The Crowded House

Steve Timmis is involved in The Crowded House, an initiative to plant a network of household churches throughout the city of Sheffield.

The aim is to reach and disciple people for whom traditional church holds no attraction, and who dismiss it as having no relevance to their lives. In two consecutive articles, Steve explains the biblical and cultural reflection behind the initiative.

A name and a place

In our first article on the issue of 'home', we left humanity migrating eastwards, which, within the structure of Genesis was symbolic of their movement away from God, and home. But they couldn't endure this restless existence indefinitely, and the need for a home caused them to attempt to settle en masse in the land of Shinar (Genesis 11).

As part of this process of settlement, they set about constructing a city and building a tower (11.4) to reach to the heavens and make a name for themselves. But they succeeded in neither! Far from reaching the heavens, the writer tells us that the Lord has to come down to see the city and tower. To frustrate them further, God confuses their language and, despite their best (worst?) efforts, they are scattered over the face of the earth (11.8, cf. 11.4).

In chapter 12 we observe closely what God does. He sovereignly and unilaterally chooses one man out of the seething mass of rebellious, 'nomadic' humanity, and makes promises to him: a promise to make him a name (12.2, cf. 11.4); and a promise of a home (12.1). So Abraham goes on a journey to the land of Canaan, which just happens to be in a westerly direction. The great reversal has begun. It may have been one small step for the patriarch, but it was a giant leap forward in the purposes of God.

When the descendants of Abraham eventually arrive in the land of promise, what a home it turns out to be! In fact, the language used to describe it seems to deliberately evoke images of Eden (cf. Deuteronomy 8.7-10). It's a land of abundance, security and identity where they will be known as God's special people: a veritable paradise!

However, as the story unfolds, we find that these same people were expelled from that home, and once more became captives, and once more homeless (cf. Psalm 137.4). Even when they eventually return to their land, at its best it's only a shadow of its former self, for the simple reason that good as that home was (and when it was good, it was very, very good), it was never, in the unfolding purposes of God, the real thing. It was never the finished article. It was a pointer and foretaste. It 'spoke' about the home of righteousness, where God's people really will live under his rule, and anticipated the new heaven and earth for which we are made, and for which our hearts ache and long. In taking their home away, God was powerfully in-forming them (and us) that there was something or somewhere better.

Heavenly embassies

Yet that 'somewhere' is a long time coming, and, in the meantime, God has yet again provided something of a staging post. Another pointer, another foretaste! This time it's called 'the church', which quickly spread throughout the world of the first century. These churches were established in homes, and were intended to be communities of grace, outposts of the kingdom, embassies of heaven. Somewhere for people to find refuge, to let their hair down, take their shoes off, put their feet up, and discover who they truly were in the purposes of God! And that remains at the heart of what it means to be church. Consider what Paul has to say in Ephesians 2.17-19: 'He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow-citizens with the saints, and are of God's household.'

The words used by Paul to describe the status of these Gentile believers in Ephesus are very telling and full of Old Testament imagery. Once they were no people, just strangers and those excluded. Of course they had their own ethnic identity, but the only identity that registered on the eternal scale was as part of the people of God, and because they were without God they were without hope in the world (cf. 2.12). They were those who were 'far away' (2.17), geographically distant from where God had made his home among his people.

No longer strangers

But because of the person and work of Jesus, the Gentiles were now no longer strangers, 'those away from home' (2.19), but fellow-citizens with those set apart by God for himself. Now they had a home, and because they were now part of God's family, members of the divine household, they had an identity, a status, significance. But remember that Paul was writing to a local church, a context where this glorious reality was earthed and given tangible expression.

Paul was telling them that they really did belong, not to some mystical, invisible body, but to a home with walls, and among people with flesh and bones!

Of course, church is not the final thing, not by a long way, but it is a home for the homeless, an environment of abundance, security and identity that God provides for the lonely, dispossessed, rootless and abandoned. It is meant, in a meaningful way, to anticipate the home that God has planned in his eternal purposes. It is meant, in our present condition, to actually meet the felt needs of the homeless. Of course we can and must speak about eternity, and of course our hearts must continue to yearn for that ultimate reality, that eternal home spoken of so eloquently and movingly in Revelation 21.1-7. But those words will only have a ring of truth about them if we can provide a taster to the hungry now, and in some measure at least, satisfy the longing of the wanderers.

Home from home

The challenge to our churches (traditional or otherwise) is, how can we best maximise the opportunities provided for us by the cataclysmic changes in society, and the need of so many of our contemporaries? Or, in other words, how can we be church so that we are that home to the homeless that God wants us to be?

The Crowded House is an attempt to answer that question. Many people who are most vociferous in their rejection of traditional expressions of Christianity are often those who feel most keenly the sense of homelessness already described. By doing church this way, which means taking the idea of family as the defining metaphor, meeting in homes, and being built around the household model, we are able to be that home without the necessary structures of larger, more institutional expressions of church. It also gives us great freedom in terms of making the gospel our defining activity and ensures that they are in a better position to listen to the diagnosis of their condition, and respond to the remedy.

Obviously, this need for home isn't something that disappears once we become Christians, and household church is a great environment to learn what it means to be the people of God, and to enjoy being 'home from home' as together we actively wait for that 'home of righteousness' which is our inheritance.

Steve Timmis concludes his series on planting a network of household churches in Sheffield (part 2 of series)

A name and a place

Heavenly embassies

No longer strangers

Home from home

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