About 20 years ago, a bunch of christian university students in Florida were committed to christian ministry on campus. So when they graduated, they went back to their churches, and they looked around for opportunities to do worthwhile ministry, but found their options were limited. They all tell a similar story …..

Stacy Gaskin: “On campus, honestly, we were experiencing a potent form of church. But when I would go on Sunday morning and try to worship and listen to a sermon, it began to just come up short, and it felt like there has to be more to following Jesus in the world than this.”

Keisha Polonio: “there were times of like, I want to get invested, I want to try to do something, I want to use my gifts, and the only options that were available were being on the worship team, kids ministry or women’s ministry. And I just thought there had to be more. God is doing something more in me and they do not fit in the parameters of these three options. Is there anything else? And there wasn’t. And I think that was the moment when I realised I think we need to leave.”

Jeremy Stephens: “These people had been amazing leaders on campus – evangelists, leaders, they’d gone overseas – they’re amazing, they’re trained, equipped, experienced, and they’re told I need you to sit in a pew and I need you to give money …. and maybe you could do the parking ministry ….. and that just really upset us over time, every week we’d just come back from Sunday service and go: this is not what we see in scripture, this makes no sense with our lives”

What happened next

In the summer of 2006, about 50 of them left their traditional churches to form seven house-based church groups. But unlike many house churches, these ‘microchurches’ are dedicated to doing mission in the community around them. Many of the missionaries moved into poorer neighbourhoods because that was the people they identified with and that was where they saw the missional needs.

The missionaries in the microchurches were supported initially by one man, and eventually by a small staff who helped equip the leaders and provide services to them.

The Underground today

Today the Underground comprises 200 autonomous microchurches in Tampa, and is part of a network of a dozen similar movements across the globe, in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The microchurches are supported by the Hub, a large multipurpose building with meeting rooms, computers, video equipment, etc, and home to about 20 staff with skills in finance, multimedia, personal development, mission, postmodern culture, etc.

“Our passion is for the poor and the lost. We empower communities to reach and serve the people who exist at the margins of the church as we know it. We believe that intimacy with God and commitment to His mission means prioritizing both those in poverty and those without knowledge of His saving grace. We also believe that discipleship of believers happens best and most significantly while obeying Jesus and following Him through mission —  therefore, we empower believers to seek the heart of God in prayer to know their unique calling, and to find a community where they can truly live it out. We then work to mobilize communities to meet the needs of the world around us, and to proclaim the good news of the kingdom.”

Microchurch mission

The microchurches comprise believers who “work together in sincere worship and genuine community to accomplish a part of the mission of God”. They engage in an amazing variety of missional projects, including:

• Honour One – God’s heart for Asian people
• Mama Africaner – mentors to black schoolgirls
• Kindred – open home, hospitality
• Timothy Initiative – a community for men in recovery from addiction
• Beer and Bible – a Bible discussion in a bar (a safe place not in a home or church)
• The Well – serving the poor via food, drop-in centre, a place to be heard and a bike shop
• Created – ministry to the sexually exploited, including prostitutes
• Grounded – support for foster carers
• Help for those involved in the adult entertainment industry
• The Just Initiative – help for the homeless
• Impact Global International – community recycling in Haiti, turning waste into energy
• Justice Restoration Centre and Advocates Against Human trafficking – serving victims and survivors of human trafficking
• other groups support women, the black community, school kids and university students, single mothers, women harmed by sexual abuse
• still other groups do arts projects

The Hub

The Hub is the central headquarters of the Underground. The building includes meeting rooms, a clinic and common space for meals and fellowship. Staff provide mentoring, counselling, media, coaching and training.

There is a Sunday meeting, more or less what most of us would recognise as a “church service”, but it is considered a support for the microchurches rather than the core of the Underground. Less than half those in microchurches attend and some attend other churches.

Structure

While it may look spontaneous and uncontrolled, the Underground seems to be organised amazingly well, with so much established in just a dozen years. They have elders and a Board of Directors. They have developed a Manifesto that spells out 18 core values (some of them: Jesus, the poor, simplicity, prayer and dependence). They have prepared resources, and have expert staff to assist, guide and mentor the microchurches in Tampa, and anyone else who wants to join the network.

Perhaps most amazingly of all, they seem to have remained both humble and focused on the mission of the microchurches rather than a senior leader’s empire.

Focus

The Underground is more or less conservative evangelical in its theology but apparently flexible in how it is applied, community-minded and mission-focused – which means evangelism, community welfare and social justice.

