Lessons From a Festival

So, last Sunday, a bunch of us from our Foothill Ranch House Church threw a neighborhood festival in the cul-de-sac by our host home. There was a giant inflatable waterslide. There was a water balloon fight, a cake walk, a cupcake eating contest, crafts, balloons, bean bag toss games, facepainting, free hot dogs, popcorn and snow cones for all. The afternoon/evening culminated in an open air street concert featuring "Dean-o" of "Dean-o and the Dynamos" whose rapid fire songs about the value of the Bible and trusting God were illustrated by four young ladies from two families who had gone through the trouble to learn the songs in advance and provide interperative choreography for each. Too fun!

Here are some things that stood out to me about the whole event:

* It was amazing how much was pulled off by such a relatively small number of people.

* The old "80-20" rule did NOT apply (20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work). In our case, it was 100 percent participation from the host families and singles right on down to the smallest of our tribe. That was SO gratifying!

* This was not a "staff driven" or "pastor driven" event. I guest preached two services at a church an hour from the neighborhood that morning, picked up the sound system and a few other things from our storage unit, and arrived an hour before start time. All preparations were either already done or finishing up. These folks worked hard. They made and distributed the flyers, came up with the ideas, involved the neighbors, coordinated the expenses, designed the set up and did all the work. We were all very tired by the end of the day, but it was stunning how productive these people were -- all because they wanted to bless a neighborhood as the local house church.

* This was our second event of this kind (last one was in November, a couple months after we had started up). The first one was good. This one was even better.

* The cost for us to put on this event -- one that put us in touch with dozens of folks outside our house church -- was 1/3 of a month's rent for the building we were leasing for our traditional church in Rancho Santa Margarita. That's not to say our event was cheap. It wasn't. It is to say that the "bang for the buck" factor in terms of outreach was immensely greater than any of the events we used to do that depended on people coming to our church campus to experience. There is a big fat lesson here.

* In the less than a year that Foothill Ranch House Church has been officially constituted, we have put on: another similar festival to last Sunday's, a Christmas Eve service including a live nativity play (held in the garage for all to see!), an open air Easter Sunday service held on a beautiful spring day right on the street, and countless smaller touches on neighbors including a gift basket delivery / prayer session for one that had been recently diagnosed with breast cancer, etc. If it is true that, in sharing the gospel, we ought to count "conversations" and not just "conversions", I cannot remember a time when so many "conversations" about Christ, the church, and the kingdom have been so plentifully initiated in such natural and even fun ways.

* In giving up our traditional church modality, we have faced new problems -- mostly related to how we will organize ourselves, care for our kids and teens, and a few other issues that are mostly about what we miss and what we were used to. But that price is so small to pay for what I have seen in terms of active participation in ministry from all ages, quality fellowship and interpersonal ministry among our small group of house church people, outward flowing stewardship of money and efficiency and MEASUREABLE commitment of our mission to "empower everyday people to take the ministry of Jesus to everyday places."

This has been a year of experimentation, lessons learned, saying some bittersweet goodbyes to the familiar, speedbumps, and so on. But I confess that -- combined with what I have seen in our other two house churches in our network and the individuals involved in them -- I'm pretty darn spoiled for ever wanting to go back to the old way of doing and being church. In that regard, what I mostly miss is the people and, in a way, we still get to have each other and the memories we have made, the growth we have gained and the love we have engendered. But when it comes to modalities of church life, I've never been more encouraged about actually seeing what I believe to be important put into actual practice.

One year later, this festival reminds me that saying "yes" to change, though difficult, can be very, very rewarding.

*

New Wanderers - Apex Church

Another sign of what the Spirit is doing in our time:

Apex Church in Dayton, Ohio is a large (formerly) traditional church that has chosen to emphasize their identity as a network of house churches. One description of their congregation is as follows:

"They have over 2,500 hundred people showing up every weekend, but that is the least impressive thing about this church. Rob Turner is a great, young leader. Their church is made up of 60-70 house churches that meet on different nights throughout the week. You are not a member of Apex if you do not go to a house church."

From Apex's own website, we get this:

Apex Community Church is a network of community churches
delighting in Jesus so much that we are compelled to love, equip, and send people. As a network of house churches we desire to spread a passion for Jesus through Christ-centered communities among individuals where He is yet to be worshiped.

Apex desires to see God work as he did in the early church, as detailed in God’s inspired Word, specifically Acts 2. We created a model termed 3G (e.g. Gathering, Growing, and Going), which is our way of making sure we are staying focused on the mission and vision the Lord has given us as a body of believers.

We gather corporately for celebration and teaching, growing spiritually as house churches and going, i.e., meeting the physical and spiritual needs of others.

