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Every day new visitors are coming to our site. In order to expose them to some of our best articles, and to create fresh discussion among those of us who have been active on the site a long time, we will from time to time repost an past article like this one. This article has been a favorite of many people. We invite you to read it for the first time or read it again. Take a moment to add your thoughts and commentary and let's learn together how we can honor and magnify Jesus and join Him in building His kingdom.

I'm concerned that we are trying to re-structure church instead of re-learning what it is to live the Christian life.

House churches, simple churches, organic churches can easily become just the "new way" to do church, the next-wave model of churchianity. It's easy for us, if we have been doing church for years, to want to simply come up with a "better way to do church." But that really misses the whole point.

Some call them house churches. Some call them organic churches. Some call them simple churches. We prefer to just call them churches. They are rapidly multiplying, simple communities of believers, meeting in homes, offices, campuses, wherever God is moving. This is the pattern common to many parts of the globe, and is now becoming more and more common in the U.S. as well.

Where are two or more are gathered in His name, there is church.

Where "DNA" is present among people, there is church.

"D" stands for Divine Truth (loving God/Jesus)
"N" stands for Nurturing Relationships (loving one another deeply)
"A" stands for Apostolic Mission (being on Jesus' mission to the world)

Organic Church. I've been using this term for around fifteen years now. Today it's become somewhat of a clay word, being molded and shaped to mean a variety of different things by a variety of different people.

T. Austin-Sparks is the man who deserves credit for this term. Here's his definition:

Let us begin with a very important fact. The goal of the site is not to criticize traditional or institutional churches. Yes, some of the articles make comparisons and some of the writers do strongly question traditional practices. However, those of us who have created this site did so for several reasons:

Recently there has been a lot of dialogue on the role of leadership. What is this thing called leadership? Who leads? Who follows? What difference does it make? Who cares? The question of leadership always leads into a lively debate. The great urgency always comes down to-who the heck is in charge around here?

My intention here is to share some of my thoughts on the role of leadership.

The incarnational aspect of our Lord’s ministry went beyond the theological truth that Christ was literally God in flesh. Jesus came as God in flesh to be with people. He told his disciples that his mission was to seek and to save that which was lost. Jesus did not camp in the temple in Jerusalem and build a ministry around a physical location. No Christ Jesus came to love the masses. Jesus went to the lost and served them. An incarnational ministry means that the church goes to people the way Jesus did!

Editors Note:
This is excellent material that has been used in starting and multiplying churches all over the world. This tool is a great way to start a group with unbelievers, and the principles that are used for studying the Bible are ones that many simple churches use regularly in the life of the church. The principles can be used with any scripture passage and the focus on discovering biblical truth as a group instead of depending on a weekly sermon is very practical and helpful for simple churches. The principles also emphasize the importance of application and obedience.

We hope to provide some additional examples of how to use this ministry tool in the near future.

Thanks to David Watson(New Generations International) for making this material available and to Todd Watkins and Pete Morton who have made some helpful additions and adaptions.
//newgenerationsintl.org/

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*Victor Choudhrie's 15 essential steps for changing traditional churches into New Testament churches.

1. Replace professional clergy with Priesthood of all Believers with authority to baptize, break bread and equip fishers of men. (1 Peter 2:9)
2. Replace Church building with "House of Peace." (Luke 10:5-9; Matt. 10:11-13)
3. Replace programmed Sunday service with daily informal gatherings. The Bride of Christ must have intimacy with her Lord every day and not just for a couple of hours a week lest she become unfaithful. (Acts 2:46-47; Hebrew 3:13)

If you watched the famous children's film "Adventure of Electronics", it is probably easy to remember how hard the mafia tried to find the "button", which would help them gain control over the electronic boy. No sacrifice of money or effort was too great.. They blindly believed that it would open the door to new opportunities.

Traveling through the labyrinth of pastoral ministry, I also was similar to the one who was desperately trying to find the "button". Sometimes I thought it was very close. This occurred especially in moments of successful ministry, when everyone was marveling at our fruitfulness or after the regular sermon, the words were said, "It was a good sermon." All of this seems so wonderful and it gives an impetus to move forward, but things are not what they seem.

All attempts to find a methodology or the secret of success in building the church lead nowhere. Again and again I was desperately continuing the search for a new system. Now, looking back, I understand what I did not in the past. I was already too deep in the system. I was part of it. It was part of me. I could not escape the system, and the system was using me. My mind was full of models and standard approaches. Moreover, I was not thinking about whether these models and approaches of ministry meet the Biblical principles of the teachings of Christ. And only now I realize I was looking for "button" for ministry success , but the Holy Spirit in His loving hand guided me to find a way out of the system. I think if I had heard this ten years ago, I would have been very terrified and could not even imagine the possibility of pastoral ministry beyond the traditional church system.

As I coach church planters all over the world, I get to evaluate a variety of approaches to this difficult task. God has relentlessly brought two facts to my attention—the two main obstacles to church planting movements across our world.

ONE: What we are doing is too complex. Even though we stress to those we train that they must reduce the “heavy package” of ‘Church As We Know It’ to bare New Testament essentials before carrying it to an unreached people group, most church planters are still struggling to strip away the cultural elements that slow or stop reproduction in the new cultural setting.

For example, dispensing with the need for a special “holy” building to meet in on Sundays may be easier than modeling active ministry by every believer. The church planter often does so much of the work himself that the fledgling church sees ministry as something only full time religious professionals can accomplish. The movement is stillborn since “qualified leadership” can never reproduce itself rapidly enough. One thing we really need is a simpler and more Biblical view of what “church” actually means. When I speak of “church” ...I mean the living organism that corporately forms Jesus’ Body and Bride on this planet, not a religious organization. In practical terms: a gathering of any size, committed to one another and to obeying the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have been lugging around a model and definition of “church” that is far too complex and encrusted with layers of nonessential, non-Biblical “barnacles.” We need to get radical in simplification.