the corner church

by Austin Pfeiffer

The cities of the south are peppered with steeples, bricks, church signs, and parking lots. In southern California there are Catholic sanctuaries and mega churches occupying huge plots of property. In these worlds I discovered house churches. House churches, to me, are the absolutely most poignant expressions of the fundamentals of the gospel. The deconstruction of bureaucracy, the authenticity and intimacy in small groups of people, make it simple to live out the loving of the poor and learning about the Bible.

Our expression of it works because we act as a reaction to a culture of inflated sentiments. In other words, we (our community) live in a city of impotent churches and as such we express the Gospel in very elemental ways. When I lived in Boston, I began an appreciation of the local church. In a society of hostility you recognize the need for organization. It is right to resist domination or hegemony, because they seem to detract from so many Gospel precepts. On the other hand, sometimes the local church is a force of good and healthy organization.

Throughout the past month we've looked at denominations, mega churches, and house churches. The good and bad of these have been parsed by personal opinions, but here's where I land on them all. I like the local church, mostly because when it calibrates itself well, its a reasonable size group of people, comprised of generations, races, and alternative view points, all coordinating in grace of differences to impact their local world.

When you take the Gospel lifestyles of house churches, something really only these types of groups can navigate with intensity and constancy, and you blend them into a city of local churches, you see the Gospel come alive. I am not afraid to say when you look at a centralized church, one singular location defined as the place where you find that "body" in most ways, there is something lost. There is something corporate and lacking of vibrant identity in such "brand standardization." So I say fight on corner church, keep opening your doors to the neighborhood and encouraging your people to use their homes. Your people live next door, and when that is the case, a lifestyle happens and the Gospel is realized.