While chatting with Robbymac last week, he mentioned to me that I haven’t blogged anything about our little missionalesque community in a while. Hmm. Hadn’t realized that, but perhaps it’s apropos to mention today. For the past couple of months we’ve been talking with the kids about art and teaching them about a few different forms of art. We’ve done “field trips” to the art gallery and to a recording studio, and we’ve had a painter come and visit. We’ve taught them a few different forms of art and talked about expressing ourselves through art. And they have an assignment: they each have to create two original pieces of artwork to show, and one of them has to be an art form they haven’t done before.

I was poking around some old draft posts and found this one — I probably wrote it at least two years ago.

I’m on record belittling certain forms of children’s ministry, the forms which are entertainment-based. The ones which focus on keeping the kids busy and out of their parents’ hair while they have their sermon. The ones which are more concerned with the kids having a program than with the kids having spiritual formation. I summed up it up by saying these were only concerned with the kids getting a story, a craft, and a cookie.

I’m thinking about small group ministries that so many churches offer these days. Many seem to be based on good principles of mutual care, and some are based around the idea that the small group or cell is the basic building-block of the church. At one time I might have said that a church without a small group ministry is missing out on a critical element of church life. In my CLB, we were all about small groups, at least in the earlier days (they became more mechanized than organic nearer the end). I remember a lot of the cell church material as well, and the attempts at hybridizing the purer forms of cell church and the megachurch mentality. I wonder now if a church with a small group ministry isn’t sometimes an oxymoronic expression of community, an attempt to replicate in smaller units the thing that’s fundamentally missing from the larger context… but since it’s fundamentally a program, its makeup cuts across the formation of organic relationship and true community.

We had some good discussion last week on my post on Measuring Converts in Simple / House / Missional Churches, and a late comment by Joe slipped in today:

Having stumbled onto this website, could I ask you for some help? I am new to world of simple/organic church, and remember fondly my early days as a Christian, when I held an after church meeting in my home, it was everything a traditional church is not, anyway could you recommend any books, websites, or authors that would help me to flesh out my understanding of simple/organic church life.

First it was Mark Driscoll saying, “And all the nonsense of emerging, and Emergent, and new monastic communities, and, you know, all of these various kinds of ridiculous conversations — I’ll tell you as one on the inside, they don’t have converts. The silly little myth, the naked emperor is this: they will tell you it’s all about being in culture to reach lost people, and they’re not.” Then recently I found a post asking if it was End of the House Church? This from another insider, who notes, “I am beginning to wonder if the ‘reemergence’ of the House Church Movement that has happened in the last three or four years has stopped before it really got going? The reason I wonder this is because in the four years of being in organic Church nothing much seems to be different in regards to numbers and the vibe I am getting around the place from way back in 2004.”