Simple Church Journal

We like to do a “Family Forming” get-together in the early stages of a new house church. This is an “exercise” that builds community as we talk about what it means to live the spiritual life in interdependence.

We build this get-together around three questions:
1. In what ways do we choose to be responsible to one another?
2. In what ways do we choose to be responsible to other churches?
3. In what ways do we choose to be responsible to the world at large?

It’s not that we come away, necessarily, with some great insight. But the process is powerful because of the discussion. We find that we are practicing doing family life together. We begin to talk about more difficult issues and start learning how to disagree and work through conflict. We learn that church is meant to be about relationship, discussion, and listening to everyone. We are laying the groundwork for future family meetings in which everything is discussed and the Holy Spirit leads through the contribution of each person.

We also come away with a stronger sense of connectedness to each other, to the Body of Christ at large, and to a sense of mission to the world. It does always seem to lead to a deeper sense of “family.”

I’m still unpacking some thoughts about leadership that are in seminal form.

We all know that leadership is influence and that biblical leadership is based one hundred percent on servanthood. We also know that leadership in churches is easily transformed into manipulation and used to serve self-seeking ambitions (both conscious and unconscious). Yet, we recognize that it’s not possible to throw out leadership; it always exists whether recognized or not. Someone will always surface, within a group, to point in a direction or at least suggest a direction. The Holy Spirit does lead His people intentionally through people… not necessarily through an assigned person… but He does lead and people who are listening become, at least for the moment, leaders.

Furthermore, the Holy Spirit does seem to be intentional about leading His people forward in certain key areas: building community, being missional, and becoming more like Christ. Therefore, it seems to me that “leadership” (the people of God) who are listening to the Spirit will also be intentional about pointing in directions that move the Body of Christ toward community, being missional, and becoming more like Christ.

As I said, I am still thinking this area through, but I would like to suggest two quotes that bring some definition to leadership that is intentional in the three areas that I have mentioned. The first quote is from Alan Roxburgh:

Leadership is not a person with a plan or vision for the future, a leader is one who forms environments in which the people of God, among whom the Spirit resides, can get in dialogue with others and narratives of Scripture.

It seems to me that this definition of leadership relates to the Spirit’s desire for us to be intentional about developing community and becoming more like Christ.

The second quote, from MissionThink, defines what leadership is that is intentionally missional. Here are his thoughts:

Missional Leaders?
I’ve noticed that most talk about missional leadership points out what missional leadership IS NOT, instead of what it is–it’s not hierarchical, its not pyramid-shaped, it rejects a clergy/laity distinction, etc. I’d like to put forth what I think missional leadership IS (keep in mind, that these are generalizations, and sometimes there can be exceptions):

Missional Leadership:

* is a steward of the vision, not its creator nor its master

* leads by giving a tangible example of missional living

* focuses on fostering networks of relationships more than on building infrastructure

* recognizes and mobilizes the spiritually gifted, rather than delegating

* helps the community in spirit-led decision making, rather than making decisions for the community

* is plural rather than singular

* is based in function rather than office

* helps people to engage people where they are at, rather than focusing on leading a meeting to draw people from where they are at

* invests in who the Spirit tells them to, not just “top tier” people

* puts ethos development before systems development

* doesn’t equate vision with control

* helps to shape ministry around people, rather than placing people in ministries

I think I would add (or modify) this list to say that missional leadership is about helping others to uncover their missional vision. When talking about vision, I believe it’s important to make sure that we do not see vision coming from, or even being stewarded by one person, rather vision is the collective of what God has put on the hearts of every believer and leadership is about helping to uncover and serve that collective vision.

Perhaps, as I mull this over, I would simplify all of this by simply suggesting that leadership is about serving (really serving) the work that God is doing in and through others.

Here is an article posted on a site that I’ve been enjoying called CellChurch Info:

House Church: A Bible Study by Dr. Victor Choudhrie

Dr. Choudhrie is a prominent surgeon in India, whom the Lord challenged in 1993 to lay down his professional life to establish the church in Madra Pradesh. Starting from scratch, the Lord has prospered the work over the past 7 years to where it now represents around 3000 churches in homes with an estimated 50,000 people involved.

EVENTS

1. Pentecost took place in a house. (Acts 2:1-2)
2. The Last Supper took place in a house (Luke 22:7-13)
3. Most of the miracles took place in homes.
4. The wedding at Cana took place in a house.
5. Jesus taught in many homes.
6. “Greet the church in your house” was a common greeting of Saint Paul to various house churches started by him (1 Cor. 16:19; Col. 4:15; Philemon 2, Rom. 16:5 and so on). He visited house to house and taught them everything (Acts 20:20).
7. The house church is the original New Testament church.
8. The disciples went to the temple regularly and taught the people, bringing the seekers to their homes. They gave them food and discipled them (Acts 2:42). Soon they were jailed and punished by the temple authorities and banned entry into the temple but by then they had reaped a large harvest and many house churches had been established. “And the Lord added to the church daily those who were saved.” (Acts 2:46-47, 4: 1-4).
9. The intimate, friendly environment of a home provided the ideal stage for interaction, resulting in the rapid conversion and maturing of believers into discipl-ers. Multiplication of discipl-ers led to explosive growth of the church (Acts 6:1).
10. The informal environment of the house churches gave opportunity for rapid maturing of “lay leaders” like Stephen, who was the first Christian martyr and Philip, who was the first evangelist to evangelize Samaria. The net result of handing over the baton to the seven Greek speaking ordinary men resulted in the conversion of priests, which in turn caused exponential growth in the church. (Acts 6:7)
11. The rapid growth of house churches (Acts 8:3) resulted in severe persecution of the believers and Peter ended up behind bars. The church gathered in the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, for an all night prayer meeting which led to the dramatic release of Peter from jail. (Acts 12:5; 12).
12. There was no formal Sunday service. The meeting could last all day and all night. Believers therefore came equipped with lamps for such an eventuality. (Acts 20:7)
13. Signs and wonders, including raising the dead Dorcus, took place in homes.
14. Baptism of the household of Cornelius and the Philippian jailer took place in their homes.

