The Reformation of 1517 reshaped Western Christianity’s theology, but the question of *where* the church met remained contested for another century. While Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a cathedral door, smaller gatherings of believers were quietly meeting in homes, barns, and private rooms across Europe — some 300,000 Anabaptists alone faced persecution for doing so. Scripture never restricts the church to a building, and the Spirit has never required one.
Yes — but not from the major Reformers. Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli recovered the centrality of Scripture, the priesthood of all believers and justification by faith, but they kept the institutional church building and the sermon-centered gathering format inherited from medieval Catholicism. The home-based gatherings of the Reformation era came from the radical wing — the Anabaptists, the English conventicle movements, and the German Pietists — groups that the mainstream Reformers often persecuted as vigorously as Rome had persecuted them.
The Reformation recovered what was preached. The radicals recovered where and how people gathered. Both recoveries were necessary, but only one challenged the Constantinian assumption that legitimate church requires a dedicated building, ordained clergy, and institutional oversight. But the house church streams of the Reformation — meeting in homes, barns, forests, and caves — represent the most direct line of continuity between the apostolic house church and the modern house church movement.
Understanding these Reformation-era home gatherings reveals that the house church is not a 21st-century innovation. It is a recurring recovery that surfaces whenever believers read the New Testament carefully enough to notice that the apostolic church looked nothing like the institution they inherited.
The Anabaptists: Home Meetings and State Persecution
The Anabaptist movement emerged in 1525 in Zurich, Switzerland — among Zwingli’s own followers who concluded that the Reformer had not gone far enough. Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and George Blaurock rejected infant baptism, insisted on believers’ baptism, and began meeting in homes rather than in the state-sanctioned Reformed churches.
The Anabaptists did not merely relocate to homes for convenience. Their ecclesiology demanded it. They believed the church was a voluntary community of committed believers — not a parish system where everyone born within geographic boundaries was automatically a member. This theology of gathered church produced small, intentional communities that met in homes, practiced church discipline, shared economic resources, and refused to swear oaths or participate in state violence.
The cost was severe. Felix Manz was drowned by the Zurich city council in 1527 — executed by Protestants for his conviction that the church should gather as believers in homes rather than as citizens in state churches. Michael Sattler was burned at the stake in 1527. Thousands of Anabaptists were martyred across Europe by both Catholic and Protestant authorities. The charge was not heresy about the Trinity or the resurrection — it was the insistence on separating church from state and gathering as free communities of believers.
The Schleitheim Confession of 1527 — the earliest Anabaptist doctrinal statement — describes a church that looks remarkably like the house church of Acts 2:42: believers’ baptism, communal breaking of bread, separation from the world’s systems, plural pastoral leadership, and community discipline. The Anabaptists did not cite the term “house church,” but they practiced it.
Conventicles in England and Scotland
The English conventicle tradition represents another stream of home-based church during and after the Reformation. A conventicle (from the Latin conventiculum, “small assembly”) was a private religious meeting held outside the established Church of England.
The Conventicle Acts of 1593 and 1664 made it illegal for five or more people to gather for worship outside the Church of England. The penalty included imprisonment and, for repeat offenders, exile or death. Despite this, English dissenters — Puritans, Separatists, Baptists, and Quakers — continued meeting in homes, barns, and hidden locations throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.
The Pilgrim Separatists who fled to Holland and eventually to Plymouth Colony were, in essence, a house church network that concluded the institutional Church of England was unreformable. They gathered in homes in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, before their emigration — a conventicle that became a colony and eventually influenced the American tradition of religious liberty.
The Scottish Covenanters of the 17th century held clandestine outdoor worship services (conventicles) on the moors and in the hills, refusing to submit their worship to state control. These gatherings — often several hundred strong but organized through networks of smaller home-based groups — represented a direct challenge to the idea that legitimate worship required a state-sanctioned building and a state-approved minister.
Pietist Collegia Pietatis: Spener’s Home Bible Studies
The most theologically articulate Reformation-era home gathering movement emerged in late 17th-century German Lutheranism. Philipp Jakob Spener, a Lutheran pastor, published “Pia Desideria” (“Pious Desires”) in 1675, calling for the renewal of the Lutheran church through small-group home gatherings he called collegia pietatis — “schools of piety.”
Spener’s proposal was specific. He called for small groups of believers to meet in homes for intensive Bible study, mutual accountability, prayer, and the exercise of the priesthood of all believers — which Luther had proclaimed theologically but the Lutheran church had never implemented structurally. Spener argued that the Sunday sermon was insufficient for genuine Christian formation. Believers needed face-to-face, participatory, home-based community to grow.
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The collegia pietatis were not intended to replace the institutional church but to supplement it. Spener remained a Lutheran pastor throughout his life. However, the home gatherings he launched produced a movement — Pietism — that profoundly shaped global Christianity. The Moravian community at Herrnhut, which emerged from Pietist roots, sent the first Protestant missionaries and directly influenced John Wesley’s conversion and the Methodist movement.
The Pietist home gathering model anticipated the modern house church in several ways: small groups meeting in homes, participatory Bible study, mutual accountability, emphasis on lived faith over doctrinal intellectualism, and the conviction that the priesthood of all believers must be practiced, not merely professed.
How Reformers Recovered Word-Centered Gatherings but Kept Church Buildings
The mainstream Reformers — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox — made the Bible the center of worship. They preached in the vernacular, translated Scripture into common languages, and insisted that the Word, not the sacrament, was the primary element of gathered worship. These were monumental recoveries.
But they did not question the building. Luther preached from a pulpit in a church. Calvin governed from the Consistory in Geneva. Zwingli reformed worship from the Great Minster in Zurich. The Reformers challenged what happened inside the building — removing images, simplifying liturgy, elevating preaching — but the building itself, and the clergy-congregation dynamic it created, remained unchallenged.
This is not a criticism of the Reformers. They fought the battles of their generation — justification by faith, the authority of Scripture, the end of indulgences and papal supremacy. The structural question — does the church need a building at all? — was left for others to ask. The Anabaptists asked it and were killed for the answer. The Pietists asked it more gently and were marginalized. The modern house church movement asks it again, with the full history of house church as evidence that the question is not novel.
The Through-Line to the Modern Movement
The Reformation-era home gatherings — Anabaptist homes, English conventicles, Pietist collegia — form a historical through-line from the apostolic house church to the modern recovery. Each movement independently rediscovered the same pattern: believers gathering in homes, studying Scripture together, practicing mutual accountability, and functioning as communities rather than audiences.
The modern house church movement did not invent this pattern. It inherited it — from Paul, from the Anabaptist martyrs, from the Pietist Bible study groups, and from every community across Christian history that read the New Testament and concluded that the earliest Christian gathering patterns are not just historical descriptions but permanent principles for how the ekklesia gathers.