When is a church not a congregation?

A statement that many find challenging is one that says, “a congregation, while a legitimate expression of church, is not equivalent to it.” (see The Hidden Lives of Congregations) So, here’s a riddle: When is a congregation not a church? And when is a church not a congregation.

Most people can venture an answer to the first question, but many are stumped by the second. People who have been “congregationalized,” that is, who have grown up in a congregation and therefore cannot fathom the church being any other way than that which they’ve experienced, have difficulty identifying other models or forms of being church. Yet, given some examples, most will respond knowingly with an, “Oh, yeah, I see it now.”

One non-congregational form of church that continues to grow is the house church movement. Despite some notions, it’s not “new” by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the origins of the Christian Church was in house churches. It seems more people are finding a spiritual home in house churches (pun intended), including two seminary professors I know. Growing up in a church-planting family my formative years were spent in a “church home”—mostly my own. I didn’t experience a congregation as church until I was in junior high school. The difference there, of course was that the intent of that house church was to eventually become a congregation, what in the minds of many constituted a “real” church. Not so with the house church movement.

Here is a report on house churches by David Holdane, staff writer of the Lost Angeles times, titled, There’s no place like home, these Christians say. In it, survey guru Barna claims, “We predict that by the year 2025, the market share of conventional churches will be cut in half. People are creating a new form of church, and it’s really exciting.” Like others, I appreciate Barna’s interesting research, but I tend to be suspect of his interpretation of the data (in this same article he falls into that annoying current habit of ascribing just about anything to “postmodernism” that contemporary deux ex machina.).

What do you think? Is this the wave of the future for the church? Is this merely another faddish movement? A resurgence of the early church movement? A backlash to denominationalism? A resurgence of the hippie granola generation trying to recapture their groove?