Our Guiding Principles

1. church management should prevent consolidations of power

2. church services, including preaching, teaching, and leading worship, should be run by the community

3. finances were not meant to be consumed by salaries and acquiring real estate, but rather should be directed to the sick, needy, and abandoned

4. stealing members from other churches or causing church splits or competing at all is the opposite of unity

Order of Services

The collaborative church model is a combination of both open, community-inolved, spontanteous movements and structured elements such as preaching and leading worship.

We understand that this may sound complicated, so here's how the average service would go:

Worship set with band number 1

A time of open congregration-lead singing, testimonies, poem reading, prayers, scripture readings, and exortations

Teaching/preaching with open debate and discussion

Full Worship set with band number 2

A Crowd of Teachers

We capitulate on the power of small contributors, speaking or leading worship on an occasional/rotating basis. Although allowing for true fellowship by each member given the ability to contribute in self-directed manner, the community would have certain safeguards in place to rule out out those who do not care for the community, but rather are simply looking for a platform.

Two of those safeguards are:

If you want to speak, you have to show that you are willing to listen. This means that you have to come to the collaborative church for some time and you have to engage in relationship with people.

The second safeguard has to do with our very structure:

The Coordinators

Within our organization there are an odd number of Coordinators. Their job is twofold:

To coordinate the speakers. namely asking people to speak when volunteers are running low, interviewing new speakers, and handling the scheduling

To coordinate the worshiper leaders in the same manner

At the very core of what they do is to train and mentor those who prepare the bulk of the teaching. They also function as a gateway to the main section of speaking and should do so with this methodology: avoiding heresy while alowing differences.

Coordinators are not supposed to be speakers any more often than other speakers. Preferably coordinators are meant to take a back seat unless no volunteer speaker can make a particular meeting or because a speakers canceled without enough time for the coordinator to find another volunteer. When they are forced to lead the service, filters should rotate.

The Theology behind a crowd

There are five giftings in the bible, (prophets, evangelists, apostles, pastors, and teachers) so it takes knowing at least five different types of people to understand the ways that God communicates.

It's unlikely that one person will be given all of these gifts. Secondly, even with a small congregration it is even more unlikely (and unbiblical) that the only person with a gifting is the pastor.

Having a group of teachers also testifies to a willingness to let things be messy and to tolerate differences, yes, even encourage them. As a gathering of believers was meant to be a place where discussion, community, working out one's salvation actually take place. Some of these goals require us to disagree, some require us to move the pews to better see and speak with one another, some require us to eat together.

Our communities may look leaderless, in a traditional sense where authority resides by position, however it actually reveals how we think about such topics as biblical servant leadership. Because the honor and responsibility of teaching and preaching are distributed among our members, a particular speaker may state something of which we do not as a body agree, however because we view the right to lead as something both identified and earned by the example one sets in word and deed, leading and speaking do not have to be considered as always synonomous.

Church Splits as Church Growth (Meeting Locations and Size)

We meet where we can. We attempt to lease no buildings; we try to pay no rent or to split rent with multiple chuches in one location. We go where we are welcomed, and if the location is small, like a home, than the group becomes small and divides itself into two nights and two bodies. If it large area, like a business or a warehouse, than we come together. Because the attraction of the group is based upon the interplay between the members and not on a personality, the group can divide and reconnect in a remarkably fluid fashion.