Dale Partridge - How Does a House Church Maintain Good Theology and Practice？

00:00:00.000 Hey there and welcome to this episode of How We Do House Church. My name is Dr. Jason Barker

00:00:12.880 and I serve as the Academic Dean at Reformation Seminary. Reformation Seminary has the one goal

00:00:18.300 of training men to plant biblical house churches all around the world. As always, I'm joined by 0.88

00:00:23.560 our founder and president, Dale Partridge. How's it going, Dale?

00:00:25.880 Man, I'm excited for this conversation because one of the main critiques that we get as a house church network and community is around this topic.

00:00:35.780 Absolutely. Yeah. There's a viewpoint or an opinion or an image of house church today, which is, I know you've used the comparison before of, say, a restaurant versus a hot dog stand, right? Talk to me about that for just a minute.

00:00:51.960 Yeah. So when we think about house church, a lot of people go, is this some kind of fly-by-night operation here? And I have a little analogy between hot dog stands and restaurants. The hot dog stand takes very little. The barrier to entry is quite low. You need maybe $5,000 and a passion for hot dogs.

00:01:18.100 um now if you have a restaurant it takes you know more like a million dollars and a full business

00:01:29.980 plan and a financial model and lots of training and a chef and a team and and so uh my experience

00:01:37.380 is that traditional churches have been more like the restaurant and they viewed the house church

00:01:43.660 more like the hot dog stand. And what we have to do and what I've made the commitment to do for

00:01:51.740 our ministry here at Reformation Seminary and Reformation Fellowship is that we have to treat

00:01:56.060 the hot dog stand like the restaurant. We have to train and prepare and plan and study in a way

00:02:08.200 that is equivalent to the work that would be required

00:02:12.120 for a traditional church. 0.61

00:02:15.060 And that's why we have Reformation Seminary

00:02:17.780 to train men theologically, ecclesiologically,

00:02:22.500 homiletically, they're preaching well, doctrinally,

00:02:26.700 so that they are prepared to not just have a hot dog stand

00:02:33.100 that may or may not stick,

00:02:34.940 but really a full functioning operation that's small but very fruitful and very sound yeah

00:02:43.320 because the the picture people generally have of a house church is a rogue man or woman or family

00:02:49.180 who is it may be justifiably church hurt they were wounded there was something that didn't go right

00:02:54.580 and and they've gone off uh and and maybe they're unprepared for what's coming and they start

00:02:59.880 something that maybe lasts a little while or whatever, but that's what people think of when

00:03:05.120 they think of house church. And so our question today is how does a biblical house church

00:03:13.360 not only avoid that, but how does a biblical house church stay grounded in good theology and

00:03:20.620 practice? Yeah. So the first thing we do as a network of house churches, as a seminary, 0.95

00:03:27.100 training house church planters as individual house churches is we commit to the 1689

00:03:34.400 London Baptist Confession of Faith. We also affirm the Westminster standards.

00:03:40.440 So we do have men who have been through our school who plant Presbyterian house churches

00:03:48.200 in our network. They are committed to the Westminster standards if they do so

00:03:54.560 in comparison to the 1689.

00:03:58.360 And so we, one, have that as our rule of faith

00:04:03.180 in terms of obviously the scriptures are the bedrock,

00:04:07.340 but the practical application

00:04:09.700 and the carrying out of that doctrine

00:04:12.940 is clarified in the 1689 on our statement of faith.

00:04:16.460 In addition to that, we have this book right here,

00:04:20.760 actually, which you can see

00:04:21.940 if you're watching the video version of this,

00:04:23.440 but it's titled, How We Do House Church, which is the biblical doctrines and convictions of

00:04:27.720 Reformation Fellowship. And this has been theologically reviewed documentation of how

00:04:35.840 we do house church. And it has the doctrines, the convictions. Doctrines are things that are

00:04:41.840 backed in scripture. Convictions are things that are a little bit more interpretive and allow some

00:04:47.220 more flexibility, but it's how we have done this. For example, we have a section on how do you

00:04:51.660 invite a guest to a house church? What's the best practice for that? That's not a doctrine,

00:04:56.620 it's a conviction. And this is what we've learned over the years to be a fruitful way of doing so.

