Kingdom manifesto

How does Jesus' Kingdom community organize? Is the Sunday gathering primary? What are ‘micro’ groups? These are the sort of questions that keep me up into the wee hours of the morning. Will you join me in an exercise to loosely structure a Kingdom community?

Definitions

First, what the heck is ‘Kingdom community’? Don’t you just mean church?

Certain words have baggage from long practice. Church attendees agree that the church building != the Church (ἐκκλησία, the ‘called out ones’), yet our practices reflect another conviction. I aim to shake our categories a little by ditching well-used words in favor of new, less baggage-ridden (I hope) words that can be invested with new concepts. I’ll let someone else try to redeem ‘church’ and ‘Christian’.

Why Care?

Second, why care how a Kingdom community organizes?

Let me list a few axioms.

  1. We humans flourish by loving God and neighbor with our whole being.

  2. To love God and neighbor isn’t an ephemeral command about our intentions or feelings, but about the actions we take in everyday life.

  3. The vast majority of our actions are subconscious, i.e. we react more than reason.

  4. Subconscious actions originate from our hearts, i.e. the core of who we are.

  5. Our hearts are transformed foremost by habitual practice.

And let me add to this one more:

  1. Habitual practice of loving acts is best fostered in a community.

So, following my dense logic,

humans flourish in communities who habitually practice loving acts towards God and neighbor.

Thus, one ought to care about the way Kingdom communities are formed because their organization directly affects human flourishing.

Kingdom Meetings

Let’s turn to the subject. When you consider how a Kingdom community might orient on a given week, at least four meetings exist:

These four exist in tension, like rubber bands holding an object in suspension. A community that’s missing one of these bands will still suspend in the air, but it means the other bands must exert greater tension to maintain the center. Remove two and the community will suspend off-center; three and it dangles helplessly in space. The four meetings ought to stretch and contract to fit the cultural and circumstantial needs of the geographical location in which the Kingdom community resides. While communities that lack one or more of these meetings are true Kingdom communities, the over-stretched nature of their existing communities puts them at greater risk of malformation.

flowchart LR Sunday[Sunday Gathering] --- SpecialInterest[Special Interest] & Discipleship --- Friendship

Friendship

Summary

Hindrances abound for the individual who seeks to grow in the fundamental qualities of a Christian; qualities such as obedience, humility, and compassion. Trauma, loneliness, spiritual attack, and a lack of self-awareness are a few reasons we don’t develop deeper humility, comprehensive obedience, or genuine compassion. Close friendships, where individuals are welcome to encourage and confront one another from an intimate, confidential relationship are a powerful means of character growth. Friendship groups, whether formally named or not, are about two to four people who grow towards a total commitment to one another, complete transparency, and a unified mission.

Synonyms: • micro groups • accountability partners • teams

Biblical examples:

Intimacy over comfort

Friendship meetings exist to foster intimacy; a fundamental ingredient of personal transformation. Few moments are more powerful than when one shares one’s darkest secrets with another human being and receives compassion. Conversely, small talk is comfortable but devoid of intimacy. Seek intimacy.

Comraderie over diversity

Friendship meetings exist to bundle people together in resilient, transformative relationships. It’s less relevant for a friendship meeting to have diverse viewpoints than to have a common purpose.

Special Interest

Summary

Transformation into the image of Jesus is an essential task of the Kingdom community, yet leaders recognize many adjacent needs that require attention to specific community segments. For example, financial wisdom deserves periodic attention, or the training of a weakly represented spiritual gift, or healing for members with unresolved trauma.

Synonyms: • skill training • topical teaching

Biblical examples:

Instruction over friendship

Special interest meetings target a segment of the Kingdom community to bolster its health and wellbeing. Any friendship built as the result of shared experience is welcome but tangential to the meeting’s purpose.

Practice over knowledge

Special interest meetings are tethered to the core purpose of the Kingdom community, to love God and neighbor, and must not devolve into knowledge transfer alone. This is especially relevant in American communities where knowledge is prized above practice.

Discipleship

Summary

Discipleship meetings are the vehicle for Kingdom building and expansion. Diverse groups who engage God’s words to discover his commands and character, to confront human nature, and to apply these discoveries to their lives are moved to make disciples of all nations. Highly reproducible, discipleship meetings can be constituted of Christians only, of Christians and not-yet-Christians, or entirely of not-yet-Christians. These are inherently Bible-oriented, but not topical. This is because the Bible, the gifts of Christian participants, and the Holy Spirit’s leading are the most powerful means of discipleship available.