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.

I’m enjoying reading about a new friend’s journey in simple church from Colorado. He has a blog called milkfusion and you can read some of his story and background from the links on the left sidebar “Wrestling with church” and “A church story”.

I am trying to understand what it means to be truly missional in today’s world. I consider it a huge topic. The following excerpt from BlahOnline is a good starting point for this discussion. He starts by saying that one of the flaws of today’s church is that it is “attractional”:

By attractional, I mean the church plants itself within a particular neighbourhood and expects that people will come to it to meet God and find fellowship with others. There’s nothing unbiblical about being attractive to unbelievers. There was certainly an element to which the early church was attractive to the wider community (Acts 2:47), though there is much more evidence that the church was reviled and avoided in its early days. Nonetheless, when I say it is a flaw for the church to be attractional, I’m referring more to the stance the church is taking in its community. By anticipating that if we get our internal features right, people will flock to our services, the church betrays its belief in attractionalism. It’s the “If you build it, they will come” mentality. How much of the traditional church’s energy goes into adjusting their programs and their public meetings to cater to an unseen constituency. The emerging missional church recognizes is compelled to move out from itself into its community as salt and light…

The Come-To-Us stance taken by the attractional church is unbiblical. It’s not found in the Gospels or the epistles. Jesus, Paul, the disciples, the early church leaders had a Go-To-Them mentality.

There’s a wonderful post by Alexander Campbell regarding “Campus Church Networks“: simple churches reproducing on college campuses.

The following is an email sent to me from John White… It’s regarding John Arnott’s term: “Supernatural Church”… and it’s regarding two predictions that John makes… read all the way to the end:

A recent email from Felicity Dale pointed me to an article by Arnott in the recent edition of the “Spread the Fire” magazine which is put out by his church www.tacf.org. The article, entitled “Let’s Get Back to Supernatural Church”, clearly articulates many of the basic concepts of simple church (see the John Arnott post below). By “supernatural church”, Arnott means “one that depends on “the foundation of Jesus as the Anointed One, rather than on structure”.
What a concept! House church…simple church…organic church…supernatural church. This may be the best name of all for what God is doing. This article is especially significant because Arnott is the Sr. Pastor of a megachurch and also gives leadership to an informal network of traditional churches. These are the kinds of churches that have traditionally been built on “structure” and they are beginning to call all of this into question. Amazing! This certainly is God!
The article is also significant because it reminds us in the house church movement that meeting in a home (or Starbucks) is no guarantee of “supernatural church”. We also must be alert to the danger of becoming “structure dependent” instead of “Jesus dependent”. At the recent House Church Conference, John Eldredge warned us that if Satan cannot stop the house church movement, he will attempt to “co-opt” it by tempting it with “Churchianity”. This is what Arnott describes as “man’s attempts to organize and institutionalize the Church”.
My predictions: 1. In the next year, we will see a growing number of traditional church and parachurch leaders embrace simple church concepts. 2. At the same time, as these concepts become more and more accepted, we will see a growing number of attempts to “organize and institutionalize” the house church movement.

I want to get this quote from Alan Roxburgh (via WinnNotes) down in print so that I can come back to it and think about it:

Leadership is not a person with a plan or vision for the future, a leader is one who forms environments in which the people of God, among whom the Spirit resides, can get in dialogue with others and narratives of Scripture.

Leighton Tebay keeps us humble with this post:

Let us be honest, we don’t know how to fix the church

All over western society we see the church in decline in numbers and in influence. There are a lot of answers but not a lot of progress. The Willow/Back churches can point to numbers, buildings and dollars as a sign of their success. Even though Warren and Hybels have had a tremendous influence on the church George Barna tell us that the church is losing its influence on society year after year. The “Emerging Churches” I’ve experienced have detoxed church but the reconstruction hasn’t resulted in much change. A cursory glance at the discussion will reveal that so many of us want church without the stuff we don’t like. What seems to matter is what we want out of church, not what Jesus wants out of His church.

Maybe it will take another 10 or 20 years of decline before we become humble enough to actually admit we don’t know. Many of us have reached the point where we admit things aren’t as they should be. When we begin to think of why we only dig down a level or two and we never get to questioning our foundational assumptions. I think we have to be brave enough to do that.