From an interesting book by Barry Liesch about worship. What interested me about this quote was that he wrote it in 1988. This idea of returning to the way of Christ and His Apostles and the simple meetings of the early church is not just a fad.
“In periods of decline we tend to look back to an earlier era when a sense of purpose was clearer and things seem to be working. We look back to the fountainhead, the source. We look back hoping to recover what was lost in the passage of time.
“That happens with institutions too, and it happens in the church. Throughout church history there have periodically been calls for a return to the simplicity and purity of the New Testament church. We see that happening again in our own time.
“According to Joyce Thurman, it is happening today in the house-church movement in Great Britain that is said to number more than fifty thousand members. ‘It’s ranks,’ she says, ‘have been swelled by disillusioned members of churches who have become impatient waiting for the denominational structures to experience revival.’ The majority of the members of the house movement are not ‘illiterates,’ but university graduates, doctors, executives, and middle-class families ‘at the peak of their life.’
“Reports of similar manifestations of growth and/or renewal connected with house meetings come from other parts of the globe. In China and Korea an immense network of small prayer groups have been a central component in multiplied church growth.”
— Barry Liesch, People in the Presence of God: Models and Directions for Worship; Chapter 6: Back to the Fountainhead, p.86.
