Thursday night to Sunday night and moved it into our home. And then it's been going on ever since of, of course, a lot of the students have gotten married and moved to other parts of the country or in ministry somewhere else, but that core has remained. And so, we've been doing a house church ever since.

Ric Shields (03:08):

So, not even intended as a house church?

Nathan Smith (03:10):

No, it didn't, it didn't, wasn't planned to start off like that. It was just, it was just worship nights and then we just didn't stop.

Ric Shields (03:17):

In our two previous episodes we spoke with Dr. Daniel Isgrigg about being an average pastor in an average church. He shared some of the struggles that small churches face compared to those larger churches or even megachurches. So, I have to assume that a home church has some struggles too. So, can you identify some of those struggles for us?

Nathan Smith (03:41):

The biggest one is actually legitimacy. So, for the first, oh, I don't know, remember the timeline, probably the first year, maybe the first couple years, like I said, we started as a worship night and then we moved it to Sunday nights for the first couple years. We didn't call it church, we just said, oh, we're having worship night, you know, at the Smith Home. Come on Sunday night. When people would ask like, what is it? You know, well, we would explain, okay, well, a typical night, you know, we get together, we have a meal, you know, everybody brings something. Then we clean up and, and we have coffee, and we, we talk, and then my dad might share a passage of scripture if he feels like something is laid on his heart, maybe not. We'll move right into worship and, and I'm leading songs.

(04:24):

And then we'll pray about whatever it is that we feel that God wants us to pray about. And then usually it's by the end of our time together that we find out what we were there for. Very often, you know, somebody has, oh, I had this dream, or, or somebody says, well, I was reading in scripture this week, and, and they start to all kind of come together and you find out by the end of our time together, oh, God wanted us to pray for the nations, or he wanted us to pray for government or, or whatever it was. There tends to be a thrust, but we don't know it at the beginning.

(04:57):

So again, we didn't call it church. We didn't know what to call it. We just called it a worship night. And then eventually as we kind of got for a better, for lack of a better word, detoxed, we were like, no, this is church. This is how we do church. And we actually really enjoy it, and it's okay to call it church, even though, you know, none of us set out to build or plant a church from the get-go.

Ric Shields (05:21):

Nathan, we spoke by phone earlier and you indicated the burden to help smaller churches and home churches. You would especially like, as I understand, to make resources available to help them with things like the worship portions of their meetings and things like helping them with streaming video content. In fact, I think you have a YouTube channel listed under the name The Worship Homestead that provides resources about those things. Tell us a bit about that.

Nathan Smith (05:48):

Yeah, so again, like I said, a lot of, a lot of what we've been doing with, with our House church, I kind of have to figure out why we were doing it years after. We're already in the middle of it. We had been doing it for a long time and I didn't really have language for, you know, okay, I want to help people do something like this, but I don't, I don't have language for it.

(06:07):

And then I heard a farmer give a talk at a homesteaders association meeting, and he talked about homesteading, and he talked about the ethos of homesteading and, you know, the importance of self-sufficiency of, of growing your own food, of working your own land, of being more connected to the place where you are. It just hit me. I was like, that's what we've been doing. That's what I've been doing as a worship leader.

(06:30):

I should mention that, in addition to, to leading worship, I also write most of the songs that we sing on a Sunday evening. Probably 90, 95% of them are original. And that's been over years and years of songwriting for our community. I've just found so much fulfillment in doing that. I didn't intend to, you know, it wasn't the vision like, oh, okay, I'm going to write all these songs. It was, I was, I was uncomfortable playing the songs that you hear in big church, <laugh>, you know, songs that work in a stadium do not work in the living room, right? And so, I was like, well, okay, we need something that fits us. And so, I would write songs based upon the prayers that people had, or dreams or what we felt like God was saying. You know, I would hear something that somebody prayed, and I thought that would be a good song.

(07:18):

We should absolutely talk about that. So, I'd go home and, and write a song and bring back whatever I had, you know, the chorus or a first verse in the chorus. And it, it became a place to experiment because, you know, there was no pressure. There's no stage. Eventually it all fit, you know, not only the prayers of people and what we were sharing with each other, but the worship itself fit the community like a glove.

