The sermon led by Scott Brown discusses the concept of 'home-churching' and how it differs from a New Testament church. It emphasizes that while family worship is valuable, it lacks critical elements of a biblical church, such as preaching of the Word, administration of sacraments, and church discipline. The sermon highlights that many who opt for home-churching might be rejecting authority, which is contrary to biblical teachings. It argues that a true church requires a structure with qualified elders and emphasizes the importance of church relationships, spiritual gifts, and corporate worship. It also addresses the misconception that a church is a building rather than a community of believers. The sermon calls for those practicing home-churching to seek a biblical church environment that fulfills scriptural prescriptions for church life.

We're here to discuss a common question that people raise regarding church life and how to conduct it, particularly the question of what people are calling home-churching. It's a term that is used for people gathering together in a home. We're here to answer some questions, make some definitions, and give our thoughts on this principle of home-churching. I find myself speaking with people and I say, well, where do you go to church? And they say, well, I'm home-churching.

Well, what do you mean by that? Well, my family gathers together for worship, and we sing, and we read the Bible, and Dad preaches. And so we're home-churching. That's our church. We have it in our house.

And so this is a phenomenon. Sometimes people do this because they're in a transition. They've left one church and they haven't quite landed in their new church, and so they start talking about home-churching, and so they are home-churching for one week or two weeks or a year even. So I'd like to bring up this subject. So let's try to tease this practice out from Scripture.

So if someone is meeting in their home as a family and calling it home churching, you know, how should we evaluate this from Scripture? And I've got with me the elders of the Hope Baptist Church. We're here discussing this Because we bump into people all the time who say I'm home-churching So guys, how should we counsel people when they speak about this? So the first thing we should probably do is just acknowledge there's a wide range within that description There are legitimate home churches because they have the marks of what you see in the New Testament church. But what you just described, when you were describing it, I was thinking, that's family worship.

The family gathers together in the home and they pray together, they sing, they read the scriptures, dad comments on the scriptures. This is not a New Testament church. This is family worship. And it's a precious practice that should be done in every home on a daily basis. But we shouldn't confuse things by putting the tag of church on it because that has very few of the marks of a New Testament church.

My thought of that is when we talk about the home church movement, we've lost what the definition of a church is. And it's not easy reading the New Testament, what the definition of a church is, but spending many hours studying it, I think Calvin probably had it correct when he defined a church as having the preaching of the Word, there's the right administration of the sacraments, and there's church discipline. And the problem is that most of the home churches that I know of fail in one or all of those, especially the last one. Frequently the reason that people are home-churching is because they don't want to be under authority. And we really see this very widespread in the homeschooling community, where the homeschooling community rightly, because of Deuteronomy 6, says, we don't want the state to direct how our children should be educated because that's not the state's role it's the family's role but they go too far and they start to reject authorities that god has put in place and they don't want to submit to any authority we look at you know Jesus talks to the centurion and says there's no greater faith in all of Israel.

Why? Because he just described what authority was. And so when we reject authority, we're rejecting the gospel. And that's my big concern about the home church movement is that frequently it encompasses a rejection of authority. Right, and of course, Scripture is really clear about what authority looks like in a local church.

There are qualified elders who are appointed to govern churches. And so, if someone is home-churching, they do not have biblical church government. A church without biblical church government is not a real church. And so, you know, people who are home-churching, we would just counsel them to really consider what Scripture says and to find an environment where there is biblical church government. Well What else?

What else is on the table here? One of the things that has happened in America is that we've confused the building with the church. The church is not the building. The church is the people. And the church building is what they need and so a home church find if it is a church in the town there's no problem with that because it's not the building but the question is is it a church or not and we've just because of the way when we talk about there's a church down the road work typically not talking about the people were talking about a building and so we say that's in a home the homes irrelevant it's The question is whether it's a church.

We are talking about the bride of Christ, right? We talk about the church, the bride of Christ, and we need to certainly look at it that way. We need to convey this to the people who are saying their home. I even hate the word home church in that title because it's not the way that you described it. It's not church.

And it's not the picture that scripture gives of the bride of Christ. And I think as we talk to these people, we can certainly acknowledge that they may have been in some unfortunate circumstances, that they may have experienced bad leadership, or they're in a church that destroyed their family, or there's no preaching of the word. We can sympathize with them, we can talk about these things, but in the end, they are not allowed to take their experiences or their feelings and put them over on top of what scripture says. And so while we can sympathize with them, We can talk about these things, but in the end, they are not allowed to take their experiences or their feelings and put them over on top of what scripture says. And so while we can sympathize with them, we can talk about these things.

In the end, we should exhort them, even number one, to look at this home church and say, are you moving toward leadership? Are you looking at moving toward any leadership? If not, they need to find themselves a church that they can plant themselves into. I think church government, Scott, you had mentioned this and you talked about what the New Testament prescribes for church government. And one of the key parts of that is a plurality of qualified elders, not just a father who's leading his home.

Should a father lead his home? Of course he should, but that doesn't fall under the definition of a church. So local churches should be governed by a plurality of qualified elders. One of the implications for this is that a church would make it financially possible for a man to labor hard in the Word. That man would be set aside.

