Bloom Church: Actual Innovation!

Apparently I am writing an occasional series on innovative ways to share life in Christ. Like so much about blogging, I didn’t plan on this. But new models intrigue me, and I happen to know they intrigue a few other folks also. (Also, it beats lamenting the state of the budget conversation.)

Today I’m fascinated by Bloom Church in Denver, Colorado. Bloom is a network of house churches that gather during the week in people’s living rooms as small groups, and on Sunday evening as a large group for worship.

I’m fascinated by Bloom for three reasons: its founding premise; the way it invites people into Christian life; and its age demographic. It is founded and supported largely by people under 35.

1) Here’s the founding premise: “Instead of launching a large public gathering and then trying to figure out what to do with all the people, what if you started with people gathering around the Kingdom in living rooms, with the public gathering being something that happened AFTER you took formation into Kingdom-life seriously?” (from their “Origins: Our Story” page)

This is a radically innovative way to be church. Founded in 2008 in one living room, Bloom now meets in seven different living rooms and gathers more than 150 people for weekly shared worship. According to this blog post by the lead pastor, in the last quarter of 2011 the (annualized) budget was about $80,000. Can I just say, as a former church planter, those numbers are astonishing. New congregations don’t usually grow that fast, and they don’t usually cost that little (speaking financially).

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This is the way I am used to thinking about church planting:

To plant a church, you get a small group of founders together, do heavy, expensive PR and launch with a big, expensive public gathering. You might gear up for the big public gathering by holding free, small private gatherings in living rooms, but the goal is understood to be a Sunday morning large group worship service.

Often, once the large group worship service is launched, the small groups in living rooms aren’t sustained. The direction of the church, including its fundraising, goes toward sustaining the large group gathering and paying a clergyperson to lead worship, teach, and pastor those who worship together.

So, for example, in 1980 when Rick Warren launched Saddleback Church, he and his wife and one other couple moved as quickly as possible to hand-addressing invitations to total strangers to come to the Easter service. (Easter tends to be a good time for church launches, as folks who don’t usually go to church are more open to checking out your new church that day.) More than 200 people showed up (they hand-addressed thousands of invitations) and Saddleback was born.

I was a church planter from 1996 to 2000. We were still using the same model. I read The Purpose-Driven Church (which is where I learned about Saddleback’s early days) before I started serving Epiphany Community Church. By then, the model had some cracks around the edges, but it was the only way anyone imagined church working.

Ironically, within the last ten years we’ve seen a rise in the numbers of churches experimenting with small groups… but in general, to be “church,” a small group experience is optional, while the large worship gathering is seen to be mandatory.

Bloom reverses that thinking.

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2) I’m also fascinated by Bloom Church because of the way they proclaim the gospel: as a story without barriers, a story into which we are all invited. I first noticed this way of describing the faith on Mars Hill Bible Church‘s website. Rather than a statement of doctrine, they share their “narrative theology.” Among other statements, Mars Hill says, “We believe that, as a community and individuals, God is calling us to participate in God’s unfolding story of love, rescue, resurrection, and restoration.”

The same is true at Bloom. Among other things, they say “Our quest is to take Jesus – his life, his teaching, his death, his resurrection – more seriously than we take any other thing. That’s pretty much how we understand what the word “Christian” means… We love to partner with God in His work, which is the healing of the world.” Notice that there is no intellectual gulf to cross… no leap of faith required… simply the desire to take Jesus seriously and enter into the healing of the world alongside Him.

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3) Finally, I am fascinated by Bloom because it is a community which appears to be largely composed of folks who are younger than I am. This is not a common experience for me in the Episcopal Church, where the average age is 57. (That’s the same average age, incidentally, as for farmers in the state of Michigan.) At 41, I am middle aged, but in the Episcopal Church I am still one of the young ones. These folks are younger than I am, and they are openly planning to build an institution: seeking property, adding staff, talking stewardship. I couldn’t be more impressed by these words from the lead pastor (from the same post referenced above):

The hard truth here is that my crowd – the under 35 crowd – tends not to be a generation of builders. Our parents were builders. They perceived that the world was theirs for the shaping, and so they did. Not us. We largely whine and complain about how things are, the world our parents left for us, without having the character to bleed and sacrifice for the kind of world we believe in… I refuse to participate in that, and I hope that you refuse also, FOR IT IS BENEATH YOUR DIGNITY AS PERSONS MADE IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF THE CREATOR, WHO BUILT AND CONTINUES TO BUILD HIS WORLD WITH CARE.

Amen, brother!

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There are days when I wonder what on earth God is up to. Then there are days when I stumble across the kind of amazing, life-renewing ministry that only God can bring into being, and I want to fall to my knees in gratitude and praise.

Bloom makes me want to fall to my knees. And it also makes me want to ask… what if the mainline church experimented with this model of ministry?

Well… what if?