To Be or Not To Be...a Church

To Be or NOT To Be…a Church?
(A Church by Any Other Name)

Ever since I took the plunge, resigning my position at a traditional church and announcing that I’m going to try to create an alternative spiritual community here in Northern Michigan, all sorts of people have come up to me and said, “I hear you’re going to start your own church.” Without missing a beat, my response has been, “Well, it’s not really going to be a church…”

A good friend of mine challenged me the other day, asking, “Why are you so reluctant to call what you’re doing a church?” I thought for a long time before I answered. Here are some of the things I thought about:


Is it that I genuinely believe that the church’s cons so thoroughly outweigh its pros as to render the entire institution irreparable?

Is it that I see all the various reform movements and Emergent trends as mere rearrangements of the deck chairs on the Titanic of the church?

Am I simply burned out, tired of trying to be a change agent for Christ in an environment and structure that seems constitutionally incapable of or unwilling to live as Christ lived?

Or is it more of a semantic problem, given that the word “church” is so laden with baggage, horrific history, and negative associations that I can’t bear applying that word to anything I do anymore?

And what IS a church anyway? And who gets to decide? Will the community I am in the process of establishing constitute a church or “just” some other sort of spiritual entity?


Here’s the important thing for me: I want change. I want to change the way I live, the way I think, the way I act, the way I make decisions and the way I interact with the world around me. And I want all of that change to be in the direction of Jesus of Nazareth. I want to see myself becoming more Christ-like every day; not just thinking about him, not just talking about him or discussing his teachings, but to actually DO more and more of the things he did while he was here. I want my family to be growing with me in these same ways. And I want – AND NEED - to be doing all this as a part of a community of folks who truly want their lives to deepen and grow, not just in some once a week or “in my spiritual life” sort of way, but in ways that matter to their community and their world.

My years and efforts within the institutional church have not elicited this kind of deep and substantive change in me, nor have I seen such change in the people with whom I’ve served all these years. Shane Claiborne put it so succinctly in my July 21st, 2009 interview with him. “We now know from all the mega-churches that we can bring a ton of people into the church without changing the way they live.”

Now, please don’t hear me as saying that lives cannot be transformed in and through a church. (And Shane is DEFINITELY NOT saying that in his quotation!) I’m simply saying that in my life and throughout my particular journey, there hasn’t been nearly the change in the way I live to keep me invested in the Church’s form(s) of spiritual community. I know I am not alone in this assessment.

Working on this book and traveling to so many vibrant churches and communities, I have seen transformed lives in all of them. Some were churches in the traditional sense, some less so. I have deep respect and admiration for the ways the leaders of these exemplary communities are going about their work and ministry, and, to a person, they have all emphasized that they believe in the church and see their communities as part of it. Again, to a person, they reject as heretical the notion that one may live outside the church and be a genuine, faithful disciple. Several of them also reject attempts - like mine - at forming alternative kinds of communities, seeing them as utopian and largely selfish endeavors. This contention has been problematic for me, and out of my respect for these leaders in both the Emergent and the New Monasticsm movements, I continue to wrestle with their perspectives.

Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists have taught us that an unjust law must be broken by a just person. I think we all understand why, particularly in a political context, but what about in an ecclesiastic context? If the “Christian Church”- in whatever local manifestation we experience it - no longer bears much resemblance to the One whose name it bears, AND, at the same time, resists and even rejects change in a Christ-like direction, aren’t followers of Jesus obligated to leave it behind to seek and form a more authentic, world-improving expression of their faith? Would such an act be “leaving” the Church or being true to it?

All of the communities I visited in the research for my book are doing beautiful, compelling, and clearly transformational things. My sojourn in each community was intended to help me understand what made them so effective in both changing lives and their larger communities. At that level, I’m not really sure it matters whether these communities are part of the Church or not. What I care about is that they are managing to help people live like Christ in the context of a community that reaches beyond itself to better the world.

It is my desire to do that same thing, coupled with my proven inability to do so in a traditional church context, that has fueled my passion to experiment with an alternative form of spiritual community that, at least in some ways, lies outside the institutional Church. Our concern at Living Vision is that our lives be continually transformed and eventually become compelling enough for others to see something of God at work in us. (See Romans 12:1-2 and Matthew 5:16) If that happens, I don’t suppose it will matter much what we call ourselves or what category we fit or don’t fit into. I am really excited to get going and to see what happens. Would you care to come along?