By Ryan Cormier
Jason Johnston goes to church every Sunday — without ever leaving his home.
While thousands of other Canadians attend church, Johnston has hosted one in his home in Mississauga for nearly two years. On a typical Sunday morning, 10-to-15 people will come over. They’ll eat a meal, sing and discuss religious topics or share stories from their own lives.
Across Ontario, house churches are springing up as people turn their backs on traditional church institutions.
“It’s pretty informal. It’s much more of a round-table approach to doing church together,” Johnston says. “It’s everyone functioning rather than having one person doing the preaching and leading the singing.”
Johnston started his house church when he got tired of the traditional Protestant church he was attending.
“I’d come in on a Sunday morning and look at the back of somebody’s head and listen to the preacher,” he says. “ And then as I was leaving, maybe somebody would talk to me for about five minutes. I wasn’t building lasting, deep relationships with people.”
In North York, Tim Germain feels the same way. He started attending a house church back in 1992. Feeling the same isolation, he moved to a more informal setting. “By virtue of the participatory aspect of the meetings, you are actually involved without somebody on a pedestal or a stage reducing you to a spectator.”
Germain likes the open discussions of his house church. “We let the Bible say what it says, and if someone disagrees, it’s an open format. Go for it.”
William Oosterman, the senior pastor at the Westboro Baptist Church in Ottawa, was once part of a house church.
He says the search for personal interaction is a popular trend. “People want intimate fellowship. If they don’t get it in a large church, they’ll get it in a small group.”
Most house churches have congregations of 10 to 15 people, but they can have as many as 30 or as few as five.
Oosterman says house churches are formed by reactions against problems in the traditional churches.
“All the house churches I’ve come across are made of people who got fed up with the hypocrisy, formalism or whatever got messed up in the organized church,” he says.
Both Johnston and Germain believe there is now a trend towards house churches in North America.
National networks of house churches have sprung up, with Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia being the most common provinces. It’s also popular among Christians in China and India.
Johnston runs a Web site that helps house churches get started.
“The appeal seems to be growing more and more,” Johnston says. “Right now, in most major cities across Canada — Ottawa is an exception — there’s house church networks.”
Johnston says it’s difficult to create a national network because house churches are, by definition, private. “They’re not always visible and they don’t necessarily connect with other house churches. They don’t necessarily do any advertising, put a sign outside their house or put themselves in the phone book.”
Oosterman believes house churches should be a supplement to the traditional church gathering on Sundays, not a replacement for it. His church has six small weekday groups that all gather together on Sunday mornings.
In the end, Oosterman believes most house churches are temporary and people will return to the traditional congregations.
“They want to be shepherded. Sheep need a shepherd. That usually doesn’t work in the smaller group. They have the intimacy, but they miss out on 300 people singing Amazing Grace in harmony. You can’t get that in a living room.”