Better Than Hippies, Pt 2

A new look at the House Church Movement of the future
By Wolfgang Simson

Editor’s Note: Wolfgang has been involved in the house church movement for years.  He is a scholar and visionary who manages to be both brief and substantive.  This is not fluff.  This content came from one of his recent articles.  For the sake of the casual reader, I have divided it up into smaller, more digestable chunks.  I’ve also added some bold sections and SECTION TITLES to make it easier to process.

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The Hippie Subculture

Do you remember the hippie subculture? Originally a youth movement that began in the US during the early 1960s and spread around the world? Free speech, flower-power, make love not war? It was characterized by folks that roamed the world in VW-Buses and pursued a nomadic lifestyle, believing the pseudo-gospel of the day that freedom is the absence of restriction, that freedom is the power to do what you want, with whom you want, if you want.

Those who were young, had a loud mouth and could take to the streets during the late 60s cried out against an entire selfish and seemingly pointless way of life – and then selfishly spent the bulk of their time to basically celebrate themselves. But what was their alternative? The whole world quickly knew what the countercultural movement was against – but what were they standing up for? Many hippies, if they were not on the road, created their own communes or communities, hangouts, and the basic activity there was, statistically, drugs, sex and rock and roll.

At its core the Hippy-culture was a rebellion against suburbia: the lame, predictable, trapped civic existence of a post World-War generation that had taken down bad guys like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini and now had no other vision than to have a good time. Work and earn, pay taxes and burn. In those days Mom and Dad were obsessed with getting a job, or better two, work hard, buy a box of a house, get a car, watch TV, plant raspberries and go – sorry, drive! – to attend a church service on Sundays.

Where Was The Bigger Vision?

Their kids did not buy it. They saw behind the façade. Such a life had no appeal; for them, it was a sham of an existence, plastic, stencilled, prescribed, something to flee from, not something to pursue. In our language today: suburbia was “The Matrix”. Youngsters fled such homes in order to find out who they really were; they ran away from such a senseless, consumer-driven circle, seeking real meaning, value, a real life. But once the selfish and rebellious orgies of drugs, sex and rock and roll had worn off, what was there to do? Where was the bigger vision, were did all of this lead? The hippie movement branched into three smaller hippie-rivers:

1. The hobos and free-riders that jumped on the hippie-train because finally something was going on, and it allowed them to have a good time. At their core they were consumers – they consumed even each other. At the end, when all the hippie-hype was vented, most of them slowly and unobtrusively trailed back into the pack, into mainstream-society, and have been happily consuming ever since, having melted back into oblivion.
2. Then there were the hard-core ideologists, some of them so taken with their anger at the machine, the system, that they went so far as to become terrorists.
3. Finally, the reformers, who intentionally invaded and infiltrated the system, becoming part of it and planning to change it from inside, even if it took decades. That long-term political perspective, which in Germany was called “marching through the institutions” later embraced almost any idea or ideology that promised change – or at least a cause – be it leftist, green, feminism, love parading, anything.

Do you see the parallels to a large segment of today’s Christianity? Since the late 90s in the Western context, house churches or organic churches are becoming a more and more frequent phenomenon. Thousands of house churches are forming inside and outside traditional church systems of all kind. Many are wonderful expressions of a passionate and missionary mind, bringing the church to the people, living a “shopping window of God in walking distance of their neighbours”.

But, I am afraid to say, some groups awfully remind me of the situation in tribalistic Africa: there is a grave danger that house churches become small spiritual tribes, independent or even antagonistic of other tribes, where the age-old denominationalism and fragmentization is reappearing in ever new forms. Only a strong human leader (a spiritual king), a threat from outside (like the persecution in North-Korea or the burst of civil war in Kenya) or the spiritual ideologies of the day seem to be able to bring about a significant level of unity or even the ability to be heard or felt in society.

Many house churches are not much more than spiritual DIY-groups with an invisible flag about themselves saying “us four no more” or became religious self-help groups that cater to their own insatiable religious needs: “lets study the Book of Revelation for the next five years”. However, consumerism (“I want a church that is good for me!”), fear & anger-based rebels (“I am hurt by the bad bad system, so I will criticize it!”) and idol worshiping ideologists will not solve the problem; they are the problem.

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