00:05:03.400 And so we try to hold ourselves accountable because again, clarity of doctrine and belief

00:05:09.900 and structure really offers an opportunity for more unity. We think that vagueness or ambiguity

00:05:17.980 is the way to go because people can be falsely unified or superficially unified.

00:05:23.840 No, the more you know, the more opportunity you have to be unified as a body.

00:05:30.880 And so we try to get very clear with members, with planters, with people that are interested

00:05:36.440 in a house church to have absolute understanding of our theological and doctrinal commitments

00:05:43.180 and how we do house church,

00:05:46.260 what to expect at a house church.

00:05:49.280 And you could find some of those things

00:05:50.720 at reformationfellowship.org.

00:05:52.500 But that's our heart,

00:05:53.900 is that we are grounded.

00:05:55.200 We are accountable.

00:05:56.580 We do stand arm in arm with our brothers and sisters

00:05:59.940 who have stood for the 1689 Confession of Faith.

00:06:03.340 Again, that's Charles Spurgeon's Confession of Faith.

00:06:05.180 If you're wondering,

00:06:06.780 he was one of the many people

00:06:08.460 that have adhered to that Confession of Faith.

00:06:11.960 And so it does.

00:06:15.060 It keeps us accountable because we have a rule of faith to be measured by.

00:06:19.040 Right.

00:06:19.320 And that's really the benefit of house churches that are united together in a network like this one is that we have this theological grounding.

00:06:26.780 And we're expecting these men and these pastors to be in substantial alignment with that.

00:06:32.980 Yes.

00:06:33.640 And so we have the theological grounding.

00:06:35.480 Talk for a minute about the ecclesiastical grounding of this.

00:06:40.040 We have certain structures in place in biblical house churches that keep them on the straight and narrow as well.

00:06:45.660 Yeah, so we have, as any biblical church should have, elders and deacons.

00:06:51.120 According to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, these are men who are overseeing, serving the church.

00:06:59.320 And these are biblically qualified men who have been ordained to ministry by other elders or by the network.

00:07:06.860 those are the two governing offices that scripture offers us and these men we also

00:07:13.460 really push for a plurality i think in certain unique circumstances like at the very beginning

00:07:20.460 of an inauguration of a plant it's possible that you might only have one elder but maybe another

00:07:25.680 elder candidate another possibility for that person to be in that position soon but ideally

00:07:35.640 you have two elders from the beginning. Now, it's sometimes nice to have three elders if you can,

00:07:41.960 but the reality is in a house church, when you only have 10 to 15 families,

00:07:46.300 having two elders and a deacon is really a sufficient leadership in the body.

00:07:54.740 The elders can meet with different families and share the teaching responsibilities.

00:07:59.680 The deacon or two can help and serve some of the complexities of meeting with families or needs

00:08:05.220 that are going on. We have a wife that just had a baby and helping get a meal train set up for

00:08:11.200 that family, bringing certain resources to the Pregnancy Resource Center that we've gathered as

00:08:16.860 a church. Those are some of the things that a deacon might do. And so we do have that theological

00:08:21.420 oversight. And the church's responsibility is to hold these men accountable to scripture

00:08:27.180 in the sense that they have the ability to, if there are witnesses of two or three,

00:08:33.560 to see something going wrong with an elder, that there's an accountable structure there.

00:08:37.680 We teach that, that if you see something going on in my life as an elder and the church has

00:08:43.980 an allegation against me, those things can be raised. And having men, we teach men to be in

00:08:52.640 gospel community where they are accountable to one another, submitting to one another in love,

00:08:58.540 and really making sure that these guys are qualified.

00:09:03.200 We look at their homes.

00:09:04.200 We look at their families.

00:09:05.280 We look at their wives, the relationship there.

00:09:07.540 We look at, are they radically in debt and not able to afford?

00:09:11.280 Like, is their home in order?

00:09:14.680 Are they, you know, obviously mature believers?

00:09:17.380 Do they have sound doctrine?

