Unite Southampton

The continuing, if not gripping, story of how we got here. Read from the beginning. Last time I talked about how we felt we had made a mistake changing from a network to a more traditional organisation. But why are networks better?

Since we got into the whole church unity thingy (I mentioned that I was never really into this before in Part 1) I have been caused to rethink what church is. See, I got brought up properly and understood that church is what you do on Sundays. You go there. You sing some songs, listen to a sermon and what-not. There's a vicar (or minister or pastor depending on your denomination). And of course I was told several times that it was important to remember that the church was the people, not the building they sat in.

Church unity tends to be about the leaders (vicars, ministers, pastors) meeting together to talk, pray or possibly organise events that will be useful in expressing our unity, or letting the town know that the church is there. So this is where we turned. We were a youth outreach organisation, we were interested in building unity in the church so off to the church leaders' group we went.

The problem is that, in general, full time paid church leaders are only interested in doing what they think needs doing. I don't mean it in a bad way about them, it's not their fault - that's their job. It's the system we have created. We expect them to act like this. In fact those of us that get to vote for our leaders would probably vote them out if they didn't.

What else should they do? Well, it now seems to me that they should be about facilitating the group to be able to help each other grow to be the people Jesus wants them to be. And many leaders might think that's what they are doing but they just aren't. The way most of us do church is about a few special people who do the important stuff and the rest turn up at the right events and give to the right causes. This is my experience of the way the church acts. The words might be different, but this is the reality that I see.

The clincher for me was this: I had worked for 6 years at IBM. This was a hard place to figure out how to follow Jesus. It was an even harder place to encourage other people to follow him too. Then I left and started trying to encourage young people in schools and parks to follow him. All of a sudden the people at the church wanted to pray for me, that I would do a good job at this. We get a little mention in the notice sheet, "pray for Chris and Becky and the great work they do for the Lord." So it seems that my work at IBM was not important to the church, my work with Unite is. But I now know that my work for IBM was as important to God as my work for Unite.

So as we have explored the church unity thingy I came to the conclusion that church unity is about the whole church, every person who follows Jesus, being united in doing God's work in a place. So, in a neighbourhood there might be followers who can pray together for their neighbours. At work there might be a group that can help each other to be good followers with the special challenges they face there. New mums can form support groups (or coffee clubs as they seem to me!). And a single person can be part of several different groups and activities.

This is all starting to sound like a network to me. It seems to me that networks of small groups, crossing over and intersecting would be more effective than what we do right now. We started out being a network and moved towards being an organisation.

We have found that we have been less effective since we left the network behind. We didn't realise that people have great ideas, great energy, great gifts. So helping people to get make best use of these is much more effective than trying to do everything ourselves. It's just that you kid yourself into thinking your ideas are better. If everyone just did what you think they should do... And, less obviously, other people will actually help you do your stuff. I don't mean they'll get involved in your project, but they will help you do what you do better.

I think God gave us an opportunity to explore this and we went a different direction. In the next post I'll talk some more about things that happened that helped us realise this and helped us move back towards network building rather than building our own empire.

But lastly for now, you might like to read this article for a view from outside the church (thanks Tallskinnykiwi for the link).