Book Reviews

Book Reviews:

"Houses that Change the World", by Wolfgang Simson

This book, I learned, is regarded as a classic in many quarters. I did not get on with it. I found the author repeated himself throughout the book and laboured his points. His overall discussion of the topic was not well organised, nor did it proceed smoothly. The book is dated now, having been published in 1998. It may have been influential on an earlier generation of western church planters, but it reads as a little old-fashioned now.

Simson's main thesis is that God wants us to meet in our homes. That, in a nutshell, is the whole book. He believes that this mirrors the practice of the early church, is more natural, gives rise to the fivefold ministry gifts of Ephesians 4 and will make churches more “persecution-proof” because their way of life will be small-scale and flexible. Simson (writing more than twenty years ago, remember) sees a major move of the Holy Spirit coming to bring us back in this direction. He sees this movement as one that will bring us back in line with the way the early Christians met. This is why the book feels dated—he prophesied an imminent move of God that has not materialised, at least in the western world, or at least in the way he describes. He quotes some authorities in the course of the book that have since been thoroughly discredited—Paul Cain and Mike Jones of Kansas City Prophets fame, for example.

The most interesting part of the book for me was early on (p.20), where he talks about the ideal size of house church congregations. He says an average church would have 8-12 members, a large church 15, and a megachurch 21 or 22! He talks about how some churches may need to shrink in order to grow—in other words, in order to get the right relational and spiritual dynamics for longer term growth, which he defines as the multiplication of small house-based fellowships, a shift to smaller groups may be necessary. However, these intriguing points were not developed and the book does not have much practical advice as to how to start and run such groups.

One thing that rankled and made it clear to me that this work is primarily theoretical, rather than grounded in the author’s own practical experience, was Simson’s rather selective view of history and other people’s research. For example, at the start of the book (p.2), he refers to a work I happen to have read quite closely and thought a lot about since, Herbert Hoefer’s Churchless Christianity. Drawing on his missionary experience in southern India, Hoefer showed that as many as 200,000 “non-baptised believers in Christ” existed secretly in a city of 8 million (Madras). Simson claims these believers do not attend church because they are not attracted to church. But what Hoefer actually presents is far more complicated and has little to do with church merely being “unattractive” (or that fact that meetings do not take place in homes). Without getting too much into it here, Hoefer’s research found that these believers in Christ put off baptism because of the negative sanctions that might be applied to them if they did (loss of government subsidies for low-caste people and lack of marriage prospects for the children of both low- and high-caste people). If the churches are at fault in the city of Madras is has more to do with the imported “latin” culture of the churches and certain western practices now inextricably associated with Indian Christianity (ubiquity of eating meat, for example) than church being simply “unattractive” (whatever than means) or not meeting in homes.

A good chunk of the book addresses critically the cell church model (e.g., Yonggi Cho’s church in Seoul), which at face value might easily be confused with the house church model Simson is advocating. Simson sees the cell church model as inherently authoritarian in structure and microcosmic of the top-down church model he is in flight from. He makes a clear distinction between cell churches, which are fragments, and within the command structure, of a megachurch, and house churches, which are freer from central authority and consequently more able to develop according to the gifts of the individual members. Other sections concern building persecution-proof structures and people, and different models of multiplication. Overall, Simson is not enamoured of denominational or historic Christianity and it shows through in the book. The book also contains prophecies about the imminent breakout of a mass house church movement (for example on page 22 he quotes a friend’s prophecy that 200,000 house-church based Christians would gather in Switzerland to address their nation). Again and again in the book the impression is given that Simson is presenting house-based churches as a good idea, as opposed to something he has lived through, led, and is now offering as an option to the wider Christian world.

Simson’s case for why churches should meet exclusively in houses is weak overall. The lack of concrete steps in the book for actually setting up and running a home-based church make the book of little practical value for us in Antioch. I felt the book was longer than it needed to be in order for the author to make his point. As other reviewers have pointed out, he would have benefitted from an editor in the writing of the book. Simson is clearly a gifted and experienced church leader and missions executive, and has a lot to say, and on the YouTube videos of him I checked he looks like a fun guy to hang out with. However, I found this book’s central argument unconvincing. Ultimately the book falls down because Simson’s prescription for renewing the church is purely structural—i.e., it is a materialistic argument for releasing spiritual growth—and theoretical, and it appears to be based on the author’s observations around the world rather than his own experience.

Simson's "15 theses” postulated in the book are as follows:

Christianity is a way of life not a series of meetings
Worship today is fusion of cathedral and synagogue—a model that is not transformative of society
The third Reformation will be a reformation of structure (the first reformation was one of theology (the Reformation), the second reformation brought back “intimacy with God" (the pietist/Moravian movement)
We have church houses when we should have house churches
Church must become small in order to grow large
Pastors alone should not lead churches—we need the 5-fold ministry
Where 5-fold ministries are present they are not working together
We have a professionalised clergy instead of the priesthood of all believers
We have organised Christianity instead of organic Christianity
Our worship structures are an idol
We bring people to church, instead of bringing church to the people
The Lord’s supper needs to be a proper meal
Instead of denominations we should have city-wide celebrations
We need to develop a persecution-proof spirit
Church is most natural in homes

Some of the above principles resonate with Antioch’s philosophy, such as city-wide celebrations and the emphasis 5-fold ministry.

There was some slight weirdness in the book. For instance (and for church history nerds), he refers to the Bogomils (among others) as forerunners of the Reformation (p.59)! A more misguided and ignorant statement I cannot imagine. For me, comments like this and his misrepresentation of Hoefer’s important book, as well as the overall theoretical tone of the book, made me wonder whether Simson wrote Houses that Change the World from the perspective of his own hands-on experience as a church-planter or whether it is more of an idealistic prescription stemming from his observations as a travelling mission strategy consultant. The absence of practice guidance, personal anecdotes (experience) and case studies in the book suggests the latter.

Other reviews:

https://www.9marks.org/review/houses-change-world-wolfgang-simson/

https://www.interfaithfulness.org/2017/07/03/a-book-about-house-churches-visionary-in-some-ways-short-sighted-in-others/

Multiplanting by Colin Baron

Colin and his friends Tim Simmonds and Tom O'Toole explain why he and his CCM Network have planted multiple small churches, rather than one big ones. You can order this directly from http://multiplanting.com. or else from Amazon.