I read this about David Platt’s church at Justin Taylor’s blog:

Tell us a little bit about “secret church”—how it started, what it is, and how other pastors might implement something similar.

“Secret Church” was something we started at Brook Hills based on time I had spent with our brothers and sisters in underground Asian house churches. There, they gather together at the risk of their lives for 8-12 hours at a time just to study the Word and pray. It’s simple, raw, dangerous, and satisfying . . . all at the same time. So when I came to Brook Hills, some of our leaders sat around one day saying, “Why don’t we do the same thing?” So we decided to try it. We set a Friday evening when we would gather from 6-midnight and simply study the Word, in addition to praying for our persecuted brothers and sisters. Just a simple 6 hours of straight teaching and prayer. The first night we did it, we had about 1000 people, and after that it began to grow. We now have “Secret Church” a couple of times a year, and we have to take reservations because our auditorium at Brook Hills will be packed full (i.e., we sold out of over 2500 tickets this last time in about 3 hours). One of my favorite sights as a pastor is to look out across a room packed with people at 12:30 a.m. (we never finish right at midnight!) with their Bibles open listening to the Word of God being taught.

People are hungry for the Word, and there are numerous ways other pastors could implement something like this. There’s really nothing special or creative about it. It’s just the study of the Word and then prayer for our persecuted brothers and sisters. All of the material from the Secret Churches we have done to this point is available for free online. Some churches have hosted their own Secret Church and simply watched the DVD of teachings from a past Secret Church at Brook Hills. Other pastors have taken the teaching material, adapted and adjusted it however they wanted, and then taught it in a similar format in their churches on a particular night. Really, any pastor could take any topic/portion of God’s Word and do the same thing . . . it’s just Bible study and prayer, and the Word itself does the work!

One of our goals in Secret Church from the beginning has been to study not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the nations. I want to lead a church with people who are equipped to make disciples in all nations, and so the purpose of Secret Church is to equip people in ways that they will then be trained to go into other contexts of the world to teach the Word. We also are in a process of taking all the teaching from Secret Church and translating into the top 6 languages in the world. That way, we can go into underground locations in other countries with hours worth of biblical/theological training in people’s native languages, and we can give them mp3 players with a plethora of biblical/theological training. So the goal is not just what happens each night at Secret Church. The goal is the equipping of the church here and around the world to make disciples of all nations.

At our Morning Bible Study Group on Galatians, I brought this up to the guys I was studying Scripture with and shared with them how I longed for a day our church could do the same.  They seemed a bit skeptical.  Would that many people gather together to meet that long to study the Bible and pray?  Would there be such a hunger to do so?  And the fact that these men who are driving from far distances meeting at 6:30am to have an in-depth study on Galatians would look at me with their quizzical eyes, made me wonder the same, “Could people really long for God’s Word in this way?”  I believe the answer is yes.  When people hear the Truth spoken, and when they have an opportunity to see the beauty of God’s Word unfold before their very eyes, they can’t help but be in awe.