(07:43):

So, when I learned about what the Homestead ethos is, I thought that's what I want to help other people do. So, in my videos and, and courses and whatnot with The Worship Homestead, it's to help people get local rather than importing songs and charts and multi-tracks, which is, it's so done that it's, it's almost the default. It's, it's like you could don't think of it as any other way of doing it in, in a big church.

(08:13):

You think, well, that's what we are going to do, because it's more efficient and everybody knows the songs. My passion would be to see small groups of people, especially worship leaders, a guy or a girl with a guitar or piano, start to listen in to their own community and say, how can I reflect what God is saying to us in song and in music to better help all of us understand what God wants us to do? Because it's my firm belief that every church that God ordained has an assignment, and the assignment is actually local. It's to your land, it's to your people. Your worship should reflect that even to the point of, like I said, you writing your own songs.

(08:53):

I think that's a, a huge untapped resource in the body of Christ is that there's a lot of musicians, a lot of talented musicians that have been told, well, excellence means doing what the big guys do to the best of your ability with the backing tracks in your local church. And what I want to say is, well, no, excellence is you working your land and bringing the sacrifice of the best of your land. So that's what I do through my videos and courses and all the rest of it.

Ric Shields (09:24):

Again, that's called The Worship Homestead is the channel on YouTube.

Nathan Smith (09:29):

Right? And then the company, the company that I run is called Blueprint Sounds. And so, if you go there, you can get access to the courses and the blog, the free videos, there's a lot of free content on there as well.

Ric Shields (09:40):

That's blueprintsounds.com, right?

Nathan Smith (09:42):

Blueprintsounds.com, yeah.

Ric Shields (09:44):

That's great. You're listening to the DoorWays® Ministry Network podcast. My name is Ric Shields, and I'm joined on this episode with Nathan Smith, who is part of a home church in Eugene, Oregon.

(09:55):

Do you have any idea of how many home churches there may be in the United States? Probably home churches are more common than other countries, especially in those countries where Christians are oppressed or even persecuted. But any idea in the US how many there may be?

Nathan Smith (10:11):

Yes. As you can imagine, stats are hard to come by when there's no address or phone number. George Barna with his Barna group has done a lot of good reporting on it, but the, the most recent thing I could find was from 2006. So, these numbers are a long time ago, but he estimated that there were probably 20 million people that went to a house church weekly. And then if you looked at monthly, you know, somebody attending maybe their home church, but then they also go to a house church, you know, sometime at least once a month, it's more like 40 million. And again, that's 2006, so that's nearly 20 years old stats.

Ric Shields (10:50):

And this is in the United States alone?

Nathan Smith (10:51):

That's in the United States, yeah. So, it's a large portion of people.

Ric Shields (10:56):

I wonder sometimes if we can count, you know, churches spin off and have their life groups or connection groups or small groups. I wonder if that's counted in there, because the reality is that's like a whole separate thing than, you know, your brick-and-mortar church.

Nathan Smith (11:11):

Absolutely, yes. It's a very large and under the radar demographic. In fact, George Barner wrote a book about this specific trend, it's called Revolution, which talks about the House church movement. And again, I can't remember when that was 2006, 2008, but he wrote that book as we were starting ours.

(11:31):

Of course, we had no idea, and we didn't know that we were a part of, I guess you'd call it a movement. We are just following the Lord and doing what we were doing.

Ric Shields (11:39):

So just so our listeners understand, you're not saying that people should quit attending their church and seek out a home church? Is that, is that what you're saying?

Nathan Smith (11:48):

No, no. I've never actually tried to convince anybody to, to stop attending their church, to come to our church or anyone else. We're not really concerned about the numbers.

(11:58):

The analogy I use is, would you move houses to save your marriage? Right. That, that's the question. Would you do it? If the answer is not an immediate yes, there's a problem. And as far as it goes with the body of Christ, we have to be so militant about the marriage, about our relationship with God, that if something wasn't working about it, you would change it up. Now, you might not have to change it up, but at least it orients your priorities.

(12:30):

So, for us, we didn't have a clear direction other than we felt like, well, this worship night can't stop because God's blessing it. We, we, okay, let's, let's make it a, whatever it is. And then turns out it was a House church. The point, the, the idea was not, it didn't come out of woundedness like, we're leaving the church because we've been wronged or anything like that. It was just the direction that God took us in.

