Am I allowed to be completely honest?  I hope so! 

I have to admit that I frequently find myself baffled by what I see the Lord up to.  I am fully convinced that simple church movements must be actively outward looking and evangelistic or the natural tendency of any small group will default to becoming more inward.  Yet, I see God working through extraordinary numbers of Christians across the United States, moving them from traditional settings into house church type settings, with no regard to my conviction that all of these groups should be outward looking! 

It seems clear to me that the primary Biblical model we see of churches forming is that of the small gathering.  From Acts 8 onwards we hear little of the larger gatherings, probably because of persecution forcing the church underground.  But again, as I look across the Christian landscape, not just in the West, I see tremendous growth in the very large (“mega”) churches as well as in the small church movements.  And an increasing number of these very large churches are actively reaching out to us in the small church movements to ask us how they can bless what we are doing.  Now this sort of cooperation has to be the Lord!

So let’s go back to the original question:  What on earth is God doing?  Actually His word is clear.  He is preparing a Bride for His Son.  He is allowing the unfolding of a mystery, hidden from former generations of prophets and angels, but now revealed to the amazement of even the heavenly hosts.  This mystery is Christ in you.  In me!  In us!  Individual and corporate.  Profoundly personal, and yet incomplete without community.  How strange that the very big has mainly been the venue to reach the individual, while the very small is beginning to give us glimpses into the power and intimacy of community.

At the beginning of September a few hundred of us from around the country gathered together in Dallas, TX to celebrate the 9th National House church conference.  I remember when we had our first away weekend in 1997 with a small group of house churches from Austin down in the southern Texas Rio Frio Valley in a couple of bed and breakfasts.  I could never have imagined that in such a short time God would have raised up literally millions of Christians seeking the Lord and growing together in house church movements.  Barna’s latest research now shows somewhere between 4-33% of the adult population regularly involved in some simple church structure, with the number varying based on your definition of “house church.”

© Svetlana Gucalo | Dreamstime.com

Numbers on this scale are staggering!  Even at the lowest end (4%) the numbers are almost unbelievable.  What is God up to?  Here may be a few pointers, though I would be the last to claim to really know what is in the mind of the Lord!

• He is moving us from planned programs to a renewed dependence on hearing the Holy Spirit and obeying what he tells us.
• He is preparing us for significant and maybe challenging times where the vibrancy of the small may be a vital component of being able to get together with other Christians at all.  Whether it is economic changes forcing the re-shaping of what we have known in the past, or other factors that do not yet seem apparent, we can assume that He who knows the future, also knows what is best for His church.
• He is releasing His people’s time, energy, and financial resources from the old, "attractional" models, where we spend almost all of these resources on ourselves and getting people to join us, into a new paradigm where these same resources can reach out to the ends of the earth.  Recent studies have confirmed the profound changes in priorities that occur as people move from traditional models into newly formed organic models of church life.
• He is bringing us face to face with each other through the “one another’s” of the New Testament, and in the process bringing us face to face with His Son.  “We all beholding Him are changed from one degree of glory to another.”

When Felicity (85%) and I (10%) and George Barna (the other 5%, but masterfully woven into every part of the book) wrote The Rabbit and The Elephant, we were trying to communicate what we see God doing in such a way that anyone reading the book would say to themselves, “Well, I can be a part of that; I can do that.” Paul (the apostle, that is!) warned us to “be careful lest anyone take you away from the simplicity that there is in Christ.” One of the team at my company has been reading The Rabbit and The Elephant over the past couple of weeks.  God grabbed hold of her a few weeks ago while she was photocopying some old copies of House 2 House magazine for me.  The articles so stirred up memories for her of when she first came to the Lord in her teens, that she hungered for a current, similar experience of the Lord.  Now, just a few weeks into this, she is saying, “I think that I can get together with a few of my friends and do this.”

What is “this.”  It is church.  It is the life of Christ among us.  It is “two or three gathered together in His name and Jesus is in the midst.”

Millions are hearing the same Holy Spirit say to them, “You can do this also.”

Tony Dale is one of the authors of the new book, The Rabbit and the Elephant (with his wife Felicity and George Barna).  It has been described as a " compelling manifesto on the future of church.  You can learn more about the book and download the first chapter for free at www.tonyandfelicitydale.com.