Leadership Journal

I tried it; I started an organic church.

It began in my living room in 2005 with a small group of Milwaukee 20-somethings—most of whom wouldn't be caught dead in "church." Then I pitched the idea of doing church where the rest of life happens: in living rooms, kitchens, Starbucks bistros—anywhere solid conversations could take place. The people grew, the group grew, the number of houses grew, and off I ventured into the world of organic churches.

Things changed only slightly when we transitioned from small groups to organic churches. We started serving Communion and holding baptisms. To the naked eye, we probably still looked more like small groups than churches. We didn't have a sermon; we didn't pass an offering plate; we didn't sing together. Instead, we shared a meal, discussed and applied the Bible to personal issues, shared testimonies, and prayed together. At the most basic level, our goals were the same as any traditional church. We were committed to worship, discipleship, and evangelism. We just tackled these objectives in more relational ways. We favored conversations over productions, shared learning over lectures, living rooms over auditoriums, and questions over answers. And we charged each individual with the responsibility to edify the rest with whatever God-given resources he or she possessed.

At first our organic churches seemed destined for success. Granted, a gathering of 85 people doesn't sound too impressive compared to a megachurch, but when four out of five people showing up are not Christians or are new to faith, something in your heart beats faster and tells you, This is what it's all about. Unfortunately, our early successes with the organic way ultimately became our undoing.

To survive as an organic movement, planters must make some very nonorganic decisions. It's not all "go with the flow" or "let be what will be." You have to dig a little deeper to plant organic.

We started with a few people and a few changed lives. People got excited, invited friends who needed Jesus, and then their lives were changed too. It looked like everything was rolling in the right direction. But soon we realized that changing to a smaller format isn't a magical solution to every traditional church problem. Sometimes smaller is just smaller. We were doing the same old thing as every other church, just with fewer people. I'm not talking about sermons, music, or offering plates—all that was different. I'm talking about the way people viewed spiritual formation. People in our organic churches still used our gatherings as their "weekly recharge." They still approached outreach as an invitation to say, "Come see what we're doing over here!"

To truly be an alternative to traditional church ministry, organic churches have to go where few churches have gone before: to lost people. Our organic church evangelized and discipled dozens of lost people; but they had to come to our living rooms for it to work. The world needs churches that live with the lost, rather than just extract them. Ours didn't quite get there. Instead, we discovered that churches will not necessarily achieve more biblical avenues of spiritual formation just by approaching things organically.

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