organic church planting = slow church
- Filed under: Christianity, authenticity, church, church planting, community, leadership, missional, missional church, missional living, organic, relationships
- Date: Jul 17,2010
For all the adjectives out there to describe the church – total church, deep church, simple church, essential church – I’m convinced that for those planting organically, the only adjective that fits is “slow.”
(As a general rule, organic planting is moving from a core to a crowd vs. a crowd to a core; for more on this, see Ed Stetzer’s Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community, Chapter 11 “Planting Missional Ministries”)
I’m not the first to come up with this idea. Tim Chester recently wrote on this and it really hit home. He says:
In recent years we have been offered all sorts of options for church: organic church, messy church, simply church, total church.
Let me add another: slow church.
There is a slow food movement that extols the merits of hand-cooked food made from local ingredients cooked for as long as takes – an antidote to fast food. The slow food movement has extended so that people are advocating slow cities.
I’ve reading through Proverbs over the past few weeks and have been struck by how many call for us to slow down.
I think Tim is onto something…
Planting organically is a very different approach than the traditional form of planting. Traditional planting isn’t wrong – it is a way – just as organic planting is. And yes, these are very general terms. But I’m finding that planting organically is, well, slow.
Echoing our experience, a church planter tells of how slow church looks in practice:
–not worrying when the church is apparently growing slowly, or not at all
–learning to value and be thankful to God for the ‘small’ actions of his grace: The idea grasped in a bible study, the godly resolution of a…conflict, the provision of work, the opportunity to bless our neighbors by doing their garden, the chances to speak about Jesus in the workplace, the unity in song, the growth in a desire to see people come to know Jesus, opportunities to look after each other, the conversation…
–praying for God to act to bring change and for the Spirit to open eyes to the truth of gospel
–our interventions in one another’s lives being focused on lovingly commending the good news of the gospel, rather than driving only at behavioral outcomes
–patience and persistence in prayer
–joy and hope coming not from activity or success ( which struggles when faced with a quiet life or failure) but from knowing the Lord Jesus
–learning to be thankful for the people God has put you with…
I think if I had to sum up the difference between the two approaches, it would have to be the issue of the “buffer.”
In the organic model, there is no stage, no lights + sound systems, and very little space between the leader and the community.
Instead…
There is a living room.
There are strangers facing one another, beginning to work through the uncomfortable stages of community.
There is lots of conversation.
There is a leader – but he is more of a harmonizer, integrating his vision with burgeoning vision of the community.
In short, there is very little “buffer.”
Here is what I think (in my humble opinion): The secret to developing concrete community in the infancy of a church may be found in the lack of a buffer.
I have nothing against preaching, corporate worship, preview services, etc. but if church leaders generally agree that 80% of true discipleship and spiritual growth come from smaller groupings [1], I’m afraid we might be skipping over something so essential in the formative stages of a church that may be difficult to backtrack and find again.
We think how you start means everything. It says a lot about who you want to be and how you want to be known.
We think whether you are a part of an established church or trying to birth a new church community, the end game is to be in rhythmic gospel formation in the context of community on mission. Everything else is periphery.
So we are choosing little to no buffer for the sake of instilling the DNA of deep gospel formation in community. It’s messy and measured. And there is no question that this means the birth of mercyview will be a slow simmer.
And that is just fine.
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[1] Dan Kimball, Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations (El Cajon, CA: emergentYS, 2004), 29.
Photo by KaiChanVong // reprinted under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
