At the recent Exponential Conference, (the world’s America’s largest gathering of church planters) we heard David Garrison author of Church Planting Movements and global research maven talk about something he picked up from Indian church planters.  He did by simply showing us his hand, and I don’t mean deck of cards.

Holding up his hand, he gave us a simple acronym used to help Indian leaders reproduce leaders among the hundreds of thousands of churches being planted right now across that nation.  He learned it from others, and now I’ll pass it along to you.  (Who will you pass this on to?)

Hold up your hand, and starting with your thumb, spell out the word P-O-U-C-H.  Imagine a little pouch in the palm of your hand.  This is the descriptive (not necessarily prescriptive) list of elements seen in viral house churches spreading like wildfire among the persecuted peoples of India:

P- Participative Gatherings.

We let the Holy Spirit lead, and we all contribute.  No one person sucks up all the oxygen when we gather.  Everyone has a moment to offer what they’re learning from God.  1 Cor 14:26 says, “Well, my brothers and sisters, let’s summarize. When you meet together, one will sing, another will teach, another will tell some special revelation God has given, one will speak in tongues, and another will interpret what is said. But everything that is done must strengthen all of you.”

O - Obedience to Christ, radically

There must be a serious, all-in commitment from each person in the group to commit their full lives to Jesus, and to each other.  Nothing short of that will be sustainable, or reproducible for long.  Francis Chan told a story of how he went to China, and spoke with some of the persecuted church there, and when he described what we call church in America (1 hour a week event, many creature comforts, apathy, etc) at first they LAUGHED OUT LOUD – then they asked, “How did you get that picture of church, from this?” (as they held up their Bible) For them, it would be impossible to conceive of apathy in the Chinese church – why give up everything including your safety for nominal beliefs?

U – Unpaid Multiple Leaders

Tithes do go to pay for one leader (1 Cor 9:11), or maybe two, but the goal is to ask the leader not to feel responsible for all the teaching, all the evangelism, all the leadership of the larger church.  This leads to burnout.  Instead, segment the tasks and pass them out to multiple, unpaid leaders – this also gives more people a chance a leadership development.  These are not a bunch of volunteers passing out bulletins, these are tomorrow’s church leaders, today!

C – Cells of 20 Members or less

Groups made up of 20 adults or less allow the group size to live in that space where everyone knows they’re a part of something bigger, but that it is small enough to ask each person to contribute, thus developing an active, rather than passive church.  This is not your typical “small group” (read Neil Cole’s recent post for more on this).  This is a place where growing disciples come to celebrate and encourage, not to be transformed by a flashy worship service.

H – Home-centered

This is more than just a strategy to save your church money on rent.  It drives your church to be the family it already is!  When you meet in homes, it will ruin the segmentation you have created between your church life and your family life – and transformation will happen!  Another way to say this is that the home is the family.  These Cells (MESOs as we call them) can meet anywhere – but its never about the event; its about the family.  There is the hospitality of the home wherever they go.  It is the family metaphors that the Biblical writers used throughout Scripture that make the most sense – a King and a Kingdom, a Father and his children… this is what God is giving birth to here on earth!

Watching churches in India multiply like rabbits is a joy and it leads me to worship God, who is declaring his glory through these simple and ephemeral families of faith.

This world transformation is the central mission of God, meaning that “the church” is not God’s only project on earth.  God’s glory fills the WHOLE earth (Hab 2:14)  Unfortunately, too often “church growth” and even “church planting” is the ultimate goal of many Christians today.  But the true purpose of the Church must be the same goal as Jesus’ mission - showing the world the Kingdom of God is near! (Mark 1:15)  This Kingdom of God is our world-transformed.  And our proclaiming that brand-new-in-every-way world is the WHOLE GOSPEL.

Unfortunately, the Church is better at proclaiming a part of the Gospel (“saving souls for heaven” or merely “doing good works for earth”).  In addition, the church as a whole often is many times so distrusting of itself and so disorganized that it rarely makes any real strategic attempt at accomplishing its goal – to display the WHOLE GOSPEL before the world.

The church in many places is about as unified as a box of toothpicks dumped out onto a table. But with a little intentionality, those toothpicks can begin to spread out over the table like spokes on a wheel.  The same is true for the church – we must work together to see a saturation of Jesus Christ presented before every tongue, tribe and nation; not uniting under one denomination, doctrine, or project, but under one mission:

…getting the WHOLE CHURCH to give the WHOLE GOSPEL to the WHOLE WORLD!

Mondo Layer

So what is the Mondo Layer?  It is the “Church Universal” as many have called it before.  Throughout all time and space, there is only one Body, one Faith, and one Lord over all of us. (Eph 4:1-4) Its the common bond we can feel with St. Francis of Assisi or Martin Luther King Jr. or a Christian from the other side of the world.

