where we started

Early in 2014, west Michigan pastors Neal Karsten and Britton Smith began raising questions about their respective church congregations. Both pastors experienced the conviction that what they observed in their church cultures didn’t align with the biblical precedent for what it looked like to operate as the church. Each began raising this question in his sermons, hoping to stir within the church a deeper hunger for the Lord, more sacrificial love for the Body, and a burden for the lost. While both church congregations would have claimed these as existing values, Neal and Britton wrestled with the gap they observed between the beliefs and lifestyles of the congregations they oversaw. This seemed all the more startling when Neal preached a sermon on the importance of sharing the Gospel with one’s neighbors only to discover that, a week later, no one in his congregation had bothered to do so.

Around this same time, Neal and Britton began hearing testimonies from the underground church in China. They heard stories not only of miraculous signs happening there—including people being raised from the dead—but of everyday Christians in China counting life and reputation as loss compared to the surpassing worth of revering Christ as Lord and making him known to others through evangelism and discipleship. They heard stories of massive revivals breaking out in apartment complexes and of brand new Christians leading their neighbors to the Lord. Neal and Britton had difficulty reconciling these testimonies with the complacency they observed in their congregations. If people were truly walking in obedience to Christ, where were the testimonies of neighbors giving their lives to Jesus and of faithful believers sharing the Gospel in west Michigan?

Realizing that the very model of church to which they adhered might be opposing the work of the Gospel, Neal and Britton began gathering with their families to pilot test a house church. The idea was to attempt a month-long experiment to see if the context of church could affect the lifestyle of the believer. Others hungry to go deeper with the Lord began to join them, and before long, some sixty people were cramming into Neal’s living room to worship together, pray with one another, hear testimonies of God’s faithfulness, and spur one another on to preach the Gospel to friends and neighbors.

However, with the increased number of people, Britton and Neal soon found the house church replicating all the same pitfalls as their traditional churches. They began to partner and connect with others pioneering alternate models of church across America. As they did so, and as they heard more stories from believers overseas, they began to lay the groundwork in the west Michigan area for a simple autonomous house church network: a decentralized network of many house churches within a city maintained through discipleship relationships and striving after the common pursuit of reaching west Michigan with evangelism and discipleship. Through this model and the faithfulness of the disciples within it, the Church in Holland grew one disciple, one simple church at a time into the present network of interconnected disciples and simple churches.