what is it?

DOVE Christian Fellowship International (DCFI) started with a group of young Christian believers who had a burden to reach out in love to the un-churched youth in the local community in northern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

It was the early 1970s and the time of a nationwide awakening among young people in the United States. The nation had been through tumultuous times in the 1960s with rapid changes tearing at the fabric of our society, including the sexual revolution, Vietnam war, women’s liberation and abortion rights.

The church was challenged to be a force in those uncertain times. After a decade of young people dabbling in the occult and drug culture seeking answers for life but being disillusioned, they were now turning to God in great numbers.

Christian song writers and screenwriters producing songs like, "I Wish We’d All Been Ready," and a movie entitled, "A Thief In The Night," describing possible end-time scenarios, jolted Christian young people from their complacency. Many of these young people developed a genuine burden for their world, because the end seemed near.

It was in these times that a group of us, who were Christian young people living in south-central Pennsylvania, started an organization called "The Lost But Found." Through friendship evangelism, we saw many young people come to know Jesus as their Lord. A Bible study under the direction of Larry Kreider called "Rhema Youth Ministries" nurtured many of these young Christians.

Although we had tried to get the new believers to whom we were relating involved, they simply didn’t fit into the established churches in our community. It seemed clear there was a need for new church structures flexible enough to relate to new converts from a variety of backgrounds. That’s why Jesus said we need to put new wine into new wineskins: "Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved" (Matthew 9:16-17).

Increasingly, there became a need for a flexible New Testament-style church (new wineskin) that could relate to and assist these new believers (new wine) in their spiritual growth. In 1978, God spoke to Larry about being "willing to be involved with the underground church."

Our adventure into cell groups
So began our church’s adventure into cell groups. A cell group was started in Larry and LaVerne Kreider’s home and when their living room was filled to capacity, they turned over the responsibility to leaders they had trained and started a second cell in another home. The roots began to grow for this "underground church" where believers were nourished in these "underground" cell groups as they gathered together to pray, evangelize and build relationships with each other. We believed when the underground roots (individuals in relationship in cell groups) are healthy, the whole church is strong.

By the time our church, DOVE Christian Fellowship, officially began in October, 1980, there were approximately 25 of us meeting in a large living room on Sunday mornings and in three cell groups during the week. We discovered cell groups to be places where people have the opportunity to experience and demonstrate a Christianity http://dcfi.org/House2House/House_to_House.htm built on relationships, not simply on meetings. In the cell groups, people could readily share their lives with each other and reach out with the healing love of Jesus to a broken world. We desired to follow the pattern in the New Testament church as modeled in the book of Acts, as the believers met from house to house.

Twelve years later, as these cell groups continued to grow and to multiply, more than two thousand, three hundred believers were meeting in over 125 cell groups all over south-central Pennsylvania. Churches were planted in Scotland, Brazil, Kenya, and New Zealand. Believers met in cell groups in homes during the week and in clusters of cells in geographical areas for celebration meetings each Sunday morning. Here believers received teaching, worshipped together and celebrated what the Lord was doing during the week through the cell groups. Every few months the entire church would meet together to worship on a Sunday morning in a large gymnasium or in a local park.

Several times we closed down our Sunday celebration meetings for a four week period and met in home cell groups on Sunday mornings to strengthen the vision for building the church underground. During one of those times, we came back together after a month of meeting solely in cell groups and realized the Lord had added a hundred people to the church.