The idea that the evangelical church of our day stands in need of reform may sound audacious. Who do we think we are? But throughout church history, the Body of Christ has had its up and downs with regard to faithfulness to Christ and the Bible. It seems that the church cannot walk far in this dusty world without needing to be washed again by her Savior in the cleansing water of His word. Our age is no exception.

Some doctrinal issues have been spiritually deadly and many dear Christians have had to die in order to reform the church of their day regarding those doctrines. When the gospel lay buried under multiple layers of Roman Catholic tradition, it took the power washer of the Protestant Reformation to do the job, and God used spiritual giants like Martin Luther and John Calvin to restore His church to its gospel foundation—Christ alone, as revealed by the authority of Scripture alone, for a salvation that is by faith alone, for the glory of God alone. Many, of whom the world was not worthy, died in their labor to restore these precious truths.

Just a few centuries years later, the Church of England in the late 1700s lost sight of what it really means to be born again. But God used men like George Whitefield, the Wesley brothers and Jonathan Edwards to lead the English speaking nations in the Great Awakening.

In a time when the evangelical church is reported to be losing a large percentage of its children to the world by the age 20, to be losing its marriages at almost the same rate as the unbelieving community around it, and to be alarmingly uninformed or unconvinced of the claims of Christ as Lord over all of life, it is again necessary to reform the local church, even though it is a reformation with a small “r.” If, as Solomon wrote, it is “the little foxes that spoil the vines,” our attempts at local church reform are intended to catch those little foxes and restore the vineyard of the Lord to greater fruitfulness.

Recent signs of drift involve the relative wisdom and foolishness of our evangelical church structure, culture and polity. Though by no means as weighty as the gospel or the new birth, they are none the less important to the church’s health and vitality. The Essential Reforms of Household of Faith are limited in their scope and focus. They have to do with what we choose to avoid in our church (e.g Sunday school, youth group, children’s church, nursery, singles groups, offering plates, etc.) and what we choose to restore to our church life (e.g. family worship, hospitality-based evangelism, parental responsibility for child-evangelism, discipleship and education, leadership development from among the seasoned men of our local body, the restoration of New Testament elders and deacons as a team, the use of spiritual gifts in our services, weekly communion, prayer for the sick, a weekly shared meal, and etc.). Thank God we are not being persecuted by our fellow Christians for not offering a youth group or a Sunday school (At least, not yet.) But these structural and cultural reforms are real and substantial. They are well worth the effort and they are bearing excellent fruit in the lives and families of our members.

It is in this limited sense that Gresham Household of Faith is an on-going “experiment” in local church reform. Our members are not lab rats or Ginnie pigs. They are fellow members of the body of Christ in a local church that is trying to do a few things differently, not just in order to be different, but in order to enjoy more of what we see in the local church described in the New Testament. Ours is an adventure in getting back to that wonderful place where the goodness and wisdom of God is so clearly on display in our local church that even our children can read the Book of Acts and look up at us and say “That’s like us. We do that too!”