This is established in 1 Timothy 5. And so what the sermon represents on Sunday is a man who has given himself to a text, to really understand it and unfold it in a way that would be a blessing and helpful. And so the thought that is sometimes pictured in a home church that we'll just gather maybe even a couple of families together and people will just share what's on their heart is not really a biblical concept, at least not in the way that it would be what is comprehensively needed by the local church. We have established patterns in the meeting of our church where the heads of households do have an opportunity to continue the teaching. We found that to be a blessing, but it's not adequate by himself.

What the Church really needs is that a man of God, a qualified man, would bear down on a text during the course of the week and really labor hard so that the sermon on Sunday is more than just sharing from his heart. It's the output of weeks full of study. And it's a blessing that it is. So it's important that we have biblical church government. It's important that we have biblical preaching and communication of the Word of God.

Another area that's absent in the family meeting together at home is the element of biblical church relationships. God has made His church a family. As individuals and families gather together, they benefit from the broader relationships in the church family. We are stones, you know, fitted together, rubbing up against one another, and if you're just meeting in your home you cannot fulfill the commands of Christ and the principles of church relation and life. How do you have the older teaching the younger?

How do you have fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters spiritually connected to you? We are of his body, of his flesh and of his bones and the body of Christ. When the church takes communion together, it's the whole family, such as the biological family. You cannot even picture a biblical understanding of the taking of communion and celebrating the Lord's table just as a family, because it's the big family that takes communion together. It's not the little biological family that Scripture speaks of in the communion celebration.

So there are many things that you just cannot fulfill of biblical church life when you're just meeting with your family. And specifically the scripture talks about us being brothers with one another and the reality is that sometimes you don't like your brother. I mean you're flesh and blood brother and one of the problems with home churches is when it's just a couple families that meet together as soon as there's a problem, somebody typically leaves. That's not the way it's supposed to be. That's not the description.

Those relationships are not always rosy. And they should not always be rosy in church because that is how God teaches us patience. That is how God sanctifies us. So those who home church, they end up losing a major element of sanctification that comes from the local church. Right.

So if you're considering the matter of home church, you have to consider what the Bible says about church government, what the Bible says about church relationships, what the Bible says about church practices. I mean, we could keep going and talking about that. How do you practice church discipline? You know, when church discipline walks out of the church, I think you have to ask yourself, do you have a biblical church? How do you exercise church discipline in a family?

Well, the admonitions for church discipline aren't for the family, they're for the church. Paul writes to the church in Corinth and he gives them specific instructions for how to deal with sin in the church. And so it's not for family members to excommunicate one another. Churches excommunicate people, not families. In fact, you do even find this practice of families exercising church discipline on family members.

Well, we would just say that's not even really appropriate. It's churches that exercise discipline. It's the body of believers collected together and fulfilling the commands for church discipline that make it right. How do you fulfill those in a biological family? You just can't.

You can't have a biblical church, home-churching, at least the way that we're defining it. Any other thoughts here about this? I was just thinking about the whole idea of spiritual gifts. When someone has converted the Holy Spirit in parts, spiritual gifts, And we see all through scripture where it talks about the giving of gifts and the body being a head and a toe and an eye. We see all these parts fitting together in unity.

And the reason why we're given spiritual gifts is not to edify an individual, it's not to edify necessarily yourself, it's not given for you to, for a source of pride, it's to edify the body. And so when you're not gathered together as a church body, you're almost saying that these gifts are given for no purpose whatsoever. And that is flat wrong. Those gifts are given to edify the members of the body. So in order to do that, you have to gather as a body.

And you're actually offending the rest of the body when you fail to do the things that you should be doing. God has given you gifts and when you fail to do that, that's a serious sin because you are not exercising those gifts for the edification of the body as required by Scripture. You know, when you think about Paul's admonition to the Ephesians that they would be speaking to one another and singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, making melody in their hearts to the Lord. He wasn't just talking about a biological family. He was talking about the whole church.

If you look at the incidences of churches meeting in homes in the book of Acts, it wasn't just the biological family. There were other people there and all the way from the upper room to all the other examples of church life that happened in homes, there's no evidence that it was just the family. There was the church in someone's house, but there were other people in that house, not just the biological family. So anyway, we just want to raise the issue of this phenomenon of home-churching. We would just encourage people who are home-churching in this manner to find a biblical church.

Find a church where there's biblical church government, biblical church relationships, biblical church practices, and all the compliments of church life that we see in the Bible. It's really not appropriate for us to try to create our own kind of church life. God has prescribed it, and it's a beautiful prescription, and it's really what we need. And sometimes when it appears to be an ugly prescription, I think we need to read Revelation 2 and 3 and look at the churches there because they had serious problems in them. And now we're at a state where you see a problem, a serious problem in a church and what you do is leave.

Nowhere in Revelation 2 or 3 does it ever suggest that people should stop going to those churches. God threatens them with taking his lampstand from them, but He's still saying they're churches, and we're too quick to reject a body of Christ as the body of Christ because of serious problems. And if you read Revelation 2 and 3, you just see serious problem after serious problem after serious problem, and God still says they're churches. So here's the advice. Love the church as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

That's the pattern. That's the pattern for church life that we ought to emulate.