A movement is born
By Neil Cole |
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Excerpted from
Organic Church
by Neil Cole
(September 2005, $23.95, cloth)
by permission of Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint
In our first year, we began ten new churches. In our second year, Church Multiplication Associates (CMA) started 18 churches. The next year, we added 52 new starts. The momentum was beyond our expectations. In 2002, we averaged two churches a week being started and had 106 starts. The following year, we saw around 200 starts in a single year. We estimate that close to 400 churches were started in 2004, but counting the churches has become a daunting task. At the time of this writing, there have been close to 800 churches started in thirty-two states and twenty three nations around the world, in only six years.
These churches we were starting were small (averaging sixteen people) and simple. The term simple church began to gain popularity, because we valued a simple life of following our Lord and avoided many of the complexities of the conventional church. Complex things break down and do not get passed on, but simple things are strong and easily reproduced. Ordinary Christians were able to do the extraordinary work of starting and leading churches because the work was simple, the results powerful.
 | | Soulwinners baptize new converts, raising the bar on discipleship |
We started articulating this profound goal for CMA: “We want to lower the bar of how church is done and raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple.” If church is simple enough that everyone can do it and is made up of people who take up their cross and follow Jesus at any cost, the result will be churches that empower the common Christian to do the uncommon works of God. Churches will become healthy, fertile, and reproductive.
The conventional church has become so complicated and difficult to pull off that only a rare person who is a professional can do it every week. Many people feel that to lower the bar of how church is done is close to blasphemous because the Church is Jesus’ expression of the Kingdom on earth. Because church is not a once-a-week service but the people of God’s family, what they have actually done is the opposite of their intention. When church is so complicated, its function is taken out of the hands of the common Christian and placed in the hands of a few talented professionals. This results in a passive church whose members come and act more like spectators than empowered agents of God’s Kingdom.
The organic or simple church, more than any other, is best prepared to saturate a region because it is informal, relational, and mobile. Because it is not financially encumbered with overhead costs and is easily planted in a variety of settings, it also reproduces faster and spreads further. Organic church can be a decentralized approach to a region, nation, or people group and is not heavily dependent upon trained clergy.
CMA’s mandate is clear and simple: to reproduce healthy disciples, leaders, churches, and movements to fill the earth with God’s Kingdom. We have developed some very simple ways to release the power of multiplication at each of these levels of Kingdom life and growth. Saturating the globe with healthy and vital disciples is our mandate. It appears that God is fulfilling our deepest desires.
The smallest group in our movement is not the organic church but the Life Transformation Group (LTG). This is a group of two or three people who meet weekly to challenge one another to live an authentic spiritual life. Members of these non-coed groups have a high degree of accountability to one another in how they have walked with the Lord each week, which involves mutual confession of sins as well as reading a large volume of Scripture repetitively. LTGs are also missional, in that they actively pray for the souls of lost friends, family, associates, and neighbors. This is the context inwhich we multiply disciples, which must come before we multiply churches. Some of the thinking that undergirds this strategy is explained further in Chapter Seven.
Multiplication growth starts small and with time builds momentum, until it is beyond control. We look forward to times when we are surprised by the Kingdom expansion.
One evening at one of my own churches, Michael (who paints houses for a living) asked me about the church we had on Gaviota Street in Long Beach. Gaviota is only a few blocks from where I lived at the time. I told him we didn’t have any churches on Gaviota. He smiled and said, “Yes, you do.” He told me he had been painting a house and noticed that cars started coming to the house across the street. People would pull out guitars, bongos, and Bibles and go into the house. He went over to introduce himself and mention that he had a church meeting in his home as well. When they saw him, they recognized him and said they were also a part of our network of churches. A church had started only a few blocks from my home, and I didn’t even know about it. When I heard this story, I felt as though we had finally reached a goal of spontaneous reproduction; we were beginning to see things get out of control. We still have much to learn, but God seems to be showing us the way to release spontaneous multiplication.
 | | The average size of an organic church is 16 |
A couple of us from one of our Awakening Chapels started a new church in an apartment complex in the barrio of East L.A. On a Saturday we went to the apartments to have a barbecue and baptize new believers. When we arrived, I was surprised to see one of our other church planters there. He was also surprised to see me. He lived on that same block and led a church that he had already started there in Spanish. Suddenly there were two churches on the block, one in Spanish and one in English. Could it be that we are now bumping into each other?
 | | The Awakening Chapel in East LA |
I went recently on a trip to Asia with Phil Helfer, one of the key leaders and cofounders of CMA. On our return flight we met a flight attendant who was expecting her first child. As we talked we found out that she had lived in Long Beach and was a Christian. What we didn’t find out until a few weeks later is that she was a part of one of our churches. It blows my mind that in such a short time we are bumping into people in our movement all over the place—even at thirty-six thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean.
After five years, I drew out a family tree for Awakening Chapels. I was amazed at what can happen in a single church network in just five years. Here is what I discovered:
The start of sixty-eight organic churches in five states and five countries.
 | | A missionary to Amman, Jordan is commissioned by her church |
Five generations of churches, where we had a daughter church, granddaughter churches, great-granddaughter churches, and great-great-granddaughter churches.
Five additional networks were birthed from this one. Awakening is only one of more than ninety networks so far in our movement.
This book is the product of our listening and learning in the journey we have been pursuing. I start by uncovering what I believe to be the essence of church. It is important to understand key concepts and shift our understanding of church and the Kingdom of God. In the chapters that follow, we unfold the organic nature of the Kingdom and see how the church begins, continues, and reproduces in natural ways.
See the Next-Wave interview with Organic Church author, Neil Cole.
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