Micro Churches - A Viable Option for Anglicans?

By Robin G. Jordan

For a group of Anglicans living in a community that does not have an Anglican church, forming a micro church is an option that they may wish to explore, rather than driving long distances to attend an Anglican church in another community or attending a non-Anglican church in their community.

While the micro church may lack the ambiance of the traditional Anglican cathedral, college chapel, and parish church, it has strengths of its own. It offers a non-threatening environment for the unchurched who are unaccustomed to these worship settings and to the complexity and formality of traditional Anglican worship in them. It also offers opportunities to build community and, to echo Carey Nieuwhof, “to serve, connect, and grow together.”

We know from the rubrics of the first Edwardian Book of Common Prayer of 1549 that Archbishop Cranmer had envisioned the celebration of the Holy Communion outside the traditional settings of cathedral, college chapel, and parish church. The rubrics of the 1549 Prayer Book permit the omission of the Gloria in excelsis, the Creed, the Homily, and the Exhortation, beginning, “Dearly beloved…” when the Holy Communion is celebrated “on workdays or in private houses.” One of the reforms that Cranmer had hoped to implement was more frequent celebrations of the Holy Communion at which the people communicated. This included celebrations of the Holy Communion in private houses. He envisioned small groups of the faithful gathering in private houses and celebrating the Holy Communion together. While Cranmer himself never saw the realization of his vision, it was not entirely forgotten.

If we examine the history of the Anglican Church from the early Reformation on, we will find a number of occurrences when Anglicans met for worship, Bible study, prayer, and fellowship in private houses rather than church buildings. The early Reformers who fled to the Swiss city states during the Marian persecutions met in their lodgings as well as in borrowed church buildings. Foxe’s Lives of the Martyrs records the deaths of ordinary English men and women who were burned at the stake for gathering in private houses and studying the Bible as well as holding Protestant beliefs.

When The Book of Common Prayer was outlawed in 1645, non-conforming Anglicans met clandestinely in private homes and read the Prayer Book services. When the episcopate was abolished in 1650 with the repeal of the Act of Conformity of 1558, the English bishops, while deprived of their office, continued to ordain men in secret, using the Prayer Book’s Ordinal. These ordinations were also conducted in private homes.

During the years the Scottish Episcopal Church was outlawed for its Jacobite sympathies, Scottish Episcopalians were prohibited from meeting together in groups larger than four people. Scottish Episcopalians circumvented the law restricting their meetings by remodeling private houses as meeting places in which a congregation, while gathered in separate rooms of the house in groups of four people, could hear the lessons and the sermon, could take part in the prayers, and receive communion.

On the North American frontier in the nineteenth century, in Canada and the United States, groups of Anglicans and Episcopalians also gathered in private houses on Sunday and read the Prayer Book services until they had constructed a church building.

Michael Green documents the successful use of cell churches in the Province of South East Asia in Asian Tigers for Christ: The Dynamic Growth of the Church in South East Asia (SPCK, 2001). He also edited Church Without Walls: A Global Examination of Cell Church (Paternoster Press, 2002). The cell groups that form cell churches are similar in a number of ways to micro churches. A major difference is that cell groups are closely networked with each other, regularly gather together for worship and other church functions, and are expected to replicate once they reach a particular size and produce more cell groups.

Micro churches may form loose networks but these networks are not viewed as forming a church.

In 2002 I was involved in a micro church in Louisiana. It was officially a preaching station of a charismatic Episcopal parish in a different part of the state. The bishop had agreed to this arrangement because none of the churches in the local deanery were interested in sponsoring a new work in the deanery. A deacon who lived in the area but was assigned to the sponsoring parish organized the weekly celebrations of the Eucharist.

On some occasions the rector of the sponsoring parish presided at these celebrations, on other occasions a Continuing Anglican priest who lived in the area presided at the celebrations.

During the time that I was involved in this micro church, it met at two different private houses. The micro church met initially on a weeknight and then on Sunday afternoon.

The celebration of the Eucharist was preceded by a meal, following the pattern of the early Church. We used “Rite III” from the 1979 Prayer Book or the Communion of the Sick from the 1928 Prayer Book, depending upon who was the president.

The services regularly included anointing with oil, laying on of hands, and prayer for healing. One of the things that united the members of this micro church was a common interest in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, healing, and prayer.

My experience with this micro church as well as with a number of home groups has convinced me that micro churches are a viable option for Anglicans.

Forming a micro church does require discarding the idea that the house of the church is the church and recognizing that the people who comprise the micro church are the church. It also requires ditching most of the paraphernalia which has become associated with Anglican worship since the nineteenth century Catholic Revival. But Anglicans who form a micro church will discover that the loss of these things is small loss in comparison to what they will gain. They will also discover that they do not need these things to meet their Lord present in his word and sacrament.