House Church is a great model for urban church planting

I have been an urban missionary for the past 19 years. Although I have been blessed to be involved in planting two (traditional) urban churches, I have always been frustrated that so much time went to raising money to pay for buildings. This left little to actually help meet the needs of the poor. One year ago we started a house church network to start churches in Denver’s inner-city. We presently have 3 house churches with several more close to starting. The benefits of house church with the target of reaching the urban poor are:

• The cost of house church is almost zero as we don’t pay salaries or a mortgage. The money we receive goes to help those in need. We have been able to help our people with money for rent, food, gas, clothes and whatever the need may be.
• As our house church is diverse racially, economically and intergenerationally we are able to see barriers broken to truly be a church where people from lots of backgrounds are experiencing being a vibrant family of Jesus in the midst of great diversity. House Church works great for accomplishing this as everything we do from going bowling, having picnics in the park, going to the mountains, etc is something we all do together and the poor don’t get left out. House Church is a great model for urban church planting.

Bruce Duell, Denver, CO BKDuell[AT]aol.com
(Posted on behalf of Bruce by Brian)