The late Baptist pastor Bob Jennings penned an unfavorable review of a book on early church practice that NTRF once published. He did so as part of a much-needed, larger criticism of the house-church movement in general. NTRF was, and is, in agreement with many of the concerns Bob raised. Having sailed house-church waters for twenty years, we ran aground on many of the problems that Bob wrote about. Ultimately, we judged modern American house churches to be too small to be healthy: there is typically no qualified leadership, no diversity of spiritual gifts, little teaching, and no financial strength. In contrast, first-century Roman villa house churches were much larger and more robust. The best thing we can say about the modern house-church movement is that it is just about kaput!
Jennings’ understandable angst seems to have caused him to shoot at anything that moved, and we got hit! We corresponded with him quite a bit after he wrote his original book review. We found him to be a very humble and devoted saint. In light of the below response to his critique, he agreed to remove the review from his web site. His book review was later revised and reposted as a general critique of the house church movement, and not as a review of our book per se. However, since the critique still has references to our book, we have re-posted our original response to his original review. The point and counter-point between his critique and our response might be helpful in clarifying misunderstandings that others undoubtedly have also.
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Stephen Atkerson helps church leaders discover simple growth strategies that Jesus gave the early church. For over 30 years, he has worked with evangelists, missionaries, church planters, and pastors in Asia, the Americas, Europe and Africa. He is one of the pastors of a Baptist...