Greenhouse Reflections

The purpose of my trip to San Jose was to learn more for my dissertation by attending an organic church conference led by Church Multiplication Associates. The architect behind it is a man named Neil Cole. I stumbled upon Cole's work when doing research for my dissertation on small discipleship groups. I was literally looking in the section where this material was at and came across his book Cultivating a Life for God. It was a simple method of making disciples of Jesus that combined discipleship and evangelism. It was one of the best things I had seen and was exactly what I was looking for.

Last year he wrote a book called Organic Church. Organic church explains more about the principles of their movement. The basic tenet of the movement is that God intends for the church to spontaneously expand, kind of like a popular video would hit YouTube and would spread throughout the web. The church was born to reproduce and the church should have many daughter churches. He stated that 96% of churches will not give birth to a daughter church. If 96% of women could not have a baby, there would be alarm. But the fact that churches do not reproduce themselves does not even raise an eyebrow for most churches.

The organic church movement values relationships over church services. They feel most churches are more concerned about what happens in one hour then what happens all week. They invest all their resources into Sunday morning but are not producing disciples. Their working definition of church is "The presence of Jesus among his people called out as a spiritual family to pursue his mission on this planet."

According to Cole, the DNA of the church is:
- Divine Truth - meaning the presence of Jesus and the word of God
- Nurturing Relationships - loving others in the body
- Apostolic Mission - Reaching those who don't know Jesus.

The primary learning for me from this weekend is the value of relationships. When I was first involved in the church, it was primarily relationship driven. I had a person who invested in my life and I invested in others' lives. As I have grown in positions of leadership of the church over the years, I realized I have begun to think more programattically instead of relationally. We ministers often spend out time running programs rather than investing in and building people. This weekend reinforced how I need to get back to being more relational as a pastor and the power of listening to people. It is amazing when you are seriously interested in people and listen to their story, you build trust and connect with people on a different level. While there were other insights from the weekend (that I hope to reflect on in the plane flight), this was primary.