This is yet another example of a traditional church that has shifted to a network of house churches focused not only on their own fellowship but on "the mission and vision the Lord has given us as a body of believers".

I appreciate the way Apex has embraced their call to launch a network of house churches that are not just appendages to the Sunday gatherings but are, in fact, the heart of this large congregation. Establishing house churches that care and serve neighborhoods, provide for intimate fellowship, and provide for the training and edification of the whole strikes me as the kind of balance that calls many New Wanderers to take risks in order to pursue.

New Wanderers - Northland Church

Up to now, the subjects of my "New Wanderers" series in my blog has focused on small Vineyard churches, very locally focused. But now, we move from the West Coast to the Eastern US - Florida, to be exact. This is the story of a megachurch of 12,000 that has left behind convention in order to embrace a most remarkable vision. It is not a Vineyard church either. But it is a most compelling and inspiring congregation as you will see.

I first heard about Northland Church from my fellow house church buddy Ken Eastburn who just returned from the church after being asked to visit there. The church leaders have recently announced their desire to partner with Global Media Outreach, the Campus Crusade online ministry to God-seekers from around the world, to plant one million house churches. That is not a typo. One million.

To get a little better picture of where a vision like this comes from, I have pulled a fairly large part of the the "about" post from Northland's website in what follows. I will be researching more, but I highly recommend you take a few moments to digest the following. I find it most inspiring:

The 1990s
With the initial renovation of the facility, God brought incredible spiritual and numerical growth to the congregation.

In the fall of 1990, the elders sent Dr. Hunter away on an extended retreat to hear a clarifying word from God concerning Northland’s future. Precisely, how did God desire for Northland to accomplish its mission of “bringing people to maturity in Christ”? From that mountaintop experience, Pastor Joel conceived, and the elders affirmed, the 10-year “Journey to Spiritual Maturity” emphasis that encompassed the entire worship and educational focus of all age levels of the congregation. In this journey together, one central preaching theme was focused upon for an entire year.

Attendance figures went from 300 to well over 5,000. The staff grew from four to 90; the church went from one service on Sunday morning to seven services throughout the weekend.

In the fall of 1997, the elders again sent Dr. Hunter away on retreat to begin envisioning the next millennium. He returned with a vision of a church unrestricted by geographical boundaries.

In April of 1998 the elders and pastors unanimously affirmed the vision: Northland would become a “church distributed,” arranging the church around the relationships of the congregation and partner ministries, rather than around a physical church building. Northland is calling people to follow Christ, distributing their lives every day in ministry to others.

Today
During Dr. Hunter’s tenure, Northland has grown from 200 faithful souls to a congregation of 12,000, worshiping at sites located throughout Central Florida and at thousands of smaller sites online. This growth forced the church’s leaders to make a decision as to the future character of the church.

Pastor Hunter remembers: “We had grown big enough to become a society within a society. If we had wanted to just do the traditional things to accommodate growth (i.e. be in perennial building campaigns, keep motivating people to live as much of their lives at the church building as possible), then we could probably have kept growing. But growing what? Another megachurch?

“We would be promoting the unspoken message that our congregation was more important to us than other congregations and ministries, and furthering the Western mentality of the rugged individualism of a church while ignoring the larger community life of the church—a philosophy that is neither biblical nor appropriate.”
The solution? Northland’s would construct a new church building that would serve as a “ distribution point” rather than a “destination.”
Completed in August 2007, Northland’s new $42 million facilities in Longwood, Florida, were built for both the local congregation and those who will never set foot in the building. The new facilities offer plenty of room—more than 160,000 square feet of space. However, the intent was never to see how many people could fit under one roof; it was to facilitate ministry worldwide with other believers.

The 160,000-square-foot facilities feature state-of-the-art technology with two-way interconnectivity that provides virtually unlimited seating for worshipers…virtually.

Congregants worship at multiple sites throughout Central Florida, where they connect with neighboring Christians for support and encouragement and to better serve their communities. Each weekend, these sites are joined in concurrent worship. A two-way video connection allows different parts of the services to be distributed among the sites and gives congregants opportunities to interact with one another in real time.

Worshipers also participate at more than 1,000 smaller sites worldwide via Northland’s innovative Webstream application.

People in Northland’s congregation continue to take leadership of nearly every ministry effort inside the church, out in the community and around the world. Elders, pastors and paid staff don’t try to control the initiatives of congregants or the connections they make, and, they don’t watch over their shoulders unnecessarily. Dr. Hunter encourages Northlanders: “Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got.” And they do!

Together, he teaches, we can accomplish more because of our differences than we would on our own—without giving up our unique identities. Dr. Hunter concludes. “Fear and suspicion of differences limit the church’s spiritual maturity. Both spiritual and intellectual maturity, grow from differences. A distributed church uses contrasts to accomplish Kingdom purposes.”