(12:54):

And come to find out, there are many, many people that have moved in the same direction. So, it's not that brick-and-mortar churches are done, you know, it's not that this, I, I don't want to be an advocate for the House church as, oh, this is the new model. You have to throw everything away. This is the model. No, the idea is the marriage matters. You would do anything to keep the relationship. So, if you need to switch it up, switch it up.

Ric Shields (13:19):

Home churches, and you've alluded to this already, they're pretty much decentralized, which means there's not typically a larger group with regional leaders or national leaders. So how do you find a home church? I mean, we don't have the yellow pages either, where you can just put on, you know, here's home churches in your area have that. So how do you find it?

Nathan Smith (13:41):

And like you said, you know, I remember growing up with the Yellow Pages, and then suddenly there are door stops. It's, it's kind of part and parcel of, of everything right now, is that the old methods of networking and building something, and, and these are the, the channels that we go through because they've always been, the channels that we go through have completely broken down and been replaced by other stuff.

(14:04):

As far as how churches go, it's, it's all about personal relationships. Because if you were to ask, I would bet you could find, you know, a couple of people in your phone that know about a house, church, whether or not they've been, that's, that's how it goes, is, is word of mouth and networking.

(14:20):

And now with the advent of the internet and Facebook groups or, or whatever it is, it's available, it would take a little bit of digging, but the, the ways that people can connect are so varied that we're sort of going around the gatekeepers. Which I think in a lot of ways is a great thing.

Ric Shields (14:39):

I have a friend in Schenectady, New York who is beginning what he calls a church of house churches, which would be apparently, as I understand it, a number of house churches that meet and then once however often they all come together for a time of fellowship, or worship, or connectedness, or a meal or, or whatever. But that's not necessarily what you're talking about. You're talking about standalone house churches that are not necessarily connected to anybody else. Is that correct?

Nathan Smith (15:11):

Yeah, it's so, and I, I don't know everybody's story. I can only tell you mine. So, we've been doing this, what, 16 years plus. And it's only within the last year, year and a half that, that my parents have felt released to start wanting to network or wanting to, to look around the community and, and see who else is, is doing things like this. And lo and behold, there are, you know, outside of town and in the, the surrounding area. And so, we've just now started to meet in a larger space and inviting people outside of our, our home fellowship to come with us. It's not, it's not an open invitation where, you know, you put up flyers and, and everybody comes. It's a little bit more focused than that because it's all based upon personal relationships and trust.

(16:02):

So other people who have been in the trenches, you know, in their home church who have learned to hear God for themself, that's, that's who we want to invite because at least the, the way that we do it, there's not a lot of room to hide and there's, there's no back pew.

(16:20):

So yeah, if you come, you will be expected to participate. Not a, not in like a, you know, we're going to hand you the mic and make you do something that you don't want to do. It's just naturally, what we found as we, we started to do this, is that the floor is open for people to share a dream, share a prayer share, you know, whatever it is that they feel that God is, is saying. And so, even though my dad is the leader, and I'm a pastor's kid, you know, three generations, he's been a, a pastor for a long, long time, he is not giving a sermon and dictating terms. He is more like facilitating, okay, where do we think God is going?

(16:57):

Who's got, who's got something, who's, you know, and so we leave the floor open in between songs. Does anybody have anything to say? And so, there's a lot of testing and discernment that's necessary to find out, okay, what does God want to say next? And so, a lot of it is built on that personal relationship and trust. That's one of the differences.

(17:16):

And one of my favorite things about a house church is that by the end of it, you find out, oh, this is where we were going. And, and the Holy Spirit led us there. My dad is of course, facilitating, and I'm, I'm helping by leading worship and, and playing in the background. And, and okay, this is what I feel like the next song should be. But it, we don't have a cue sheet, we don't have a program notes. We don't have, this is, you know, this is our production notes from front to back and let's land this plane in an hour and 15 minutes. We just don't operate like that. And it, the flexibility can be a little bit scary, but it's also really, really fulfilling when God gets to drive the bus.

Ric Shields (17:54):

And there's scriptural support for this idea.