Synonyms: • discovery bible studies (DBS) • small groups

Biblical examples:

Obedience over knowledge

Discipleship meetings put the Bible’s claims, instructions, and demands before participants and inspire them to wrestle out their responses together. They enable participants to interact with other’s perspectives, ideas, and backgrounds through a shared encounter with the Bible. Participants should never stop at knowledge but take what’s been discovered, apply it to their lives, and share it with others.

Contribution over consensus

Discipleship meetings are centers of diversity. It’s less important that everyone agree than that all participate.

Discovery over instruction

Discipleship meetings facilitate the discovery of the Bible’s claims whatever prior experience an individual may possess. All participants grant space for others to learn at their own pace and the group actively avoids building knowledge hierarchies.

Innovation over conformity

Discipleship meetings package core principles in new models to better engage with their participants and neighbors. Principled experimentation and risk-taking are encouraged over conformity to other discipleship groups.

Multiplication over addition

Discipleship meetings replicate by inviting seekers to launch new groups with people in their networks over invitations to add new members to existing meetings.

Coaching over centralization

Discipleship meeting facilitators are coached by facilitators from another group. Loose central control is encouraged to foster expansion and innovation.

Sunday gathering

Summary

Kingdom communities benefit tremendously when the roles and gifts of all Christians are expressed and shared. Teachers with sound theological instruction protect the community from heresy and build up its faith, hope, and love; prophets encourage and guide the community through challenges and into opportunities, administrators organize large functions where mutual sharing and group service can be expressed. Without Sunday gatherings, Kingdom communities remain scattered collections of Christians with a loosely cohesive mission; with them, the community reminds itself of its shared and unified purpose and labor in the world.

Synonyms: • celebration • huddle • conference • church service

Biblical examples:

Effect over regularity

Sunday gatherings have been regulated more than any other meeting. Regulations include: weekly meetings that are seeker-friendly, feature a single speaker, and offer community announcements. These regulations, and others like them, are less important than the effect Sunday gatherings have to unify the disparate parts of the Kingdom community towards a common vision. Sunday gatherings may become more relevant if they were less frequent.

Celebration over discovery

Sunday gatherings remind participants of their shared purpose: to love God and their neighbors. The opportunity to celebrate with one another is valuable because it is so rarely done.

Personal Confession

This manifesto is incomplete, for who can escape the gravity of one’s circumstances to envision a community different from one’s own? It is bound by my humanity, by time and space, by errors, foibles, and misunderstandings. Nonetheless, it is uniquely my own, and I believe that I also have a measure of God’s Spirit.

Thank you for listening.

Addendum - Sunday Gatherings

As a painter returns to his work to apply a fresh layer, so I hope to further define this manifesto. I will dispense with the introductory work and apply new strokes to the largest of the Kingdom meetings, Sunday gatherings.

Sunday Gatherings as a Service (SGAAS)

The centrality of the Sunday gathering is embedded in the United State’s social fabric. It is the subject of countless books, podcasts and blogs, and has developed an entire vocabulary. Consider some Sunday-specific slang:

“Seeker” refers to a person who is not yet committed to Sunday gatherings Jesus but has courageously jumped the chasm between their environment and the Church enough to attend a Sunday gathering. It is a testament to the compelling power of Jesus' community that anyone makes it through the doors.

A church that’s labeled “seeker-friendly” tries to reduce the seeker’s chasm-jump distance by synthesizing more with the seeker’s environment. Sometimes it can also mean that the speaker edits their message to reduce friction, ranging from reducing slang terms to avoiding entire subjects. These ought to be separate terms, I think. Maybe “seeker-friendly” and “seeker-safe”?

“Member” refers to an individual who has promised to pay regular dues tithe, to attend more Sunday gatherings than they miss, and sometimes to volunteer.

A church with member registration is trying to weed out the “seekers” from the “finders” (made that last up). A member registry is useful for a number of reasons, such as to count the actual number of committed attendees Christians to gauge the relative growth of church commitment over time.

If you work in a technology marketing department, these definitions might be familiar, only with different terms. Swap “seeker” for “visitor,” “member” for “customer”, and the rate of church commitment as the “conversion rate.” I don’t know who stole which idea from whom, but there’s comical overlap.

What I want you to understand with this tongue-in-cheek slang comparison that the Sunday gathering is conceptualized and marketed exactly the same way that a company conceptualizes its core offering. As radical as an entrepreneur announcing to his company that it has misidentified it’s fundamental service, I propose that we the Church have mistaken the Sunday gathering as our fundamental service. We the church need an innovative disruption to stay “relevant.”

Sunday Gatherings in a new Light

Ok, so I’ve just stated that Sunday gatherings are not a fundamental service. Does that mean we do away with them? By no means! Instead, let’s place the Sunday gathering in a more modest position alongside the other three meetings/services. You may call them “the four fundamental services” if you’d prefer alliteration.

Necessary Discoveries