Welcome to the CollaborativeChurch.com!

More or less, this is our small attempt to think about church leadership, management, and direction. We hope to be a bridge between many denominations and a place for the body of Christ to come together, connecting on shared beliefs. We hope that as you encounter some of the ideas on this site, that you would consider a model of church that does not compete but rather collaborates.

(If you are here to get the full version of the article that appeared in Consp!re Magazine, please click here). You might also enjoy this collaborative sermon series called The Story of God, which was designed so that the audience (our homeless friends) would be allowed that space to costantly interrupt and "finish the story."

Our two main focuses:

1. 

In the United States alone, real estate owned by churches is worth more than $230 billion. The costs of having these buildings, including interest, service, and maintenance, is around $9 billion a year. To give some kind of reference point to how large $230 billion is, consider this: economists estimate that $225 billion is all it would take to eliminate all deaths due to preventable disease, hunger, and malnutrition.

At collaborative church, we had an idea: Let's share spaces and use this money better. If we simply saved the 18% of church budgets that get drowned in mortgage interest, building maintenance, (notice that this 18% does not include the portion of mortgage payments that go toward principle or the maintence and cleaning staff's salaries) we could afford to do two things: take care of the orphan, the widow, and the alien, and be able to reach the 20% of the world that has not yet heard the gospel.

We have been working very hard on an open source coffee-shop-in-the-daytime/ministry-center-on-weeknights-and-weekends business plan for allowing churches who share a single location to develop a micro-enterprise so that even the cost of sharing a service location do not diminish their giving capacities.

2.

In recent years, the numbers of roles a pastor is expected to fill and the amount of work he is expected to do has increased exponentially, and are far beyond the bible's definition of a pastor's responsibilities. Sadly because of the unbiblical time commitments and stresses, pastors report a whole host of problems associated with fatigue, depression, and anxiety.  We have some statistics about how being a pastor is An impossible job and how the modern role of a pastor is very different than how the bible describes it.

In addition to the cost savings methods of joint spaces, the Collaborative Church is an attempt to bring some of the management and involvement of a church into the hands of its people, changing its structure from the "Pastor as CEO" model to something more like "leader as servant" model. Whenever possible we also try to encourage those who manage our services to support themselves in the workplace, as such, we are living out what a church would look like with a decentralized leadership.

Our concept is to transform church into a collaborative, leaderless, starfish organization from the current CEO-model. Freed from the top-down hierarchical version of the church which, more often than not, is the result of lack of checks and balances in church management and the resulting, unintentional, power consolidation. This is far from what was intended by the biblical metaphor of the shepherd.

It is our belief that a decentralized church is a cult-proof church.

On the far right, you can see a collection of links that will allow you to learn more.