00:09:18.500 Are they dealing with any sins that are absolutely overcoming them?

00:09:24.100 And so we try to do a lot of this through seminary as we evaluate these men.

00:09:27.640 But that is an absolute commitment. So you have not just the confession of faith, but you have men who stand behind that, who have been qualified, ordained. Doesn't mean that men can't fail. They can, but it is another check in the process of sustaining strong gatherings.

00:09:45.700 Right. And sort of in line with that, when the men go through seminary at Reformation Seminary and they graduate, they're ordained, they go out and they plant a church, we're not just sending them out there on their own, right? They're not just going out into a vacuum to minister as they best see fit and without any assistance along the way. We actually have the Reformation Fellowship Church Planting Network.

00:10:07.700 Now, I want to be clear, we're not a denomination. We don't function that way. But there is a certain alignment between these churches to be a part of that network. So talk with us for just a minute about what is the network? What does it do with particular attention to how it helps hold pastors and churches accountable?

00:10:28.160 Yeah, I often say we're not a denomination, we're an association of biblical house churches around the world. And we're early, if you're listening to this in real time. This is still pretty early. We have a handful of churches that are in this network. As men graduate and get trained and planted, they're being added to that network.

00:10:45.680 But the network allows us to keep up on a biannual basis.

00:10:51.300 So every six months, checking in with them, making sure that they are still substantially

00:10:56.080 affirming that statement of faith, making sure that they're heads above water, talking

00:11:02.040 to a few of their members at their church to make sure that things are going well over

00:11:08.840 there from a member's perspective.

00:11:10.100 and we basically allow them to maintain good standing in the network so that if you're a

00:11:17.280 visitor, you can go to the website at Reformation Fellowship. You see a church in your area on our

00:11:21.480 church finder and you can see that, oh, this guy graduated from seminary. This guy is in good

00:11:28.360 standing with the network. You can see that he's married. He's got kids. You can see maybe a little

00:11:33.640 bio about him. And so we want to help guests feel comfortable that this is a trusted pastor

00:11:42.480 that they can bring their family to and have coffee with for a potential invitation to the

00:11:48.780 church. And so the network is ongoing accountability. In addition to that, when churches

00:11:57.040 multiply, when a house church multiplies, it multiplies into what we call a parish.

00:12:01.380 Really, this is the idea that the church that planted and multiplies into two churches, those churches become connected at a local level.

00:12:13.840 Those elders of those two gatherings, because they're essentially sister churches, can have accountability to one another locally.

00:12:22.500 And so if you have something go rogue with one church, they can talk to the elders of the church in their hometown as another layer of accountability.

00:12:29.760 They also would share things like a calendar where they might do maybe if they could baptisms together or if they're doing a parenting class by one of the families in congregation C, the people from congregation A and B are welcome to come to that parenting class.

00:12:46.880 So it creates this ability where you can have not just the intimacy of the house church,

00:12:52.760 but the capability of the traditional church.

00:12:56.220 It allows you to have that larger, we're going to do a worship and prayer night.

00:13:01.160 We're going to have a Christmas Eve service.

00:13:02.900 We're going to have an Easter sunrise service together.

00:13:05.740 Yes, and we're going to go meet at the park and you're going to have three churches.

00:13:09.460 You're going to have 30 families that get together,

00:13:11.900 or you're going to do something in the summer like a family camp or whatever it may be.

00:13:15.680 And so that's another layer of accountability. So we are working very hard to create that. And I think as time goes on, because our ministry, guys, if you're new here, we are pioneering, by God's grace, the house church movement in this generation.

00:13:36.440 And so this is still very new. Our job, really, and I feel my calling is to really legitimize house church as a valid alternative for the modern Western church. And so we're working up. We're working hard to create accountability, to create trust. And I expect that it'll get stronger and stronger as the years go by.

00:14:05.200 Yeah. You know, Dale, one of our goals has always been as we're planting churches to keep them connected to where if a family is attending a Reformation Fellowship Network church in Southern California, where I live, and they want to, they move to Sedona, Arizona, or they're vacationing here one weekend, that they can go to that church and expect to have not an identical experience, but a very similar experience that they can trust is going to be grounded in the same doctrine and the same practice.

