I met up with a guy called Peter Farmer earlier today. He’s got his hand on a couple of simple churches in Nottingham. At the moment he’s on a mission to go around different areas across the UK and tomorrow his visit to Wales ends. His aim is to get to know the areas, meet people who are involved in missional/simple/new forms of church, and to pray for the areas. He emailed me asking to meet up and so we did.
We talked about what he’s doing and I shared where I’m at at the moment. He was asking me about Wales, particularly about Cardiff and Newport (since they’re the areas I know well) and I also told him a bit about the Valleys, as they’re some of the most socially deprived in the UK. He also told me about the others in Wales who he’s met. It was great meeting him.
We’re talking reproduction here, not of the human kind but of the church kind. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently (again the church kind not the human kind…!) And the thing my thoughts have centred around are that if a church is going to reproduce lots and regularly within short spaces of time, then it is beneficial to be simple.
Organic church, simple church, house church, whatever you want to call it. What’s the point in it? Something occurred to me yesterday as I was trying to sleep but failing with my thorn that occasionally appears in my flesh. I’d just been reading another chapter of Brian McLaren’s book, Church on the Other Side. In chapter eight, McLaren virtually slams every existing model of church through the various sizes, including the organic/simple/house church model. But something he said made me realise one answer as to why anyone would want to go for that model, and the answer is anarchy!
