Grace Communities: Growing Smaller

The diversity of the body affects not only what we do, but also how we do it. Is that right?

J. In terms of what we are trying to do as a staff the outworking of that diversity is important. What the gospel perspective means for gospel practice in staff is to move from a program orientation more into a person orientation. We can’t individualize everything as well as we’d like because we’re not God but we can have that bias to try and make our teaching and opportunities of our ministries actually fit who is coming rather than set up the program and tell people to fit this pre-existing program. That requires the staff to develop a new set of competencies, recognizing where people are and applying new ways of working together creatively to help them express gospel realities in their lives. That’s one shift we’re making.

D. We will be emphasizing Grace Communities, which is really the idea of growing smaller as we get bigger. Whether that is a small group or a ministry, the concept it that ministry – grace moving outward – expresses itself best through relationship within community.

Why did Session feel the multi-congregational model was the best?

D. It’s driven by several things. At the heart of it, we’re going to think through what it looks like to lead by relationship; multi-congregation is a natural outworking of that thinking. More practical, we’re always been aware of the culture around us and who we’re trying to reach. The typical growth model is not going to reach who we are most called to reach. Also, we have an intention for this not to be about us; that it’s about grace going out and being free. I’ts not about one guy. We’re not going to live forever, how can we pass this on? A lot more is going to happen if we have more people - young pastors - here in our circle.

J. When we saw that model, it was like ‘oh… I know what we can do with this.’ It was one of those moments where I could feel all these things at the same time. It’s what I spent the last four to six years of my life doing. Thinking that fits. When I look back, I can see this is what God was preparing me to do.

There aren’t a lot of churches using this model. Isn’t there some amount of risk?

D. The history here was the church grew bigger and bigger and seeing what effect that had on the church and had on me. Being in the Asheville area so long and picking up on the culture and seeing how anti-corporate they are. I was already pretty snippy about not growing bigger in that sense. I couldn’t articulate it very well. Pragmatically, we don’t know if the multi-congregational model is going to work. Whether or not, the principle is worth pursuing. It’s very risky. There’s a leadership that puts it on the line and we put ourselves there too if it doesn’t work out. It’s not the safe way to do it.

J. For me, the risk is part of the attraction. Risk is no fun and not necessarily Godly. However, all true faith has an element of risk to it. When you identify this is different, this fits what we’re called to, and there’s an element of risk to it, then it smells like God is in it to me. It feels like that’s a piece of it. If there’s no risk, there’s no faith.

D. Personality wise we’re both different. But we are both alike in many ways also. We both get easily bored and we both have a creative bent, kind of an outer edge. We prefer to be on the edge of things rather than doing things that have always been done.

J. We don’t have a single answer. What you typically see in a church, you see these are three things that will happen. We don’t operate so much by lists.

D. We had that assembly line chart as we looked at strategic planning. That was helpful; it helped us eliminate some we’re not going to follow. The first was to do this wisely through David (Key) and Josiah’s leadership initiative. But, that’s not what we’re trying to do. We want people to come here and catch the hope of the gospel. We don’t even want to define it as only happening here in the church. You can serve here; you can be in the community. It’s about those 3 neighbors that live around you. It’s about that homosexual cousin that the family is having trouble with. It’s about the single mom who can barely make ends meet. Moving the Gospel out is about where God has put you and extending the grace that you have been given to others.