Church Detox part 5

Sunday Morning is just one of many expressions of following Jesus.This is one of the more important ideas that I came away with this past year. For most of the time that I have been following Jesus I have been a part of a modern Evangelical church. Here are a few assumptions about the modern evangelical church:
They are usually event driven.
They are usually motivated to saving entire city’s.
They are usually large, min 150-200 people.
They place great importance on evangelism

For many years this is all that I new. But in the last couple of years I have had the chance to expand my understanding of ways to follow Jesus. Below are three other models that I know of, I am sure there are more.

Parish Church: The catholic tradition has been to meet as a parish church. This may look a lot like the typical church model, but there is one major difference. The parish church is created to serve the needs of a particular community. That community may be geographical or cultural. What I love about this model is that is more likely to actually love the neighborhood that it is in. Many Evangelical churches try to “win” entire city’s or entire countries in the case of missions, and forget about the people that live next door to them.

House Church: There is a growing underground movement of house churches in the US right now. People are beginning to see simple expressions with limited structure as a great way of following Jesus. Without the need of a building or paid staff, the community is freed to give there money to causes they support, usually the poor. And without the complicated logistics of putting on a service every week, they have the time to actually get involved in their communities.

Intentional Community: In most churches our shared experience is through events. What if that shared experience didn’t have to stop when the event was over. Intentional Communities offer the chance to share life together in a way that can not be done through weekly meetings. A chance to know each other and help process the journey of following Jesus.

So one might me compelled to ask “Brian, what’s next for you?” My next step after my church detox is to join up with some friend in East Boston. (Click) We hope to set up a sort of intentional community, the details are a little sketchy at the moment, but one thing is clear, we want to share life together and make an impact in our neighborhood.

Photo Credit Hackintosh (Click)