House church

House church (or "home church")/("Underground Heaven") is used to describe an independent assembly of Christians who gather in a home. Sometimes this occurs because the group is small, and a home is the most appropriate place to gather, as in the early church, or the beginning phase of the British New Church Movement. Sometimes it is because the group is a member of an underground Christian movement, which is otherwise banned from meeting, as in China. More recently some modern writers have determined that the home is the "right" place to meet, and have based the operation of their communities around multiple small home meetings. Their justification for avoiding public meetings in dedicated buildings are many, and include: it is a more effective way of building "community"; it helps the group to engage in outreach more naturally; or more controversially, they believe small family-sized churches were a deliberate apostolic pattern in the first century and intended by Christ.^[1] However, the word "church" translates the Greek word "ekklesia" which means "those called out"^[2] and derives from the Greek where it is used to describe a public political assembly: see Acts 19:25-41 for an example of its secular use by the New Testament. Its use elsewhere in the New Testament presupposes, on a number of occasions, that the meeting is public (James 2:2, 1 Corinthians 14:22). Acts 20:20 declares this explicitly "You know that I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you but have taught you publicly and from house to house." Paul teaches both publicly and privately; his public teaching refers to his engagement with the synagogue, and the Christian synagogues that emerged from them. According to Lesslie Newbigin the loss of public truth in modern and postmodern societies is something to be mourned rather than celebrated.

Cell churches are usually associated with larger churches: they also meet in homes and share some characteristics of house churches. They are not normally considered to be a house church, as they are not self-governing.

Some within the house church movement (associated with Wolfgang Simson, Frank Viola and others) consider the term "house church" to be a misnomer, asserting that the main issue for Christians who practice their faith in this manner is not the house but the type of meeting that takes place. Other titles which may be used to describe this movement are "simple church" "relational church," "primitive church," "body life," "organic church," or "biblical church." However all of the practices implied by these terms are shared with many other churches outside the movement.