Praxis Church

The Crowded House is a group of church planting networks which began in 2000 with a team of eight people.

In 1996 Steve and Janet Timmis had started a new project to plant a household church. It was originally known as ‘the Broomhill Initiative’, but later got the name ‘The Crowded House’.

As this plant grew some of the group began to realise church as they knew it would have to change radically if it were to ‘fit’ into a home. Church could not be viewed as an event, but as shared lives. In 1999 Steve and Janet left the congregation with a mandate to recruit a team to start afresh.

Meanwhile Tim Chester had become convinced of a household model. Tim and Helen had been church planting in west London while Tim worked for the evangelical development agency, Tearfund UK. Working with John and Pauline Miller they had started Staines Baptist Fellowship in 1993. The church had transitioned into two ‘church groups’ that met in homes with a missionary mandate. Steve and Tim had met through a fraternal where Tim remembers being on a walk with Steve thinking, ‘Here is someone who shares my [Reformed and evangelical] theology, but thinks the same way about church – I didn’t know such a person existed!’ So when Steve asked Tim to join them in Sheffield to start a network of household churches he jumped at the chance. Tim and Helen moved up in December 1999 with their two daughters.

In February 2000 Steve and Janet, Tim and Helen Chester and Mark and Denise Lawrenson all met for a weekend together. Mark and Denise were youth workers in a church in Brighton, but were planning to join the new TCH. Together they put together the ten core values which have become the defining document of The Crowded House.

Phil Harper and Fiona Seagren (now Fiona McWhirter, together with Steve, Janet, Tim, Helen, Mark and Denise made up the initial team of eight people.

The Crowded House launched in August 2000 with an away weekend for prayer and planning at a conference centre in Castleton in the Peak District.