HEALTHY CHURCH: An Essential Church Builds Community

         An Essential Church is a fellowship of believers that places a very high value on community. In some churches, when the services are over, you do not want to get in the way of the stampede as people are focused on one thing — leaving. It is refreshing to see churches where, when the service is over, they are not in a hurry to go anywhere but instead are focused on building and strengthening relationships. In Essential Church, Thom and Sam Rainer stated, “Somewhere along the way, ‘church’ for some people became a once-a-week event with no sense of community.” They ask us, “Where did that sense of community go?”

      As discussed before, revitalization is the supernatural work of God and requires a church to adopt a complete submission to the authority of the Word of God. The next essential ingredient is right relationships and fellowship among the membership. You might react negatively to using the term revitalization, believing you only need to tweak a few things and are far from requiring a major overhaul. While that may be true, you must resist the temptation to not properly and transparently assess where your church is spiritually and how well it is obediently fulfilling the mission God has given her.

      Questions need to be asked, and biblical answers are required. Have you left your first love? Have you become lukewarm? Are you no longer passionate about reaching your community for Christ as you once were? Is your membership in unity, and is there a driving desire for closer, intimate fellowship? It is the people of the church who build community, and it is those same people who are capable of straining and even destroying the community. Someone once said, “To dwell up above with those that we love, will be glory. To dwell down below with those we know, well, that is another story.”

      Do you have a system in place that intentionally and strategically helps people in building community and strong relationships? At our church, we developed an initiative called Next Steps that showed our congregation and newcomers what it looked like to connect to Jesus, our local church, a connection group and a ministry team. If I had it to do over again, there are certainly some specific areas we would change and some we would add. One addition would be a more intentional system of ensuring that we connected disciples to disciple-makers. We tried to do this, but not as well as we could have.

      Think through the spaces in your ministry where you need to connect people to help them not only “join” the church but to become an integral part of the family. The places churches focus on the most are the larger spaces that are mainly about an event, more public, and the “social.” This space is needed, and everyone should be connected here, but this is the common area where relationships are more casual and usually lack depth. This space of 70+ is where people are able to come and go without really engaging in deep, potentially life-changing relationships. There is very little transparency or accountability in this space.

      Christ-followers also need to be connected to a small group of 12-20 where they can love and be loved, know and be known, and serve and be served. These spaces are seen in Jesus’ ministry where He was occasionally with the crowds, sent out the 70 but focused on investing in the 12. This is where you can get down to the nitty-gritty of better clarifying Christ’s expectations of His followers and building deeper relationships. We always told those who God sent to us that the best way to get connected was in a “connection” group. It is far too easy to slide in and out of the larger groups without being noticed or even committed.

      Think of what Jesus did with the 12. He washed their feet, walked to them on the water, heard Peter’s confession and had to rebuke Him as well. It is with the 12 that He had them serve the multitudes by feeding them. Yes, an impossible task with the amount of food they had, but He taught and showed them that the impossible becomes reality through the power of God. He lived life with the 12, and your people need to understand that the best way to get connected is in smaller family groups that are all a part of the larger family. A very good friend, Drew Cline, refers to their church as a “family of families.”

      You will also need to work harder on building deeper relationships through triads and one-on-one discipleship. Jesus had Peter, James and John. The smaller the group, the more customized and confidential it will naturally become. That is where iron can really sharpen iron through the interaction and holding one another accountable to what you have committed to doing for Christ. This is where you can pray individually out loud with one another and ask the hard questions that need to be asked. That is what Jesus did after His resurrection when He walked with Peter and asked him three times, “Peter, do you love me?”

      That is the space where disciples learn how to know Christ, not just know about Him. That is where disciples learn what it means to follow Christ daily because they are able to see how disciple-makers follow Him as they share their challenges and struggles. How will you systematically and intentionally connect people in these spaces? Do you have a class or training that clearly teaches new people how to connect in all five spaces mentioned? How will you deliver this necessary process of connecting within your church family?

      Consider a delivery mechanism for connecting. Maybe offer four Sunday night classes in a row every quarter and ask newcomers (even old comers, if they have never been trained) to commit to those four nights. Yes, it requires a commitment but offer a meal and childcare to better ensure the effectiveness of the connecting process. That will help you build relationships and promote community.