by Peyton Jones: Stop and think about the implications of this. Everyday believers who had their gifts awoken, and were living in microchurches found it no challenge at all to organically plant a church when all you changed was their address. When you moved them geographically, they became little seeds of the gospel, proficient in planting without the presence of leadership, simply because they weren’t dependent upon the gifts of their leaders, but rather active in the Spirit’s working through their own gifts and passions.
How is that for scandalous? Microchurches were so effectively discipling believers that churches were being planted organically. This doesn’t happen when believers are trained to be spectators. It’s absent in churches where believers opt to be pacified instead of becoming participants. The first church plant out of Jerusalem was so scandalous that the apostles send Barnabas as an emissary Northward to check it out, inadvertently kick-starting Paul’s ministry. Because microchurches focus on the gifts of others, instead of on the gifts of the leader, they are able to multiply and infiltrate a community naturally, without any of the big fanfare that we depend upon today. Instead, they function more like a guerilla band, low to the ground, and subtle. They begin to saturate a community with their own transformation, and witness the transformation of others in the process. In addition, they function as smaller churches within a larger gathering or church. Because they function as a smaller cell within a church they can function on their own when taken out of it. This was the secret to first century multiplication and helps explain why the gospel spread so fast. Put simply, they are easy to plant. They aren’t expensive. They don’t take a seminary grad to lead them. They don’t have a bunch of hierarchy. Think of a microchurch as an embodiment of Acts 2:42.
What would happen if we released people into the mission field in small clusters to reach a cross-section of the community? What if instead of gathering everyone together, we were more concerned with scattering them outward? How would our people grow and mature if they were allowed to feel ownership of the mission on a smaller team?
Buy Peyton’s newest book “Reaching The Unreached: Becoming Raiders of the Lost Art” over on Amazon.com. You can also download a free chapter and watch a cool trailer for the book HERE or click the image below.
