Rethinking the Chessboard: Bringing the Church to a Community
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from “Rethinking the Chessboard,” an interview with missiologist Alan Hirsch on City to City’s Church in Outbreak podcast. In the discussion, Hirsch discusses the challenges and opportunities of ministry in the middle of COVID-19, and how churches can go beyond a once-a-week structure to reach their community.
Hirsch is also the co-author of Reframation: Seeing God, People, and Mission Through Reenchanted Frames, which helps readers experience and articulate the gospel in ways that resonate with the longings of their contemporary culture.
CTC: A lot of people have been trying new ways of gathering together for worship. In some ways, this disruption helps us reimagine what church ought to look like. You've been thinking about these things for a long time—about what missional community looks like outside of the prevalent model.
Alan Hirsch: I do think it's a challenge most people have not expected and are probably ill-prepared to face. If the only tool that you've got is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. There's no question that most churches in North America have sorely over-relied on the singular tool of the Sunday expression. And now that it has been excluded from the equation for some, they find themselves in a very tricky situation.
I'm told I'm not the greatest chess player in the world, but I know what each piece on the chessboard does, more or less. One day, a man who knows a lot about chess told me, “If you really want to learn chess, take your queen out first. Your opponent will keep the queen. What you do then is learn what all of the other pieces on your board can do. Then, start putting the queen back into your strategy. At that point, you've learned to become a champion without over-relying on a singular function.
The sermon or worship service is the “queen” for many churches. And for some, the queen has been taken out. Now, they may not know what the other pieces on the board can do.
What sorts of activities can churches implement in addition to a weekend service?
AH: The conversations I've been having have been with leaders interested in what constitutes movements. Now, this has been my shtick—this idea of the church's movement. My best articulation of that is in a book called The Forgotten Ways, which actually asks this very question. I tried to answer the question, “How did the early church grow from 25,000 followers to 20 million in two hundred years?” They didn't have all of the things we think we need. They were illegal. They didn't have a 501(c)(3). They usually didn't have church buildings, and when they did, they were houses that were made into meeting halls, rather than huge areas. Yet, they grew at the exponential rate of 40% per decade.
Now, that's quite incredible and counterintuitive to the way we normally think about church. And I think there's something we can learn about that situation in relation to ours. It can precipitate some serious thinking about movements and how we might actually become that very viable, dynamic, transformative kind of church.
I think at the moment, what we have as an asset is the idea of small groups. Some of those groups can become ecclesial expressions of church. You can call them micro-churches, if you will, led by people who currently lead them, and these groups can even grow to around 40 and multiply, We're learning a lot about these 20- to 40-person, “small enough to care, big enough to dare” groups. When you look at what's going on in the New Testament, in meetings by the riverbank or in houses, that's where the primary movement is happening. Scripture calls them ecclesia. I think this is where we can think about our understanding of the church, its scalability, and its genius of giving agency to all of God's people to use the places in our common life—our homes, our pubs, our common spaces—as the natural place for church to take place.
When we bring the church to places like that, everything changes. The church gets out of one building and it's unstoppable at that point! We can at least invest in ways forward like this. Maybe not everyone wants to go out and do this, but say there’s 10% of your community that’s willing to experiment with you on this and see what this kind of church would look like. Experiment with meeting out in the community, or taking a little cell group and morphing it into a mini-church. Then, the mother church can help organize them and nurture them just like a parent would, helping them grow up to maturity. That’s how a gospel movement takes place.
What does it mean for us to be the church to a community?
AH: You live in a certain place, and you have to express your missionary identity as much as you can by using that home.
When I look at Manhattan, for example, I see each of those little towers as a village. And they’re all filled with lonely people—oh my goodness, this city is lonely, man! There's a lot of single people, a lot of older widows, a lot of divorcées, many of them focusing on their professional career and working too hard. I think beginning to look at those apartments as one’s village to whom one has been sent is a good first step to being a church.
I know a hospitable couple from Texas who now live in Manhattan. The husband smokes meat. I tell you, he’s gotten to know all of the guys in his area, particularly in his apartment building, through smoked meat. They come down in groves to eat and sit around. He's literally opened up a whole community of people that didn't know each other just by feeding them. It’s remarkable what we can do just by using very basic things.
If you just look around, you can probably see that you already live in a mission field. And using whatever's in your hand, you can begin to kind of be faithful to its people. Put another way, you can find out what sucks in your neighborhood, find out who agrees with you that it sucks, and do something about it.
I think the idea of a church maintaining a mostly online presence is counter-productive in the long run. We should be gathering as much as we can, safely and wisely. You can even use small groups as sustainable forms and invest in leaders, supporting them, and seeing if these groups can develop into a mini-ecclesia.
The challenge of growing the church can’t be solved by better technology and doing the exact same things we have been. We can’t expect fundamentally different results if we don’t organize our congregations and send them out. Strengthen the church’s other muscles, invest in leaders, and learn what the other chess pieces can do. Use this chance to identify and develop leaders in your midst.
I think one of the keys to growth and viable missional impact is developing what we call an L-50 leader: someone who can lead 50 others. In America, people tend to think of leaders as people who lead huge amounts of people—even tens of thousands. In the Bible, a leader is much closer to the ground. It's a leader of a house church, which is around 50 people. I think we need to train more at that level.
I think as leaders, our responsibility as leaders to define what is real. The battle is won at the level of, first and foremost, imagination. I think if you can't think it, you can't do it. I would use this as an opportunity to reconfigure the paradigm, not simply go back to what we did before. As Winston Churchill said, “Never waste a good crisis.”
About the Author
Alan Hirsch is an Australian author, missiologist, and thought leader in the missional church movement. His books include 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ, The Forgotten Ways, and Reframation: Seeing God, People, and Mission Through Reenchanted Frames.