New Generation at Worship Winter 1997

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We're passing the offering plate--it's actually a Tupperware salad bowl--but not one penny of this offering will pay the mortgage or the preacher. Our church doesn't have a mortgage or a preacher. Since we meet in our homes and practice no clergy/laity differentiation, 100 percent of this offering will buy soup beans, toothpaste, and coffee for Gerald's ministry to the homeless.

Melissa exhorts us to bring visitors who don't know Christ. Kevin confesses a sin and asks for our prayer and our understanding. Everybody raids the refrigerator--we've all brought drinks and food to share--then Joe leads us in an inductive Bible study. Ron reminds us to pray for his absent wife's eating disorder and for their marriage. Jamie wants to put on the new Petra album and crank it up. "Stand up, take a stand for Jesus," we all scream on the bridge, playing air guitar. "Stand up 'til the whole world sees us," we wail.

This is a typical Thursday night in my first house church. A few blocks away stands the edifice our parents built. Many of us were raised in that church. Our parents still attend there. Our parents take offense at our Thursday night house-church meetings, but we've only done what they did before us: reject the church form of the previous generation in favor of a more generationally indigenous model.

Will Generation X be the House-Church Generation? With the possible exception of the "cell church model," none of the emerging Boomer-style churches--"Seeker," "Shopping Mall," "Seven-Day-a-Week"--are likely to appeal to Xers. On the contrary, this intimacy-driven crowd could well become the "House-Church Generation." Relational, participatory, egalitarian, and non-authoritarian, the growing house-church movement might find a generation ...

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