Jesus is omnipresent, but it’s easy for us to lose awareness of his nearness. Gathering around his presence means intentionally acknowledging that he is with us, that he is leading us, and that his Spirit is actively speaking and guiding us. It means relating to him as a real person—present, active, and central in everything we do.

It’s also important to recognize how easy it is to accidentally gather around other things: a charismatic leader, a church brand, a denomination, our traditions, or even our own preferences and plans. But true spiritual community is formed by centering ourselves on Jesus—trusting him to lead, to speak, and to build his Church. We follow his plans, not our own, and we rely on his presence, not our structures or strategies.

If you want to learn more, there is a five-part teaching on the Presence of God in the Training Circle course.

There likely isn’t a community in your neighborhood or even city yet, but it might be the perfect time to start the community you’ve been looking for. Instead of asking, “Where is a group I can join?” start by asking, “Who can I start a group with?”
 We are creating a decentralized and open system, and we are not leading it - you are! Go here to start something by this weekend!

You might not feel like a leader, but this model is built on shared leadership and has a different DNA than what you might be used to.

We’re just building a trellis for this movement to grow on. This movement is led by everyday believers, in everyday places. None of us are meant to be consumers of ministry. We are meant to be carriers of it.

That being said, it’s often helpful to visit other expressions to pick up on the DNA of this movement - to see it with your own eyes. We are seeing people within our relational network travel to visit one another’s expressions - to both experience and learn, and to encourage and offer reports on what God is doing in another area.

You can connect with other people in our Facebook group at the link in the footer below.

Yes! There are many traditional church pastors growing with us, desiring to empower everyday believers to build community outside the walls of the church building. They desire to bless new expressions, and ignite new ideas. There are several ways you might benefit from Dwellings, but here are a couple:

1. Our tools and trainings can be utilized in smaller communities within your church, to give frameworks for discipleship that don’t require you to write training or curriculum. Consider getting a group of your leaders to go through the self-paced Training Circle Core course, and get together and discuss it in-person before new communities begin. The Training Circle contains all your leaders need to lead communities from Scripture for the rest of time!

2. More and more traditional pastors are exploring hybrid models. These churches are experimenting with planting and sending out house churches to reach people who might not come through the doors of a traditional church. In this case, these communities aren’t required to come to the larger Sunday gathering anymore, but might be held together by common values and leaders within the church. This is discussed more within the Premium version of our Training Circle.

If you click “Start Here” at the top of thIs page, we can help you start a community this weekend, within your church. If you desire to learn discipleship frameworks that will last you a lifetime, instead of always buying the latest book or curriculum, go through the Training Circle Core Course. It will train you to create a culture that feels like family, where everyone participates and uses their gifts.

It’s important to know that the church is about people and not about places. The word church in the New Testament is a translation of the word ekklesia, which means “called out ones” or “assembly.” It doesn’t refer to a building or place, so it would be wrong to give too much importance to any location a church chooses to meet.

The Bible often refers to the early church taking place in people’s homes. Here are some verses that show examples of the variety of people opening up their homes for church:

In I Cor 16:19 Paul says, “The churches of Asia send you greetings. Aquila and Priscilla, together with the church in their house, send you hearty greetings from the Lord.”

In Philemon 2 he sends greetings to “Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier, and the church in your house.”

And in Col 4:15 Paul sends greetings to the brothers at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her house.” (Col 4:15)

It is essential that we don’t idolize a model, but keep our focus on Jesus, the Word, and the Spirit, wherever a church happens to meet.

That being said, some of us today need permission to gather in a different form, and the Bible gives us plenty of room for creativity in how and where we meet. As John Piper stated, “Nowhere in the NT is it commanded or forbidden that local churches meet in homes. It is perfectly acceptable that they do, and acceptable that they don’t. This is not something God thought it wise to regulate. No doubt, I think, in part because of the incredibly diverse cultural situations the church would find itself in for the next two thousand years: under trees, in garages, in stores, in cellars, in caves, in cathedrals, in homes.”

While a sermon is a helpful tool, it’s just one of the ways a community can learn about God and the Bible. Another way to learn is through interactive discussion that’s based on Scripture. Jesus often taught his disciples through dialogue rather than monologue. He engaged people in a discussion, through asking them questions. He taught Scripture through a back and forth conversation, inviting people to think and respond. Being in a smaller community or house church makes having a group dialogue around Scripture possible.

In the New Testament, Paul instructed the early church to “teach and admonish” one another, and he described how a gathering of Christians should look in 1 Corinthians 14:26:

“What then, brothers? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.”

An interactive style of teaching and learning seems to be the way the early church was set up, and it’s a way we can still approach learning in our smaller communities today.

All of our training and tools encourage high participation through dialogue and practice-based learning.

By our current leadership standards in churches in the West, Jesus’ own disciples probably wouldn’t even be considered adequately prepared for leadership. And even some in Jesus’ time had trouble with who he considered qualified to lead in his mission. In Acts 4, as the two apostles Peter and John were boldly speaking to the crowds before them, people were astonished, knowing they weren’t trained in a way that qualified them to do so. The more qualified people in the crowd questioned where the power behind their words even came from. Finally, they realized it was less about their education and more of the company they had been keeping: Acts 4:13 says that they recognized they had been with Jesus.

