House Church Woes

When we don’t shepherd the shepherds, the paradigm doesn’t work.

I was recently talking to a full-time kingdom pioneer who dropped this on me:

I’m done with house church.

He wasn’t done with the mission, and he wasn’t done with church in general, but for a handful of reasons, he was done with house church as a thing.

Another friend gave me this line when he was speaking about some messy issues that required counseling (some formal, some informal) in his house church:

I couldn’t handle the situation alone.

I understand where he was coming from, but he was also leaning towards being done with house church.

What are we doing wrong when people trained in a movement paradigm are ending up opposed to or struggling with house church gatherings?¹

In the original church planting movements book, David Garrison calls out that one marker of all known movements at the time of writing was house churches.

(Two related markers were that churches plant churches, and that churches are planted with the intention of planting more churches.)

What are we missing?

We’re not shepherding the shepherds.

We’re not actually coaching or shepherding people to lead a church. We stop training and coaching people after they have used our specific Gospel and short-term discipling tools.

Again, we come back to this: The call is to make disciples. We can do that in a house church, and it is often easier to make disciples in a simple gathering than in a traditional church. But a house church on its own will not produce disciples, and these stories suggest it can lead to burnout in leaders without the shepherding and caring of leaders.

Where we are seeing simple churches sustain, there is usually a network.

I asked a friend in one of those networks how they were doing at this, and he said:

I don’t think anyone is crumbling under the weight of shepherding people in our network. There’s a lot of frustrating and stressful situations we’re dealing with in discipleship, which is tough, but I would say overall, people have others to talk to and process that stuff. A lot of churches are not reliant on one person at the moment, but some are. I’m pretty sure all the leaders who have a church reliant on one person have other people talking with them regularly. (Emphasis mine)

Another friend in a different network with sustaining churches offered this:

We have concluded that the Biblical example is that apostolic people start churches and are called to shepherd for a season, but if they do not raise up elders to shepherd the churches, there is a breakdown in sustainability. I had been pounding the need for appointing elders for years without anything happening, but when I offered to train elders, six churches in our network appointed elders within the first month, many before we ever met. There was a paralysis: they didn’t know what to do, so they did nothing.

If we want to see churches sustain, we need to shepherd the shepherds.

So, if you are part of a house church network, what are you doing to strengthen your shepherds?

If you are part of a house church without a network, where can you go to find the strengthening you need to sustain?

1. These stories were shared with permission. Here is some additional context:

For story 1, from the worker: I think one of the greatest challenges to house church is leadership development. We can’t microwave the process. It takes a while to walk with people in discipleship, and in major urban centers, time is extremely limited with people because of the demands of the city (logistics, work schedules, etc.) - people just simply didn’t have time to meet, even if they expressed interest in more discipleship.

For story 2, from the worker: We’ve run into situations where people needed deeper counseling—like broken marriages and really heavy stuff. That’s hard because we just don’t have the capacity to provide that kind of support. There are only a limited number of us, so that’s one challenge. Second, sustainability is really hard. You start to build momentum, and then someone leaves or something changes, and it feels like you’re starting over again. That gets exhausting over time.