A Common Danger in House Churches

Let me explain why so many modern house churches are spiritually dangerous to you and your family…

First, it’s not because they meet in houses. Churches have met just about everywhere throughout church history. In the New Testament, believers often gathered in homes because they were the easiest and most available places to meet (Acts 2:46; 5:42; 12:12; 16:15, 40; Rom. 16:5; 1 Cor. 16:19; Col. 4:15; Philem. 2). But the church was never tied to one kind of space. Christians also met in temple courts (Acts 2:46; 3:1–11; 5:12), synagogues (Acts 9:20; 13:14–16; 17:1–4; 18:4), borrowed halls (Acts 19:9–10), and outdoor or ordinary places like upper rooms and riversides (Acts 16:13; 20:7–9). From the beginning, the church gathered wherever God made space: homes being convenient, but never exclusive.

So I’m not opposed to churches meeting in homes. East River’s earliest gatherings were in a park and in a house.

Second, it’s also not because I reject everything associated with modern house-church thinking. Emily and I have been around house-church leaders since our teens. I read the books early on. I appreciated some of it, and still do. I understand the desire for community, intimacy, and simplicity. You can even see that impulse reflected in one of East River’s foundational commitments: we aim for a streamlined form of church life. We try to keep things tight, centered, and uncluttered.

The spiritual danger I see with house churches is not always intrinsic to the idea, but it is ever-present in the modern movement.

First, the house-church world easily becomes a haven for authority-despising, manipulative men. It attracts those who want influence without accountability, followers without oversight, and power without courts of appeal.

Second, many house-church models operate from a restorationist mindset, the claim that the church quickly fell away from its “pure” New Testament form and that they are now restoring it.

Those two dangers feed each other. Let me take them one at a time.

1. A refuge for unaccountable men

One of the most consistent patterns in unhealthy house-church networks is not intimacy, but insulation. When there is no formal eldership, no recognized courts, no real mechanism for discipline, appeal, or removal, authority doesn’t disappear. It goes feral.

Someone always leads. Someone always teaches. Someone always sets doctrine, direction, and boundaries. The only question is whether that authority is visible, tested, and constrained, or hidden, personalized, and untouchable.

House-church movements regularly attract men who resent oversight, bristle at peer leadership, and despise institutional restraint. They often speak endlessly about “organic church,” “relational authority,” and “the Spirit’s leading,” but what they usually mean is that no one gets to tell them no.

In that environment, families have no protection. If a leader becomes controlling, doctrinally unstable, sexually compromised, financially manipulative, or spiritually abusive, there is nowhere to go. No outside eldership. No court of appeal. Leaving simply means disappearing, and the man remains, unchanged, for the next group.

The New Testament assumes the opposite. It teaches plural eldership (Acts 14:23; Phil. 1:1), tested character (1 Tim. 3; Titus 1), public ordination (Acts 6:5–6; 13:3), discipline (Matt. 18:15–17; 1 Cor. 5), and appeal beyond the local leader (Acts 11; 15). Authority in Scripture is always real, and therefore always bounded (1 Pet. 5:1–3; Acts 20:28; Gal. 2:11–14).

House-church worlds often promise freedom from hierarchy, but what they usually deliver is the most dangerous hierarchy of all: one man, self-appointed, immune to correction.

Side Note:

Right now I can think of almost a dozen men I know who were very pro-structure and pro-institution, until they were disciplined or denied a position they wanted. Almost overnight, they became outspoken house-church advocates and railed against the abuses of the institutional church.

2. The restorationist delusion

The second danger is theological.

Many house-church systems are built on the assumption that the church “quickly fell” after the apostles, was corrupted by structure, creeds, clergy, and continuity, and must now be rebuilt from scratch. The language is usually, “We’re getting back to Acts.”

But this mindset quietly severs Christians from the actual historic church.

It teaches people, often without saying it outright, that for most of two thousand years, Christ failed to preserve His church in any meaningful way. That the Spirit largely abandoned her. That the creeds, councils, ministries, and institutional forms of Christianity were mostly mistakes. And that the real church has finally been rediscovered in someone’s living room.

This is just arrogance.

It also produces theological instability. Once you detach from the historic church, you lose the guardrails that preserved doctrine through centuries of heresy and hard-won clarity. You trade the tested consensus of Christ’s body for the private interpretations of a few modern leaders. And when doctrine shifts, as it always does in restorationist settings, there is no fixed reference point to correct it.

The result is predictable: novelty replaces catholicity, personality replaces office, and “what God is doing right now” replaces “what the church has always confessed.”

The New Testament church was not anti-institutional. It appointed officers (Acts 6:1–6; 14:23; Titus 1:5), guarded doctrine (Acts 2:42; 15; 2 Tim. 1:13–14), disciplined members (Matt. 18:15–17; 1 Cor. 5), and formally transmitted the faith (2 Tim. 2:2; Jude 3). Acts is not a protest against structure; it is the seedbed of it.

To reject the historic church is not to recover the early church. It is to cut yourself off from her.

How the two dangers combine

These two errors reinforce each other.

Restorationism creates leaders who believe they are rebuilding Christianity from scratch. Unaccountable structures give those leaders room to act like apostles. Together they produce small, intense, personality-driven communities that feel pure and radical... until they fracture, burn out, or wound the people inside them.

And families pay the price.

Wives sit under unstable teaching. Children grow up in doctrinal experiments. Marriages get entangled in informal authority structures. And when things go wrong, there is no church, only a man and his followers.

That is why the danger is not the house.

The danger is a church with no past, no courts, no officers, no accountability, and no protection.

Again, these things are not intrinsic to the house-church movement. Any model of church can be twisted into something unhealthy. And it ought not to be. For example, there is such a thing as an overly systematized, overly litigious church.

But in an age of collapsing institutional trust, my inclination is that I don’t have to warn about those dangers the way I once did. The cultural current is already running hard in that direction.

P.S. I would not recommend Tom Wadsworth, Frank Viola, Neil Cole, etc. Wadsworth, by the way, started out in a restorationist denomination. It makes sense why he has landed where he is.