Who Am I and What Am I Currently Doing?

Someone recently emailed me asking for a brief account of my background and what I’m currently up to. I thought it might be good to write a short summary here.

Some of my past story can be read at my first post.

And my core value (relationship) is blogged about here and explained in more detail here.

As to what we are doing today… we still have no clue what we are doing… but we are having a great time doing it.

We are a part of four or five “churches” or “gatherings” (located on the central coast of California) that we call a “network” for the sake of definition. Although we have a loose-knit “structure”, i.e., times and places and informal “leadership” (situationally in which everyone, really, is a part), every church is completely autonomous and thus there is no room for a hierarchy to develop.

We “network” with each other based on relationship, we network with other churches (both simple and traditional) based on relationship, and we love being “networked” (relationally) via the internet with other simple church expressions.

Our heart-beat is to facilitate authentic Christian community amongst one another, and this is probably our strength. Our desire is to also learn how to be missional from a place of true authenticity and compassion (seeing and relating to people, not numbers or a goal)- something that we are still struggling with.

We are, most definitely, not attempting to re-structure the church, we are simply trying to “be” the church, i.e. lovers of God and lovers of our neighbor. We want to keep everything else as simple as possible so that we are as unencumbered and undistracted as possible.

As I said already, we don’t know what we’re doing (God, after all, is more mystery than we can imagine), but we’re having a great time doing it.