Home Church is Moon’s most fully articulated populist model. Each blessed couple is given a geographic neighborhood — 360 homes — and charged with building a community within it. No parish lines, no HQ permission required, no buildings provided.
The key elements:
- No parish lines: multiple blessed families can work overlapping geographies; competition gives way to complementary witness
- Full local ownership: the blessed couple has authority to build whatever serves their community — they are the church, not representatives of it
- Frontline decision-making: people touching the actual community make the actual decisions; headquarters provides vision, not management
- Decentralization as growth engine: the more hubs, the more contact surfaces, the faster the total network grows
Hendricks notes that this model crosses cultural barriers naturally — because each hub is led by someone native to (or deeply embedded in) the local culture. The unchurched person in the neighborhood doesn’t encounter a foreign institution. They encounter a neighbor who happens to have a living faith.
Home Church failed to scale in the 1970s–80s largely because members weren’t spiritually ready for full ownership. The theological understanding was there; the maturity to carry it wasn’t always. That’s a different problem now, with a more developed community.
The model itself was right.