In 1997 the leaders of this charismatic church in the centre of Andover made a decision to transition the congregation to a house church model. The reason for this change was more to do with a commitment to underlying values rather than a desire for structural change.
The transition from a congregational model to house churches was not easy and took both a long time and two attempts before things started to move forward. The initial attempt to reorganise the congregation into four large house churches had to be re-worked after about 18 months to establish properly relational "family" groups. There were initially six of these, one didn't work so it disbanded and the remaining five worked through various issues and developed new ways of doing things.
Several Alpha courses were run on different lines, either as joint ones between a couple of house churches and a central one with guests and hosts from several house churches. The best outcome generally was when an Alpha was deliberately run with the intention of it developing into a new house church from the outset, with the hosts / workers becoming the leaders of the new house church with those guests who made commitments.
Andover has continued to develop; four of the original house churches have reproduced and there are currently ten house churches, with the potential for some more in the near future. Numbers in each church vary from half a dozen to thirty. All the home churches gather together about every six weeks and occasionally for training events. A further house church was planted in Newbury and this has reproduced twice. Over 75% of those in Newbury were previously non-churched and in Andover at least 50% of the churches are made up from this category.
The Valley Church has also sent out an Apostolic Team of three couples who are working with house churches in Andover, Newbury, Bath, South Wales, Sutton and Horsham in the UK and also with house church groups in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Malawi. They have also had contact recently with groups or individuals in Spain, Finland and Holland.