Jesus chose ordinary people to become his followers and eventually start the Church, which was primarily led in homes. Here are some names of men and women that the Bible started had churches in their houses: Apphia, Archippus, Lydia, Nympha, Priscilla and Aquila, and Philemon.

One thing we are noticing today, in other parts of the world, is that ordinary people are sharing about Jesus as soon as they decide to follow him. And taxi cab drivers, school teachers, and former drug dealers that are devoted to Jesus and His Word, are filled with the power of the Spirit and are leading networks of rapidly growing communities and house churches.

It seems that some of the qualifications we put on leaders of churches, thinking they must have PhDs in seminaries or requiring charismatic personalities to lead the masses, simply weren’t qualifications in the early church and aren’t qualifications in much of the church outside the West today.

Now there are definitely reasons you should pause before leading a house church. Some of these reasons include:

anger and wounding at the church that has not been dealt with or healed

lack of support from fellow believers and mentors

and being stuck in a pattern of sin

People that will do well leading a house church are typically Christ followers that have been WITH Jesus for some time, who are generally spiritually and emotionally healthy, who are already making disciples, and are ready to be on a Spirit-led adventure for at least two years. They don’t start alone, but with a few other passionate followers of Jesus who are humble, dependable, and ready to share in leadership.

It depends how that word is understood. Too many times in our current Western model, the word “Pastor” has come to mean the person that does it all. This person leads a staff, preaches sermons, counsels people, leads new initiatives, keeps the budget, and more. As more and more leaders in the church experience burnout, we have to go back and redefine what it means to be a pastor, and also understand that there is more than one leadership gifting that is meant to carry the whole. Pastors are part of five functioning ministries described in Ephesians 4 alongside these other four: Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Teachers. We teach about these in our Training Circle.

The word pastor or shepherd is used interchangeably with other words such as overseer or elder. These are three different Greek words for differing functions of the one role. There is no concept in the NT of a traditional pastor figure over and above the elders in the church. The way the church was designed to work was the elders teams and other 4 ministries work together. You can read more about this in our premium version of our Training Circle course.

5-fold ministry according to Eph 4:11-12 was given not to DO the ministry but to equip God’s people for ministry. Too often professional ministry has sidelined ordinary disciples from walking in their spiritual gifting because it has been reserved for the so called ‘qualified’. Paul says only when these function properly will the body of Christ be built up, be united and mature to look like Jesus in His full stature and character.

Yes and no. We are not a top down movement. While we allow new expressions to use our name, (specifics on the “Get Started” page) we are not responsible for monitoring or overseeing expressions that birth from this movement. Instead, all should find wise local mentors and spiritual/biblical advisors where they live. Those who register their community and desire to be in the Dwellings Family must be in adherence to our beliefs and values, stated here.

Dwellings is a decentralized movement, meaning it's not built around a single leader, organization, or location, but around shared beliefs and values and a common vision. Other examples of decentralized movements are Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), where each group operates independently while adhering to a core set of principles, or TEDx, where local communities host their own events under a shared name and philosophy.

In a centralized system, authority, vision, and decision-making tend to flow from the top down. In contrast, a decentralized movement spreads ownership and responsibility across many people and places. Ideas, leadership, and authority are shared rather than controlled.

With Dwellings, the goal isn’t to build a brand or expand an institution—it’s to multiply communities centered on the presence of Jesus, led by the Spirit, and empowered to be faithful right where they are. You can feel free to use our tools and never get us credit or identify with us by name, or pay us any money.

There are a lot of things we can’t provide, but our guarantee is that we will provide you with three things: tools, inspiring ideas, and a global relational network. We hope this network feels like an extended family.

Very little, in practice. A strong small group—whether called a community group, life group, or discipleship group—might function almost exactly like a house church.

The main difference lies in how the gathering fits into the overall structure of the church. In a traditional church model, small groups often feel like they're on the periphery, while the Sunday service is seen as the center of church life. In a house church, the small gathering is the center. There's a conscious awareness that the full life of the Church—worship, teaching, communion, prayer, community, and mission—needs to happen in and through that gathering.

There’s also a greater sense of ownership and autonomy, with more space to listen to the Holy Spirit for unique direction.

Last, the house church typically includes every season of life. Older kids and teenagers sit alongside adults of all ages, and everyone contributes.

It is important! That is one reason why we have outlined our beliefs and values, explained here. We talk about leadership in our Training Circle.

When it comes to leadership, there is no central authority or oversight in this movement. We encourage the cultivation of local accountability and leadership in each community’s region.

We are not building a denomination and we will remain decentralized. The healthiest communities in our relational network benefit from eventually having both the wisdom and encouragement of local champions or elders, and also inspiration and training from the broader relational network of Dwellings.

What if one expression or church goes rogue?

From the very beginning, Jesus knew that not every expression of His church would stay true. Yet His commission was still the same: “Go and make disciples.” Because humans are fallible, some groups may go astray. If we become aware of a community using the Dwellings name but not reflecting our beliefs and values, we will ask them to stop. At the same time, we believe deeply in empowering everyday believers to cultivate communities. With that freedom and movement comes risk—but we believe the potential for life-changing discipleship is worth it.