Paul Walker is book blogging on "The Forgotten Ways" by Alan Hirsch

We shape our buildings. Thereafter they shape us.

Winston Churchill

Backtracking slightly to my post yesterday about how Alan Hirsch moved his people from being a 'church' in the traditionally accepted sense of the word to an organic community, I've been reading over his reflections on how buildings come to dominate and shape our entire thinking and focus.

It's fairly obvious the a traditionally orientated church is based on a model of passivity - where 'the ministry' is done by a very tiny percentage of people, often only those with particular qualifications (as evidenced by special clothing) and the rest of the people are in the role of passive participants, or even 'observers'. The transition to contemporary worship styles has only really scratched the surface of addressing that problem. A few more people take part in the music ministry, or join the prayer team, or lead prayers. But, Hirsch estimates, you're still generally looking at an 80/20 split of active/passive. (I actually think that's a pretty generous assessment in most cases). Even the 'holy grail' of GenX or post-modern worship, even some Alt.Worship settings too, have still left most people as passive participants.

And so we return to the earlier point about whether we change the 'software' of church (what we do to make things 'work' in the way they do) or the 'hardware' (the underlying core that makes the thing even happen in the first place). A decision was taken to rebuild the church from the ground up - from 'first principles' if you like. (Remember that this was a significantly 'successful' and sizeable, so this wasn't a straightforward decision borne out of desperate failure)

This involved a number of foundational ideas

• The basic 'unit' of church was to be much smaller - more along cell or simple church lines, to facilitate genuinely active participation by every member.. Rather than being based around mission statements, philosophies or documents, the church would be based around a set of practices - people would be asked to enter into covenant with others around these core actions.
• The majority of the members of each 'cell' had to be involved in the practice of spiritual disciplines - bible, worship, prayer, accountability etc. This - I am assuming - was as a result of the realisation that people in the church were not being fruitful as I mentioned a couple of posts back.
• The 'rhythm' of the church would be different to the usual 'Sunday morning meeting'. There was to be a weekly group meeting, a monthly meeting of 'the tribe' (a local area with networked groups - I'm guessing meetings of, say, 50-100 people) and a bi-annual large scale celebration of everyone in the 'movement'. However the regular discipleship, teaching, prayer etc takes place at small group level (and rooted in the core values through the missional DNA)
• The groups would have a core value of aiming for multiplication - as soon as feasible each group was to multiply, which prevents the development of an inward-looking approach and the constant missional focus.

It hardly needs saying that this change did not occur without criticism or cost - I know from my own experience that people don't necessarily want to move from passive to active. In this particular case it took a period of two years to fully transition. My sense is that transition a more historically-rooted inherited church - such as my own - could take even longer.