The Church in the House

There is a small phrase tucked near the end of Paul's letter to the Romans that is easy to read past. He sends greetings to Prisca and Aquila, calls them his fellow workers in Christ Jesus, and then adds a word that ought to catch our attention: "also greet the church that is in their house." The church was in a house. Not a church building. Not even a rented hall. A house.

Paul does not offer any apology for this arrangement. He does not treat it as a temporary embarrassment or a sign that something has gone wrong. He greets the church in their house the same way he greets every other church, because it is a church. The Lord Jesus is there. The Word is there. The people of God are gathered in His name. That is enough.

For those of us who have found ourselves meeting in a home rather than a church building, this passage is more than a historical footnote. It is a word of encouragement straight from the Scriptures. We are not doing something strange. We are doing something that the church has done from the very beginning.

God Has Never Needed a Building

Worth pausing over the early church's pattern. When the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost and the Lord added thousands to the church in Jerusalem, those believers did not immediately erect sanctuaries. They went house to house.

The Lord was adding to their number daily. In houses. With bread on the table and gladness in their hearts. The size of the room had nothing to do with it. The Spirit of God was at work, and He does not require a steeple or padded pews to do His work.

This same pattern shows up throughout church history, and Baptist history in particular is rich with examples of God doing extraordinary things in very ordinary places.

Shubal Stearns and the Sandy Creek Church

In 1755, a man named Shubal Stearns arrived in Sandy Creek, North Carolina, with his brother-in-law Daniel Marshall and a small band of believers. The group numbered just sixteen people. They had no building, no established reputation, and no guarantee that anyone in that part of the Carolina backcountry would listen to them. They simply began gathering, preaching the Word, and praying.

What God did in the years that followed is one of the most remarkable chapters in American church history. Within a few years, Sandy Creek Baptist Church had sent out dozens of churches across Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Historians have called it the mother church of the Southern Baptist movement. The man Morgan Edwards, who surveyed Baptist churches in that era, wrote that in seventeen years Sandy Creek had gone from one church of sixteen members to forty-two churches numbering nearly three thousand members.

It did not begin with a building. It began with a handful of people willing to gather in the name of Christ and trust Him with the rest.

The Churches in China

Perhaps the most dramatic example in modern history are the churches in China. When the communist government came to power in 1949, there were perhaps one million Christians in the entire country. The institutional church was systematically dismantled. Pastors were imprisoned. Buildings were seized. Public worship was forbidden.

So believers did what believers have always done when they are driven from buildings. They went into homes. They gathered quietly in living rooms and back rooms, sometimes in small numbers, sometimes at great personal risk. They read the Scripture, prayed together, and passed the Word from family to family across entire provinces.

By the time the restrictions began to ease in the late twentieth century, researchers estimated that Christians in China had grown from that original one million to somewhere between eighty and one hundred million believers. The house church model had not been the death of the Lord's work in China. It had been the furnace in which God refined and multiplied it beyond anything that comfortable, institutional Christianity had produced.

God did not need their buildings. He used their faithfulness.

What This Means for Us

Our own situation is not as dramatic as the persecuted churches in China, and we are not planting a movement like Shubal Stearns. We are simply a congregation of believers who, for a season, are meeting in a home. But the same Lord who met with the church in the house of Prisca and Aquila, who multiplied Stearns' sixteen into thousands, and who sustained millions of Chinese Christians through decades of persecution, is present with us when we gather in His name.

A smaller meeting does not mean a lesser church. It may mean a more concentrated one. There is something that happens in a home gathering that is harder to find in a large crowd: you know the people next to you. You hear how they pray. You see what they are trusting God for. You cannot hide in a house the way you can in a pew. That closeness is not a consolation prize for not having a building. In many ways, it is exactly what the New Testament describes when it talks about the church.

Paul greeted the church in their house. He did not pity it. Neither should we. Gather with gladness. Open the Word. Pray without ceasing. Trust the Lord to build what He intends to build.

He has done it before. In a house just like the one we meet in.