The Mondo Layer gives us access to the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Church Fathers and Mothers to write the classics that are with us to this day.  The Syriac Fathers to Margery Kempe, Celtic Spirituality to the Anabaptists… they offer us multiple streams of living water and each display for us a piece of the Kingdom that would otherwise be lost to us today.  Many Christians are anemic – even though they live deeply into the Mono, Micro, Meso and Macro Layers, simply because they do not access the Mondo Layer – the Church Universal, where the Holy Spirit is waiting to bring unity and family to us through time and space.

There are three measures for unity in the Universal Church (not just anyone can be a part of God’s called-out people), theological (doctrine, right belief), functional (producing fruit that resembles Christ’s life), and relational unity (we are only unified when we practice unity!).  But truthfully, there is something even more important in discovering Christian unity.  What Barton Stone called “Fire Unity” – which is the union of God’s Spirit to humanity.  In Stone’s words,

“How vain are all human attempts to unite a bundle of twigs together, so as to make them grow together and bear fruit! They must first be united with the living stock, and receive its sap and spirit, before they can ever be united with each other. So must we be first united with Christ, and receive his spirit [sic], before we can ever be in spirit united with one another. The members of the body cannot live unless by union with the head—nor can the members of the church be united, unless first united with Christ, the living head. His spirit is the bond of union. Men have devised many plans to unite Christians – all are vain. There is but one effectual plan, which is, that all be united with Christ and walk in him.”

Mondo Lived Out

The Church Universal is a great feel-good concept- that we are all one in Christ.  The problem is, you cannot work toward unity with the Pope, because you’ll (likely) never meet him.  You can only express unity with Christians in your actual life - where you actually have some practical say over whether or not you live in unity with your brothers and sisters so vastly different from you.  So, maybe you’ll never meet the Pope, but what about the church on other side of town?  What about the mega-church down the street, or the black church downtown?  The truth is – the functional portion of the Mondo Layer is seen in the city-church.

“In the NT, there are three fundamental dimensions of the church: the believers who frequently gather as a house church; the believers that periodically gather as a local (city) church; and the entire community of believers in Christ who do not have an opportunity to meet but of which each believer is a part.” — Rex Koivisto

This is bigger than any one congregation or church network (also called the Macro Layer).  It is the entire Christ-centered community in a given city or area. It is the City-Church you hear about it Acts 14:23, Titus 1:5, and the seven churches in Revelation.  There is no “North Side Ephesian Church” or “1st Church of Philippi.”  Paul either addressed “the church that meets in Lydia’s house” (the Meso Layer) or “to the church in Ephesus,” (the Mondo Layer).  This was how Paul understood God’s people – not divided, but united – each house church living out the Kingdom life locally, and all the Christians living in a certain city or region working together to display the Kingdom to their own local Empire.

How does this get lived out today?  How does the churches-in-the-city become one city church?  Well, to start, it is more organic than organizational.  Built around the love-centered relationship of the Trinity, it overcomes ethnic, denominational, ecclesiastical and socioeconomic prejudice.  Second, a shift must take place in the hearts of churches and church leaders in particular.  So many churches today are territorial, and short-sighted on seeing their own church succeed.  We must begin to see ourselves as one network of God’s people.

So, we don’t all meet downtown at the civic center as one church – we remain lots of congregations and organic church networks all doing lots of ministries and mission efforts …but we are one Church with one goal for our city – to see it transformed into God’s vision for his world!

Mondo Strategy

Living out the Mondo Layer means the church working together as a “network of networks.”  It means fighting the apathy, rugged individualism and frankly ignorance that turn the mission work of God into a box of toothpicks randomly dumped onto the table.

Living into the Mondo Layer means living into the strategy of Christ – the Great Commandment (love) and the Great Commission (love sent).  The result is “saturation church planting.”  Churches across the city must find unity in the goal of city-wide transformation through the process of seeing a vibrant family of Jesus in close reach of every single person in their city.  This is a comprehensive look at the city, and doing everything in their power (nothing more, nothing less) to offer the Gospel for every people, and a spiritual family for every person.  Only 30-40% of our city will/can be reached by traditional churches, which is why we must invest (spiritually, financially) into emerging, organic, and neo-monastic expressions of Christ’s church.

Leaders with this vision might be called “Missional Resource Teams,”  listening to God and living out the life of God for a particular area with the core conviction that “mission flows from listening.”  Spiritual mapping aides in the process of saturation church planting (Pray4Chicago is an example of such a project), as does praying for workers through a Luke 10:2 prayer.

Its possible that each year, major city-wide celebrations and worship festivals can begin to breakout.  Leadership conferences, mission efforts, and  other gatherings emerge, as families grow in Christ and peace reigns on earth.  These and other pictures of heaven CAN happen this side of eternity, if we have eyes to see it and the heart to live it out in our lives.

