SimpleChurch Journal

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.

Simple Church in Colorado

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".

Becoming Truly Missional

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.

Simple Churches On Campus

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

Supernatural Church

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.

Leadership Quote

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.