Many years ago we home schooled our children. Experiences gained there have taught me that no-one can safely claim to represent everyone. House churchers are almost as diverse. I say almost because unlike home schoolers we assume the centrality of Jesus. You don't have to be a Christian to be involved with a house church - but Jesus Christ must be central in the life of a church.

Another thing that has made me hesitant to add articles to this site is not wanting to detract from our main aim of networking. House churches can be very isolated. We were fortunate in our early years exploring house churches to be friends with Tony Collis - who was key in bringing to NZ Wolfgang Simson, followed by Tony and Felicity Dale.

The third thing that has made me hesitate is that I am no expert - and even if I knew all the answers, time and experience will soon give me the opportunity to learn the error of my ways. I started this article by talking about home schooling. One of the things I learned from that experience is that is important to be a life-long learner. So anything I say on here could be modified as I get more experience.

Having said that, most of the thoughts are not mine - they're things other people have expressed far more eloquently than I ever could. But the important thing is what I do with them. And the dare I say the same applies to you. We can fill our mind with ideas, debate issues until the cows come home. and so on - but the ultimate test of any idea is how it translates into practice.

Well. a simple definition could be a group of Jesus' disciples who meet in a house. But that's really a bit simplistic. For example, it doesn't have to meet in a house, and it certainly doesn't meet modern expectations of a church. That's partly why people have tried to come up with different terms - organic church, simple church, and so on.

By house church, I mean a church that is born out of spiritual life instead of being constructed by human institutions and held together by religious programs. House church life is a grass-roots experience that is marked by face-to-face community, every-member functioning, open-participatory meetings, non-hierarchical leadership, and the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ as the functional leader and head of the gathering. 

An oxymoron? As soon someone lays out how a house church should be run, I want to run. When we lay out rules, constitutions and the like, we're on the path towards institutional church. The rules may be fine at the time - or even expressed as guidelines rather than rules. Or there may be no formal rules - but we have seen people break informal rules and be brought into line by others. The point is we should function as a body - warts, pains, joys and all.

However, people genuinely ask what their current group should (or should not) be doing in their group at this point in time. 

There's been considerable confusion (in my mind at least) when it comes to distinguishing between Christianity that is the Way Jesus established (remembering He is the Way) and the Christian religion, with all its forms. Much has been said about the difference between the Way Jesus set out and the way it's been complicated since. One writer (well actually two) summarised a lot of things that have been added into the mix since Jesus time. These include church buildings, orders of worship, sermons, pastors, costumes, ministers of music, tithing and clergy salaries, baptism and the Lord's supper and Christian education.

Just to be clear, not everything about each of these has been added. Baptism and the Lord's supper were clearly part of the church in the years immediately after Jesus died for us - just not as we may know them today. And some existed in the Hebrew religion before Jesus' time. 

This title of this little thought shouldn't make you think I've given up on house / simple / organic church. Far from it. I'm encouraged by what God is doing in a variety of places. In my review of Mark Holloway's "The Freedom Diaries", I mention J B Phillips classic "Your God is too small". I've realised (I can be very slow sometimes) that God cannot be pinned down into the inventions of our minds. So while I'm still an advocate of freeing ourselves from the shackles we too often live by, and house church is a big part of that, it is still too small - way too small.

Since I started my conversations with God, my life has changed - even more than when I had a stroke and lived without "my" mind to 2.5 years. Suddenly God is interested in every part of my life - interested enough to discuss it with me - and He does that with every human being. So my God really is far too small. I think of the communication issues I have with the love of my life. And if a third party comes into the conversation, it can be great - but the conversation is inevitably diluted. Adding a fourth, fifth and sixth person even more so. Yet God is always wanting to talk with me about my stuff. And he has billions of other people to talk all - all at the same time. 

How far back do we really have to go to find our roots? Didn't the reformation suffice? Well, in travelling on this journey I've discovered that more and more of my ideas actually don't matter to God. I thought I'd already been stripped back to basics when a friend challenged me on the Lord's Supper. This was one area I was fairly sure about - and she'd recently "converted" to orthodoxy. What could I possibly learn from her?

By the time we finished I had to concede that her view of the matter could well be supported from Scripture. I still felt she couldn't possibly be right - but suddenly relying on my understanding of what the Bible says seemed a bit limiting. What I was really saying is my understanding of the Bible - and that could lead to who knows where.

A question for you - if you can think of it as a creature of time. What was God doing before creation? A tricky concept as time itself didn't exist then. Now I should say that this thought occurring to me is not original. It was sparked by reading Frank Viola - although it's bound to have occurred to others since time began.

So creation (including time) doesn't exist yet. But God does. And He has the perfect relationship within the Godhead. I won't get sidetracked by the issue of the Trinity. I used to have analogies - but in hindsight, all they did was try and bring God down to a level I could understand. So there's God, with this perfect relationship of love going on. Did He have a brainwave? Or a meltdown? He decided to create a being (that's you and me) to share this loving relationship.

From what the Bible says, He still considers it / us as worthwhile - even after all the issues we've caused. What does that tell us about His love? The hymn Amazing Grace doesn't even come close to doing it justice.

I've been mulling over this issue - how important is our culture to our house church? I'm a Kiwi with an English father - not unusual. I've grown up in very much a Western world, and this has influenced my thinking. I don't set out to think that particular way - it's just part of me.

So my thinking about house church is very much in terms of Western thinking. But I've slowly come to realise that at least until Constantine, that was not part of the church at all. If the people in the New Testament, and the three centuries or more following did not think this way, then what should we take from that? How important is it to adjust our thinking?