From this point on, then, any concerns that you might have will need to be taken up with other parties. Thank you for reading and for commenting.

To Dennis:
This comment by “Just No One” is the point I have been trying to make, what I’ve been trying to convey is my previous posts. There needs to be better oversight in regards to control by homechurch leaders. In my own opinion, I don’t think that this problem exists in all home churches, but just enough that serious issues do arise, enough to call attention to the church itself.

I mentioned in an earlier post that in a new home church plant from my own group, of the couple who became the leaders, the woman has absolutely no business being in this capacity of leadership. She is nosey, a gossip, immature, and at times the things she says or questions she asks are totally unappropriate. When I challenged this decision by the existing leaders, the response was ‘but she has so many good qualities as well.’ I won’t agrue with that, but it worries me who will be harmed by her actions.

I can’t imagine attending any other church because Xenos has been a blessing to me, but with as with anything good there is the bad to deal with when humans are involved, unfortunatley. HOWEVER, there is a problem here with control, as Just No One mentioned.

I suggest that you talk to some of the people who have left the church, not only those who left years ago, but those who have left recently.

I was in an adult home church and told not to hang out with a friend of mine who was a believer, but the home church leader didn’t like him, so I was to abandon him. I saw a couple by these same leaders instructed not to get married, not suggested but instructed.

If you keep asking the HC leaders if they are being controlling they are going to keep saying no, ask those who have been displaced and run off. Stop asking the bobbing heads around you.

YOu haven’t created a cult, but I do think you have created a church in your own image, one that is very impressed with it’s own intelligence, arrogant and controlling.

In my case I knew somebody who had been rather seriously hurt in a prank instigated by the leaders of our home church and when I went to talk to one of the leaders I was told I had a “love problem” and “didn’t understand love”. I was given some verses to study and dismissed. It was the final straw for me and I left shortly afterwards.

A few years later a friend of mine, knowing how badly hurt I had been by my experience, arranged for me to meet one of the leaders of my former home church. He didn’t have much to say to me when we met, allowing me to talk about what was bothering me. After a while he pulled a piece of paper out of his notebook. wrote the name of several books on it and suggested that I read the books. He then left the room and that was the last I ever saw of him.

I remember attending a Workers meeting where Dennis explained that Columbus was “fished out” and that the church was going to have to look outside of Columbus for additional growth opportunities. By the leadership’s estimate by 1986 Xenos had “touched” over 70,000 people in Columbus and that most of them had not found a home in Xenos for one reason or another. I’m sure that many of them didn’t because they weren’t ready to make a commitment to Jesus or a church that was as different as Xenos is. But I’m betting that more than a few of them have been burned by Xenos. It’s not hard to find bitter ex-Xenos people. Many of them tell the same sort of story as the people here. And they continue to get slapped down by Dennis, Gary and the rest of the leadership.