{"id":1618,"date":"2007-07-23T11:02:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-23T11:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2007\/07\/the-church-in-your-living-room.html"},"modified":"2007-07-23T11:02:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-23T11:02:00","slug":"the-church-in-your-living-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2007\/07\/the-church-in-your-living-room.html","title":{"rendered":"The church in your living room"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> In the age of the booming mega-church, some people are bucking the trend and deciding that, if size matters, smaller is better<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Jason Kilp had a short commute to church one recent Sunday. He walked about 15 feet from the bedroom of his Anaheim apartment to a small worship service in the living room. <\/p>\n

“It’s intimate,” the 24-year-old graphic design student said. Unlike gatherings he and his wife have attended at a 4,000-member mega-church in Irvine, Kilp said, “this is like a conversation. It’s somebody talking to you.”<\/p>\n

The couple are part of a growing movement, mostly among evangelical and born-again Christians, that, depending on who’s talking, represents either a second Protestant reformation or a sellout of biblical principles.<\/p>\n

The trend goes by several names: house churches, living-room churches, the underground church, the organic church, the simple church, church without walls. Although they disagree on whether it’s a good thing, proponents and detractors say that going to church in a home has the potential of forever changing the way Christians worship.<\/p>\n

“We are at the initiation point of a transformational shift,” said George Barna, author of the book “Revolution,” about the changing nature of worship, and founding director of the Barna Group, a Ventura-based research firm that tracks religious trends.<\/p>\n

A 2006 survey by his firm \u2014 tracking developments for use by researchers and the media \u2014 concluded that 9% of U.S. adults attend house churches weekly, a ninefold increase from the previous decade, and that roughly 70 million Americans have experienced a home service.<\/p>\n

Those most likely to attend house churches, according to phone interviews with more than 5,000 adults nationwide, are men, families that home-school their children, residents of the West and nonwhites, while those least likely to attend include women, people older than 60 and Midwesterners. <\/p>\n

“We predict that by the year 2025, the market share of conventional churches will be cut in half,” Barna said. “People are creating a new form of church, and it’s really exciting.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Will this sort of worship spread to Catholicism? I remember, back in the ’70s, attending one or two “home masses,” with maybe a dozen people gathered around a dining room table. (Guitars may have been involved. I don’t remember.) But part of being a community of faith is being a community<\/i>, and sharing communion<\/i> — in every sense of the word. Is smaller really better? I’m not so sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the age of the booming mega-church, some people are bucking the trend and deciding that, if size matters, smaller is better: Jason Kilp had a short commute to church one recent Sunday. He walked about 15 feet from the bedroom of his Anaheim apartment to a small worship service in the living room. “It’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":365,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe church in your living room - The Deacon's Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2007\/07\/the-church-in-your-living-room.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The church in your living room - The Deacon's Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the age of the booming mega-church, some people are bucking the trend and deciding that, if size matters, smaller is better: Jason Kilp had a short commute to church one recent Sunday. 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