Home-church movement growing in U.S.

COLORADO SPRINGS — Kites and Christmas lights drape from the ceiling. Denver Broncos banners hang on the walls. Paper plates and canned soft drinks grace a makeshift buffet line.

It doesn't look like a church, but it is. It's a house church, hosted by Dick and Jean Wulf. Every Sunday, six to 10 Christian worshippers gather in the Wulfs' west-side basement to eat, sing and share their faith. And during football season, they watch the Broncos game afterward.

"We focus on one another," Dick Wulf said. "We don't exist for anything less than that."

In an era when arena-size churches seem all the rage, there's another, quieter movement afoot. House churches are springing up around the world, across the country and even in Colorado Springs, a place where megachurches seem to grow like kudzu.

According to a 2006 study from The Barna Group, an evangelical polling organization in California, 9 percent of adults nationwide attend some form of house church during the week. That's up from 1 percent who attended such a church a decade ago. (The study says these house churches are distinct from the small groups offered by many large traditional churches.)

This is no-frills spirituality — faith stripped of glitter and polish.

House-church experts say there could be as many as 100 such house meetings in the Colorado Springs region, but no one knows for sure. House churches don't build sanctuaries, don't hire pastors and don't issue press releases. At a recent citywide "gathering" of house-church participants, only 20 people showed up.

Organizers claim that's to be expected. People involved with house churches often don't feel a need to network with large groups of people. That's part of the point.

They're informal and small: Rarely do they have more than 20 congregants. Most are conservative, and many lean toward the charismatic or Pentecostal, meaning congregants may speak in tongues or believe in spiritual healing.

But the only thing you're guaranteed to find at a house church is a meal. What happens during the rest of the service — well, congregants say that's up to the Holy Spirit to decide.

"If I was a pastor, I'd never attempt to do (in a large group) what we do here," Dick Wulf said.

House churches have been around since the beginning of Christianity, when being Christian meant risking being killed, and meeting in large groups was downright dangerous.