00:14:35.200 And that's really the beauty of what we're trying to put together here.

00:14:38.740 Yeah. And Lord willing, 10 years from today, there will be several hundred biblical house churches in the Reformation Fellowship. And we can create a movement of deeply connected Christian individuals and families.

00:15:01.760 And if you're interested, I mean, I'm telling you here, I'm looking at the camera now.

00:15:05.840 If you're interested in being a part of what we're doing, men, enroll.

00:15:13.260 We do classes every six months that go for a year.

00:15:17.900 And so the seminary is a one-year program.

00:15:20.080 So we would love to have you as a part of our program.

00:15:25.520 And it is a calling.

00:15:28.800 I mean, if you're called to ministry, I think we've had so many guys that are self-employed individuals who really are excited because they felt called to ministry, but not full-time, get the building, do the big thing with the staff, all encompassing, all in traditional church planting.

00:15:54.340 But they found that, wow, I can keep my job. We have police officers, we have firemen, we have electricians, we have all these men that have been able to come in, be a part of the network, be a part of the seminary, and really obey that calling to ministry without radically changing their entire life.

00:16:17.780 Right. You know, it's interesting that we're on this topic on this day because here today in real time when we're recording this, we're getting ready to welcome our fourth group of men, our fourth cohort of men to Sedona today for their first intensive.

00:16:34.480 And I know it's a little bit off topic, but we're here. So let's talk about it for a second. What is going to happen this weekend for these men? What are they doing? Why does it matter? Why is it great?

00:16:43.500 Every group of guys that comes in, we're coming close on 75 students that have gone through the program or in the program.

00:16:51.420 And our intensive today is going to teach men how to prepare an expository sermon from start to finish.

00:17:01.160 And it's a wonderful experience from block diagramming to grammar to clausal layouts to how to study scripture and to extract the meaning of the text.

00:17:11.960 And we teach men everything that I learned from John MacArthur and Dr. Steve Lawson, who was my professor for preaching.

00:17:21.240 And we teach these things to these men so that these guys at these churches are faithful expositors of the word.

00:17:28.860 And they know how to study their Bible hermeneutically, exegetically, and faithfully.

00:17:36.280 And so it's an exciting time.

00:17:37.900 Yeah, these intensives are so great because the guys come together, they learn, they fellowship, they hang out, and there's some late nights, there's just time chatting, hanging out, and some of the later intensives when families are invited to attend, we have activities for wives, and we coordinate informal things for the kids that come along, and it really is this expanding family of house church planters, and so it's a huge thing to be a part of.

00:18:01.620 Again, if that sounds like something you're interested in finding more information about, we welcome you to, number one, pick up a copy of Dale's book, How We Do House Church.

00:18:09.980 This is going to answer and expand on a lot of the answers that we gave today, a lot of the questions that we've reviewed in these podcasts.

00:18:17.740 If you really want some specific information on planting a house church, head to reformationseminary.com, fill out an enrollment inquiry.

00:18:24.860 that basically goes straight to me

00:18:27.020 and I'll be in touch with you

00:18:28.120 about a candidate interview

00:18:29.340 and what those next steps are

00:18:30.560 where we can answer

00:18:31.320 all the questions that you have.

00:18:33.640 Seminary is a big decision.

00:18:35.580 With Reformation Seminary,

00:18:37.220 we've made it as accessible as possible,

00:18:39.580 both financially

00:18:40.100 and in terms of time commitment.

00:18:41.900 But it is a big decision

00:18:42.920 and we want to walk through that with you.

00:18:44.420 So we hope that

00:18:45.000 if you have those questions,

00:18:46.520 you'll take the opportunity

00:18:47.440 to reach out to us.

00:18:49.300 And I think that's all of our time today, Dale.

00:18:51.020 Thanks again for joining.

00:18:52.460 And guys, we will see you next time.

00:18:54.860 Transcription by CastingWords

Dale Partridge - September 19, 2022

How Does a House Church Maintain Good Theology and Practice？

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