The Manifesto

The Underground doesn’t have a doctrinal statement as such, for they think that beliefs are nothing without actions. So the Underground Manifesto is about values and intentions. This has the advantage of avoiding disagreements about non-core christian beliefs, but it would still be impossible to sign the manifesto if one wasn’t a committed follower of Jesus.

The Manifesto starts with Jesus, defines his status as the image of the invisible God, and states: “All of our values flow from what we understand about his character, concerns and the practices of his ministry”.

And so other values are built around Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God – values of caring for the poor, simplicity, sharing and giving, Kingdom mission and Biblical justice.

There is a statement about the Bible, and while their views would be more or less conventional evangelicalism, they are expressed much more in action terms of how they will use the Bible. Another statement is about the importance of prayer and dependence on God.

Finally, there are personal values such as humility, zeal and contemplation and caring for each other. All in all, it is a most interesting and compelling statement.

What is a disciple?

The Underground has a well-rounded view of discipleship as they found it in the New Testament. A disciple is one who shares the gospel, seeks justice, repents of both personal and societal sin, hates the evils of racism, sexism and consumerism, loves the poor, lives simply and seeks reconciliation in relationships.

Different to other churches

There are many ways it is apparent that the Underground differs from most Protestant churches, in the western world at any rate.

Most churches focus on the health and development of attendees, and thus are built around activities that go on in the church building. This tends to mean that perhaps 20% of attendees at other churches are actively involved in mission and rest are little more than passive consumers. But in the Underground, everyone is a missionary, and the mission goes on primarily in the microchurches. The central Sunday service is secondary.

This requires a very different approach to leadership. Instead of “rock star leaders”, only servants are allowed to lead. There is no empire-building, but rather serving the community via the microchurches.

Another interesting side benefit is that most churches are competing for market share in the same market – those who want to attend conventional christian worship service. This tends to be a zero sum game – one church’s gains come from another church’s losses. But the Underground is continually developing new areas of mission, as new microchurch leaders begin ministering to a sub group they have been led by God to serve.

Innovation vs uniformity

Every microchurch is different, ministering to different communities in their city, using appropriate, and generally different, methods. Prospective microchurch leaders are encouraged to innovate, and while there is plenty of support from the central staff, there is very little control.

This entrepreneurial attitude means that new microchurches are starting all the time. Some of them fail and the leaders almost invariably go on to try a new idea. The result is about 30% growth in microchurch numbers each year, but about a 10% attrition rate, meaning they end up with 20% growth in microchurches each year. They regard the number of microchurches as a more significant statistic than the number of people attending, especially the number of people at their Sunday gathering.

They have an interesting attitude to critical people. Most churches find critical people difficult because they rock the boat and contest the pastors “vision”. But the Underground encourages critical people to try something different from what they criticise. if it works, then a new ministry is established; if it doesn’t work, then everyone has learned something. They are able to take this approach because their ministry is so diversified, unlike conventional churches where the focus is on the Sunday service and so there is little scope for other ideas and approaches.

Why not?

I’m left wondering why more churches don’t adopt this model, for it engages christians in mission, uses their gifts, reaches out to the wider community and changes peoples lives. I can only think that most ministers are too insecure to try this. Their salary is on the line, they can’t afford to rock the boat and disturb the consumers in the pews who pay the bills. They also probably were never trained for real world ministry, but only for within-church ministry via preaching, administration and pastoral care.

For these reasons, Brian Sanders counsels visionary christians not to try to change the church, but rather get on with being the church. We can do this while remaining members of the conventional churches we are currently part of, but probably in the end those who follow his lead will end up outside the conventional church structure.

With churches losing numbers, especially among youth and young adults, the Underground’s approach could provide the inspiration that idealistic younger christians need to keep going, and avoid sinking into passivity.

The challenge

Underground’s former Executive Director Brian Sanders:

“…. become the church. And that means starting with mission. We still think that we plant churches by starting worship services, by inviting people to a worship service, but this is not fundamentally what the church is. A worship service is a good thing, a beautiful thing, an important thing, it can be something that’s full of life and vitality and the delivery of the word of God, the voice of God to a community, but only if they are vibrant with mission first.”

“But what I’d say is, if you want to change the church, want to be part of engineering some kind of change in the church, extract youself from it, from its politics and expectations, find a place where non-believers are, where needy people are, where those who are hungry for the kingdom but don’t know it are, get a team of people, root yourself there and see the kingdom come.”

“If you do that and people come to Jesus, you’re going to have to baptise them, disciple them, you’re going to have to meet real serious needs, and you will become …. an alternative to the earthly church.”

“Win them by doing the things we believe in.”

Learn more

The Underground website
Underground people video

Photo Credit: Photomatt28 Flickr via Compfight cc