Circle of Hope

I was sitting around the big table with the CoHOp Core Team last night. Maybe you don’t know that Jason’s dad donated a bunch of his old office furniture and we now have a big wooden table (like a board room scene from Bruce Ward’s skyscraper!) in the “mezzanine“ level of Broad and Washington. Only our “power center” has 7-foot ceilings and a sprinkler pipe at 6 foot three running through it.

Liz had put up the poster of the 5-year imaginations that people had graffitied during the Discerning Retreat on one wall of the room. Dan looked at it at one point and said something like, “We apparently don’t think of ourselves as a small, marginalized church fighting the man anymore.” There are so many big ideas on the paper it threatens to topple the wall! People have big ideas for what they apparently now think is our big network. A congregation budding in Camden seems to have put them over the edge into a new way of seeing Circle of Hope.

Well, honestly, let’s not bust any buttons being real big, yet. We’re not that big. We may be more capable than we ever imagined we would be, but the average car dealership has a yearly income greater than our whole network’s. So let’s be as excited about ourselves as we should be. Romans 12 says: “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. …In Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given us.” We are no more and no less than God has made us. We have our gifts to bring to the cause according to the grace received. We’re big, but no bigger than we are given to be.

I keep trying to tell people that they don’t need to be dismayed about getting larger as a network. We will always be small, too. We committed ourselves to a vision for how to be the church from the beginning — we always expected to be a network of congregations that each grew to about 200 people and then multiplied. We have always wanted to live face-to-face. We’ll probably keep finding inventive ways to keep that going.

Right now we are on the edge of figuring out how to be both a network of some size: three congregations that are face to face, and a network of cells and mission teams that share an organic life together. I hope you are up for the challenge, because it is pretty weird. A lot of us don’t have a feel for it, yet — even many people among the many, many people who lead our community in Christ.

The fact that we don’t get how we work sometimes surprises me. I think what we are doing is just common, biblical sense. It seems like what the first believers did in Acts. The Celtic church organized in a similar way. John Wesley basically lead the first Methodists to do what we do. All sorts of people movements all over the world look a lot like us (only better organized!). What is the big deal?  From what I understand, people have some fears born of where they used to live. For one thing, they don’t want to be some mega-whatever. I kind of missed the mega-church thing, but a lot of us didn’t. So we equate that big, American dinosaur with being irrelevant and anonymous in the body — the pastor on a jumbotron, some ideology taking over, professionals doing everything and finding warm bodies to fuel their programs. No one wants to be big like that. Similarly, but from the opposite direction, a lot of us have come from nowhere, wandering around alone or in a little pod of leftovers from the youth group and we are glad to get in a cell where we can be authentic. We don’t want to lose that.

For the most part, most of us didn’t care much about church structure before Circle of Hope got to be who we are and we still don’t care — so we are content to be whatever part we end up being as God leads us along. That’s what I’m glad we are doing — letting God lead us along.

We are listening to God and staying creative. We want to extend the Kingdom – that may force us to organize for larger. We want to live in the Kingdom – that will definitely force us to stay small. This year our big goals have powered us into being a more effective network. Since we accomplished our goals – planted the beginnings of another congregation, hired Liz to invent good administration, hired Jeremiah to give gravity to generating compassion, made some network offices, even – we’ve got a new look that people are noticing.

I’m not sure what all that new energy will come to. But one thing I’m happy about is this: finding ways to handle the opportunities of being larger has freed the pastors and Cell Leader Coordinators to spend better attention on being small – caring for our cells and the congregations they form. Our 46 brave Cell Leaders are leading the charge for transformation where it will always happen best: person to person in living room or coffee shop, (or maybe even huddled in the mezzanine on Broad St.), with Jesus in the midst.