Nathan Smith (17:57):

Yeah, I mean, it says Paul, Paul says, when you get together, brothers, one of you has a revelation. One of you has a teaching, one of you has a word of, of tongues, and one of has an interpretation. And I was reading that a couple weeks ago, and one of the things that that struck me is that he doesn't say when you get together pastors, he doesn't say when you get together, clergy. He says, when you get together, brothers. And then he goes on to say, revelation teaching, word of encouragement, psalm, like everybody is supposed to be ready to rise and fire. And that is, that's kind of a shocking thing to think about what we do in a big church nowadays compared to what Paul said. And in fact, you know, that's, that's also part of the, the scripture. He then goes on to talk about the role of women in ministry, you know, I'm sorry, in the church meetings.

(18:46):

And so many people make such a big deal out of that paragraph, and they get, they get all jumbled in a bundle about, you know, are women allowed to speak in church or not? But they forget to read the first part of the paragraph when it says, brothers, when you get together, all of you should be ready to contribute. I'm like, oh, how many of us hit that standard? So maybe read the first part of the paragraph before you get to the second part of the paragraph. Like that we're looking for a hundred percent participation. That's what we're after.

Ric Shields (19:17):

Do you see yourself going back to a brick-and-mortar church at some point?

Nathan Smith (19:21):

I wouldn't want to say no, because I, I don't know that this thing is forever. And not by, not by this thing, I mean our house church because I can't really imagine doing it any other way.

Ric Shields (19:33):

But the point is, whatever it takes to make your marriage work exactly,

Nathan Smith (19:36):

But yeah. Is what you got to do. Like yeah, the relationship is the thing. If it were a brick-and-mortar church, that's great. However, some of the things that we, we fell into doing seemingly accidentally are so integral to the relationship, the marriage that you're like, oh, this, I think this might have been what God intended.

Ric Shields (19:59):

As we draw our time to close, I wonder if you have any special words of encouragement, you'd like to share with home church leaders or, or members.

Nathan Smith (20:08):

Yeah. Other than of course, get ready for a big legitimacy battle within you. Because I certainly went through that. We went through that on a corporate level, and I was, went through that on a personal level of like, do you even matter <laugh>? You know, you're a worship leader leading in a living room and nobody's hearing your songs other than, you know, this small handful of people. So, there's that. Get over that and let God work you through that.

(20:30):

The other part is combating the spirit of poverty. In a small group like this, it's really easy to look at the things that you don't have to look at, the resources that you don't have. And because I'm a worship leader, I'll just take that as an example. I have percussion section. You know, you, one of my, my friends brings his, literally it's an upside-down trash can that he drums on another person brings a tambourine, my dad has a small djembe, that's the band, and then I play guitar. That's it. So, I do not have the resources of bass keys, drums, backing vocals, you know, all the rest of it. And for years it's been like that. So, I could look at the resources that I didn't have. I'm never ever going to have that full sound of, you know, oh, you know, you just step into it, and it thumps you in the chest. We don't have that.

(21:20):

What I did have was time, and I had a lot of time to get better at songwriting, to listen to my community and see if I could write songs that matched. Turns out that was a better resource than having a full band, because now it matches, it, it makes sense when I write a song and present it to the group after, you know, years of doing it wrong. Now it fits, it fits the community. So, what I would say to small house churches is don't be so quick to think that you don't have something.

(21:54):

What you need to do is ask the Lord to open up your eyes and have another look at the resources that are around you that you maybe haven't seen before. And then this, this is a really important part, is don't dictate to God what order of in, in which you should go. Right? Don't tell him, God, I really need $10,000 when he is like, well, you have time. Oh, you mean I should just use this resource? God knows exactly in what order to give you things. And he, and he's really, really good at the order, but you do have to receive what he's giving you at the right time so that then you're ready for the next thing.

(22:33):

And that's, that's the story of my life is wanting one thing, God is handing me the other. And then finally, okay, God, I will, I will take the thing that you're actually offering, but it requires you to believe that he's good and that he gives good gifts.

Ric Shields (22:48):

I hope you found this podcast to be helpful. If there's someone you think may also enjoy your benefit from this episode, please consider passing the link along to share with them. If you'd like someone to pray for you, drop me a note at info@DoorWays dot cc. I'll pray for you, and if you'd like, I will share your note with others who will pray and believe for God to work on your behalf.

(23:10):

Until next time, may the Lord bless you as you'll follow after him. Thanks for listening.