So I’m continuing to explore the idea of more organic forms of church. I came across this blog post entitled How the Local Movement is Revitalizing Church. Its basically about “reclaiming the ancient idea of the parish” – that’s right a community-based church! You might want to go to the link and read it first. But basically I’d like to take their idea of community or neighborhood based church and adapt/apply it to the idea blending Organic and Institutional church forms.
Rather than creating another Institutional church, what if we created something like a network of inter-related house churches? What if the larger Corporate church existed not to feed itself (i.e. to make the organization larger and larger – as in the church growth movement) but instead existed to empower, equip, support and provide training to/for the smaller community/neighborhood based cell-churches? Now-a-days, typically we drive to the church of our choice (as in consumer Christianity), hopefully close to where we live (maybe in the same city) but not necessarily in our own neighborhood. What if we could change the culture to where the (cell) “church” we attend is based upon geo-location (proximity to our home/in our own community) rather than based on own “freedom” to pick and choose who we think is coolest small group leader in our church? There could still be a larger corporate gathering that supports these neighborhood based house-churches. What a great way to cover/reach a city with smaller neighborhood based outreach cells!
Once again, I’m kinda just thinking out loud here. So what do you think? Let me know in the comments below.
I have friends who are doing just this sort of thing in western Burma as the model for “Churching” the staggering results of their contextualized evangelism in the region. One of the things that they have observed is that when an “institutional” model of church moves in the evangelism falls apart, mission dies, and money starts to flow up the heierarchy rather than across the community.
Amen and again I say Amen, Brad.
There are some like this already. I guess they would repay study.
Thanks all. Very helpful. I guess now I just need to flesh out how to actually implement something like this in more detail!?!
It is probably more difficult in the US because we have such an institutional view of what “Church” is. Is it the called out for service viewpoint, or the called in to be served viewpoint? What we see for the most part is an INreach, not an OUTreach. Yes, it can be done, but it requires the parent organization to free the cell groups to minister as needed in their varying communities.