The Layers

Mono, Micro, Meso, Macro, and Mondo.  They are all wrapped up together like an onion, or a sea shell.  You cannot live in one and not the others if you want to be healthy.  They are a part of God’s life for us here on earth – the expression of his church at work in the world.

Living into these layers, we can begin to know ourselves better, experience love and trust from others, belong to a meaningful family, and engage in significant mission.  But it all spirals out from a life of intimacy with a loving God, who is at the center of it all.

When God created the world, he chose to be in relationship with that world, God’s light reaching and connecting and networking every thing he created to the farthest reaches of the cosmos.  This is God’s “Great Connection.”  Each connection in God’s creation to this day is another explosion of energy – the more links you live in, the more you live in light.

“Let there be links…” (Gen 1:1-3)

Unfortunately, it is stereotypical for the average house church (the Meso Layer) to stop at the Meso Layer.  It’s a wonderful thing for a simple church to experience God’s family life, but asserting their autonomy effectively keeps them in the dark, away from the links of light. Isolation brings death, whereas inter-connectivity brings life.

This blog post is an exploration of the resilience of an interconnected family of faith in a city or region – the Macro Layer.

Something to ponder:  There is no example of a “house church” in the New Testament – but there are plenty of church networks! (Romans 16, Acts 16:25-40, Revelation 1:4, just to name a few…)  Beyond the household gatherings, the earliest church also clearly enjoyed worship, fellowship and mission with an extended network of believers.

Teaching, prayer and shared meals at the Meso Layer was the daily experience of First Century disciples – but it was also common for Christians to gather for prayers in the temple courts, to proclaim Christ in the Hall of Solomon, receive teaching from church leaders, and share in Communion at regional gatherings! (Acts 2:42-46)

This “gather-scatter” concept grew mainly out of the “prayer houses” and synagogues of the Jews during their exile from Israel several hundred years before Jesus.  The Jews of course, hoped their Messiah would reestablish an earthly home for Jews, to call them home from exile and create a centralized place of worship and government (like in “the good ole’ days” of King David).  However, Jesus called (and calls) his followers to venture out as “voluntary exiles,” seeking citizenship of no earthly nation, but of a heavenly Kingdom – yet connected like illegal immigrants here on earth.  That’s gotta be a downer for your average Zionist!

Liquid Church

The Macro Layer takes seriously the liquid form of Christian Community – it does not have physical structures or an exoskeleton holding its size back – like water, it is contained only by its dynamic, inter-dependent correlation of relationships.  The Macro Layer is the engagement of relationships beyond the family level – it is the local “extended family” that reaches from “eternity to here.”

In our paradigm of the Onion, the church takes on a “living system,” organic nature.  Systems Theory seems to say that every organism is part of a larger, interconnected network.  And even my very notion of self is not determined by myself alone, but by the web in which I’ve been woven.  In this way, the church is more like an afghan than a building – it is knitted together, fully flexible, not easily broken.

Yeah, but what does it look like???

Of course, liquid is best enjoyed in a glass, not spilling all over the table – and similarly, liquid church at the Macro Layer contains internal structures to give focus to the regional church – funneling into infinite nodes of connectivity:

• network worship gatherings (monthly, rotating leadership)
• teaching and vision casting (network blogs, mission wikis, network gatherings)
• social media outlets (Ning, Facebook)
• mission teams and network leadership (Missions Resource Teams)
• mission efforts, fund raising, social justice projects
• yearly festivals and commitment ceremonies (Planted Life Event)

The important piece is not necessarily HOW you connect, or the structure of the nodes, but the process going on between them (the WINE is more important than the WINESKIN).

Fractals Rock

Fractals are everywhere.  From the largest of galaxies to the smallest snowflake, fractals are the code of the universe.

Every living thing or dynamic system takes a fractal form.  Fractals are based on simple mathematical equations that contain unending diversity.  The patterns are determined by a simple rule in a series of repetitions that feed back on itself new information. Starting with a simple building block (a human cell, a coordinates in a computer) these repetitions unleash a creative potential for infinite complexity.

The genetic code of a seed gives the crucial information needed for the fractal equation found in cell multiplication to help catalyze the growth of a tree.  The DNA of this seed will grow an oak tree, and not a dogwood or a squirrel.  There are boundaries for fractals, and yet, when watching the process, it can only be described as beautifully chaotic.

The Church is built on the trillion cells of local churches and Christians scattered throughout time and space.  The Church then, is the Fractal of Jesus Christ in the world. Self-similar, yet wildly diverse – each point of light on a fractal is connected to every other point of light throughout the system.

