Members of Ferry’s house church hike at their annual Hocking Hills trip. The deep bonds they form in house churches come from extended time together outside the church walls. Photo by Tristan Ferry
1 in 10 churchgoers in America cite conflict with another church member as a reason for switching churches, according to Lifeway. Hurt received from people in the church may cause Christians to avoid deep, intimate relationships with believers. However, Tristan Ferry, the family ministry lead at New Community Church, said that rather than avoiding the pain altogether, inviting messy church relationships into daily rhythms can transform lives, even more than a rousing sermon.
“We're actually giving people the context to work theology out with fear and trembling,” said Tristan Ferry, the family ministry lead at New Community Church. “Many people would just say, ‘Just go to another Bible-believing church,’ and they just dropped all of their relational commitment, instead of staying there in the pain.”
New Community Church in Xenia, Ohio, is a collection of house churches. Their members gather regularly on Sundays, sharing life during the week with their local house church community.
Ferry leads a house church, and he started attending New Community soon after graduating from Cedarville University in 2017. He said post-grad life shifted who was in his circle of friends and made him see the Church differently. At Cedarville, a Christian university, Ferry said it was easy not to look for Christian relationships in the church.
“I didn't really look to the church to be my community or the people that I chose to gather around to order my life around the ways of Jesus,” Ferry said. “I mostly did that with my Cedarville friends.”
Ferry also said his vocabulary around the church began to shift the longer he attended New Community. They now call their church building a “meeting house” and their sanctuary a “gathering room.” They call their pastors “shepherds.”
“Whenever there are words that get tired and they don't carry the same emotional weight that they were intended to — sometimes, it can just be pastorally wise to shake it up and use a different word,” Ferry said.
Ferry said his primary role is to equip the members of his house church to take on the forms of ministry they feel called to.
“A lot of people imbue pastors with too much authority or responsibility, when really, there's a lot of work that's just supposed to be done by the church,” said Ferry. “We look to all of the paid professionals to do the work of the ministry when it's the Holy Spirit living inside of that pastor.”
The lay people that comprise the house churches work to change the hearts and minds of New Community’s members. Although the church still gathers on Sunday mornings, Ferry said each house church group sits together, symbolizing their commitment to each other’s sanctification during the week.
Members of New Community gather for an eclipse watch party on the lawn. New Community gathers as a whole church body often to form relationships between house churches. Photo by Tristan Ferry
“There's this line in the book of Ruth where Boaz walks up to the field and sees Ruth working, and he asks, ‘Whose is she?’” Ferry said. “What he was really asking underneath that question was, ‘Who's caring for her?’ And so, when I think about membership, [the church members] are accepting a certain amount of responsibility for the body in the church.”
This deeply rooted community sounds inviting, but it is also uncomfortable to invite people to go deeper than the surface. Ferry said intimate relationships can be the “sandpaper” on the rough edges of our lives.
“We look to the Bible study to be the most transformative experience that's going to happen for us,” Ferry said. “When in actuality, it's much more likely that God is going to use that annoying person that I don't like, more than a verse about it.”
Each house church gathers around a meal once a week. Ferry said they rotate who shares the Scripture, and members discuss the Bible and its application to their sin struggles. But, there is so much more to community life than those few hours.
“You can't replace relationships,” Ferry said. “You can replace charismatic speakers and good Bible facilitators, but you can't replace this person that cares for me. I'm keeping this person accountable. This is the person that I confess my sin to. This is the person that I get meals with or I pray with at 6 a.m. on Wednesday morning.”
Those close relationships come through in hard times. After a vehicle crashed into Ferry’s house and garage, a member of his house church provided a car.
“We have a lot of needs, and people have been showing up for us and bringing us meals,” Ferry said. “We live close enough to one another that we're seeing actual needs, and we're aware of what those needs are.”
That level of closeness — intimacy that looks beyond the mask of self-sufficiency and sees needs — does not happen accidentally. Ferry said this intimacy is missing in legacy models of the Church.
“The most likely context for growth in your life is in long-term relationships, so we don't really make it that easy for you to just leave a house church,” Ferry said.
Intimate relationships get messy
Walking with someone through deep waters is not a walk in the park. Ferry said one of the most marked life changes he observed at New Community was through the restoration of broken relationships. A couple in his house church became pregnant before they were married.
“Oftentimes, we have this romanticized idea of what discipleship would look like,” Ferry said. “But it was so ugly.”
Ferry said that instead of placing blame and condemnation, the church walked alongside the couple as they navigated their next steps. They encouraged the couple to live in the redemption of Christ.
“You have nothing to defend (when) you have confessed your sin before God,” Ferry said. “You have owned it, and your righteousness doesn't come from any penance that you would do.”
As Ferry and the church continued to counsel them, the couple decided to get married, just two weeks before their due date.
Ferry said their house church mobilized: one person reserved a park, another gathered tables and another purchased a cake. The members continued to be there for the couple, from constant conversations to meeting needs for the wedding celebration.
Ferry said their house church had a front-row seat to how the couple dealt with repentance and the realities of the gospel, even as they surrounded the couple with encouragement and counsel.
“When there was so much distress in their families, they just talked about how they had to believe the gospel,” Ferry said. “They had to believe that Jesus forgave them of their sins, because they had accusers who were reminding them of their sin day and night.”
The church mobilized for a wedding, showing up for their community. The members of their house church needed help to put together a wedding reception, and each person brought something to help. Photo by Tristan Ferry
One and a half years later, the couple is still a part of New Community, thriving as members, and Ferry witnessed new life not just in their new baby girl, but in their hearts.
Individuals need community
There are days where Ferry said he does not feel motivated to shepherd his house church or days where repentance and intentionality do not come easily.
“It’s better when we're trying to carry all of those burdens together; that works the best, but it's so unnatural,” Ferry said. “It's so much easier to just stay cloistered and isolated.”
Ferry said it is also easier to pick and choose your intimate friends, creating an exclusive club with your heart, only admitting the cool or likable people. He said the church cannot function like this.
“There's a Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote from ‘Life Together’: ‘The ideal of your community is the destroyer of community,’” Ferry said. “I hate him for saying that because he's so right. If I could, I would choose all of my super attractive and cool and interesting friends to go out and attract other people to Christ. But, I'm not really attracting them to Jesus — I'm really attracting them to an aesthetic.”
Ferry said ministry is not solely an aesthetic. Beauty comes from addressing brokenness.
“The messy, on-the-ground reality is not as pretty or attractive as our buttoned up, nice polished theology of church,” Ferry said. “There's our aspirations, and then, there's the reality. And that doesn't mean we don't shoot for the aspirations; it's just slow and hard.”
Yet, right there in the messiness, that is where the Lord works.
Margaret Fipps is a junior Journalism student at Cedarville University and the editor-in-chief of Cedars Magazine. As a journalist, she wants to revive beautiful writing with a purpose: to engage communities in conversations with each other. As a former pastor's kid, she deeply cares for the church and loves seeing Jesus proclaimed through his bride.
