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Stories from the Village Green #2

Posted Jan 1, 05:51 PM | 5 comments | by Amy Moffitt | Link

Leaving the Institution to Reach a City
By Jeff Elkins

Our tribe doesn’t really have a name. We call ourselves “The Thingy,” but more as a joke.

We were all leaders in a great church in downtown Baltimore (I was the executive pastor, the others led various ministries). We loved it there, but were frustrated with our inability to make a real kingdom impact through the institution (the church).

Baltimore is a dark place. Generational poverty, drugs, and various other injustices are like cancer growing throughout the city. Our hearts are broken for our city and we want to see Jesus restore it to Him.

The more we talked together the more we realized that being part of the institution was actually hurting our ability to participate in God’s move in the city. We were focused so much on growing the institution, we had no energy to focus on building true relationships and loving people like Jesus. So we asked the church we were a part of to send us out as a church plant (sort of).

We started in January 2009 with a white board and the Gospel. Good place to start, right? We turned to the life of Christ and asked, “If we were living like Him, what would people say about us? How what would define our lives?” Off the bat it was clear that we needed to be people defined by our love of God and our love of others (practicing righteousness and justice in OT lingo). However, ”love God and love people” maybe the most over used phrase in Christianity today. What in the world does it mean? As we hammered through stories in the Gospels we semi-accidently stumbled upon six characteristics of Christ we thought should define us. Our community is centered on living these out in the world.

So, every time we get together we read the following…

“We will share Jesus with others by loving God and loving people through lives defined by…

Humility – understanding our need for God, we will be defined by our transparent, sincere brokenness.
Forgiveness – with an attitude of brokenness, considering others to be better than ourselves, we will seek to offer forgiveness, restoring others to right relationship with God and one another.
Service – longing to see people restored, we will love them with reckless and messy abandon.
Worship – as we encounter God through loving others, we will proclaim Jesus as Lord with uninhibited authenticity.
Wonder – in reverent stillness we will appreciate God’s glory without fear.
Surrender – knowing that Jesus is God and we are not, we will daily humble ourselves, deny our selfish ambition, and seek the Spirit’s guidance.”

…and then we ask each other where we have succeeded and where we have failed.

The group officially launched in March. We now meet weekly to hold one another accountable to practice the core principles and read scripture. Monthly we do some kind of community outreach.

One of our goals is to rethink how we are doing evangelism. All of us have come from attractional systems of church (I hope my terminology makes sense) so for us evangelism was all about building a rocking awesome worship service and inviting people to it. In a rejection of that we have tried not to name what we do, we don’t have a web site, and we routinely change our meeting location. The idea is that evangelism happens in one-on-one relationships and therefore we will only grow as a group if we are in the community doing our job. It is a seriously messed up system…but we are really messed up people.

Read more “Stories from the Thingy” at the Elkins’ blog here, and a example of their relational ministry here.

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