This is a blog series on the Layers of Christian Community – the Onion of the Church.  The onion is a beautiful example of a fractal – layers upon layers of “similar difference.”

A Tribe to Belong To

It is interesting that as we explore the levels of the Onion, we are learning that each of these layers are also core desires of all humanity.  Everyone desires a personal connection with the Divine; everyone desires one or two others who get them through thick and thin;  those who have come from broken families still desire an expression of family — and we all desire to be a part of a dynamic tribe.

A tribe is a group of people, connected to one another, and to a shared story. This postmodern age has brought an explosion of tribes, covens, meetups, making each of us part of multiple tribes.  Our embrace of the tribe is our rejection of the factory — the place of passive production and impersonal sausage-making.

JESUS’ TRIBE:::>> So far in this series, we’ve explored Jesus’ community – here’s what we’ve found: (Mono) Jesus was “one with the Father,” (Micro) and his heart-to-hearts were with his core team of Peter, James, and John.  (Meso) Jesus’ 12 disciples were his daily community – his family-on-a-mission.  But who was Jesus’ “Macro Layer of Church?”

Jesus taught and fed the crowds, that much is sure – but beyond the masses, Jesus specifically cast vision and trained 72 disciples.  (Luke 10)  This was Jesus’ TRIBE.  The people who were following “the Way,” sent into every town and village in the area to declare the Good News of the Kingdom.  Through this Kingdom Tribe, Jesus was forging a sneeze of relationships right across the Empire that remained connected to each other through Love and through a dangerous Story – that God’s Kingdom was near!

Tribal development comes through a linking through a common story, and living into that story together to make dramatic change.  From the contemporary Tea Party Movement or Obama’s Grassroots Campaign, from Geronimo’s Apache Tribe harassing and impeding the Spanish conquistadors, to the First Century Church decrying Cesar as a mere man, and a murdered, resurrected Jesus as King of Kings and Lord of Lords… the tribe is consistently the  social layer for monumental change.

The Tribe you choose to join is of utmost importance.

The social media sites like  Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube make a veritable Youniverse that puts you right at the center of your own “social-black-hole.”  You can now be the leader of your own private Tribe. Recent studies have even said that Facebook and mobile computing has brought about the demise of the church.  Now that we have our own network – we no longer need to be a part of God’s local Tribes.

From the beginning, humans have had to choose between being king of their own dark kingdom, or a citizen in God’s Kingdom of Light.  It is either “My Kingdom Come” or “Thy Kingdom Come.” And choosing God’s Kingdom means we choose to be connected to God’s Tribe – a inter-connected network that is glocal in influence.

A Family Reunion

These network gatherings and other nodes of connectivity will feel more like a family reunion than a United Nations Summit. It is essential for Christians to remember that they are primarily citizens of the same universal Kingdom of God, rather than constituents of individual house churches.

Certainly, there is leadership, but unlike a hierarchy (static leading from the top down) and more like a v-formation flock of birds – sharing and rotating the front position to go farther together.  Maybe each month the Macro Layer (say, 10 house churches) meet together for worship, and each month, a different community organizes the event and leads worship in their way.  This promotes diversity in the Body of Christ, and a reminder that God is creating a Family from every tongue, tribe, and nation. (Rev 7:9)

A bohemian, post-modern group might choose to fill a rented club with ambient music and allow God’s presence to surround the worshippers as they pray or participate with God in apophatic practices and incense.  Another group might bring a recent convert to give his/her testimony to the rest of the network.  The important principle to be communicated at every monthly network gathering is a theme of unity in diversity. Each church that plans worship should put the needs and interests of other groups they are in relationship with above their own desires to control the experience.

Home-brewed Leadership

Regular local leadership gatherings allow those involved to pass along insights and resources to other organic church leaders in the network.  It serves as a bridge between leaders and a limitless array of links to resources and fresh connections.  A “home-brewed seminary,” of sorts. This never ending journey of learning and serving other communities is an “opt-in” learning community of practitioners – no one in the church network Macro Layer is excluded from leadership gatherings, but only those who are interested in developing Meso Layers seem to stick around!

Monthly leadership gatherings bring cohesion and training to each house church leader – part book club, part coaching session, part training in various pastoral tools (like conflict management, or church multiplication…etc).

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As best as I can, I’ve tried to describe the “congregation” as a Macro Layer – not as a building or institution, but as an organism or movement.  Through a lifestyle of worship and fellowship with a dozen or so house churches, the Macro Layer can offer Christians a sense that “they are not alone” in this family of God.  Through God’s grace, these communities will slowly transform into an ecumenical Body of Christ in your city.  The underground church network is one such Macro Layer beginning to emerge in our context here in Chicago.  Much like a Fractal, it displays the DNA of Jesus, and yet the possibilities in the fractal of Christ are limitless!