Jeff Brush/ THE POST Tom Ebenhack(jb), his wife Janie, and Kris Hibl(jb), of Reynoldsburg, OH, celebrate a service at the Christian Brethren church, one of many new Cell Churches in the U.S., in Columbus Sunday morning. "I like the relationships here, it helps people open up more," says Tom Ebenhack.

COLUMBUS - For the last four years Rev. Jay Firebaugh has been trying to push people out the doors of his church. In fact, there is not much worshiping happening inside the East Side Grace Brethren Church in Columbus these days.

"I'm not the pastor," Firebaugh said gruffly last Sunday. "They call me that," he said, pointing into the dimly lit church, where 300 people were waiting for the service to begin. "But what I am trying to do is to equip our people to do the ministry themselves."

The Columbus church is part of a worldwide movement characterized as "the second reformation" of the church - the first reformation being when protestant Christians broke off from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century.

The movement has created a network of "cell" churches that divide congregations into small groups of people who minister to one another in homes.

In America, the movement began in the early 1990s. Now there are an estimated 15,000 cell churches.

The worship service is mostly music. Saxophones, singers, handclaps and drums fill the church with sound. The sermon is brief. The message is about the battle to live a holy life.

"God works in all of you," he told the congregation. "Among each other, in homes, that's where you will find help to workout your salvation. It happens with each other."

Jeff Brush/ THE POST Senior Associate Pastor/Cell Coordinator Jay Firebaugh (jb) of the Christian Brethren Church in Columbus preaches Sunday during a morning service.

Christians were worshiping in homes for nearly 300 years before the Roman Emperor Constantine had the first Christian church built.

Firebaugh says a dynamic was lost when people left their homes to worship in churches. "Worship changed from participation to observation," he said. For four years, the Columbus church, like other cell churches, has been bringing Christian worship back in time and beyond the walls of the church. When a member of the church asked Firebaugh "why they had to do this new-fangled thing anyway," Firebaugh responded, "This new-fangled thing is 2,000 years old."

Karen Keers, a cell group member at the Columbus church, grew up in a traditional church. She said ministering to one another in small groups allows her to put relationships at the core of the church.

Something similar to modern day cell churches began in America in the 1730s with the early Methodist Church, and its ministers traveled from home to home.

Barbara Jean Carriere is an associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Athens. Carriere said that while cell churches represent "a wonderful Christian ideal," she is concerned that cell pastors have little accountability to a larger church administration.

"When you don't have that accountability in any organization you run the risk of abuse of leadership and power," she said.

The cell church movement began in the early 1960s in a church in Seoul, South Korea. It is now the biggest in the world, and has 250,000 members and 21,000 cell groups.

Randall Neighbour leads Touch Outreach Ministries in Houston, a resource and network center at the forefront of the cell church movement.