The Thingy 2.0 – What We’ve Done Right

If you missed the back story of the Thingy that I wrote two days ago you can read it here.  If you missed my discussion of what has frustrated me you can read that here.

Here is a quick summary before I jump into the meat of this post: Three years ago Wendy and I joined a small team of people whose goal was rethinking what it means to be the church in Baltimore.  That team calls itself “the Thingy.”  We quickly discovered that the most important part of being a church was sharing the common mission of imitating Jesus in our various communities and circles (our tribes).  We started meeting weekly to pursue the development of this goal.  Our gatherings have taken a lot of different forms, but nothing has ever clicked.  Now we are moving into a strategy that I find exciting and terrifying.   But before I talk about who we are becoming, let me first explain what has gone right.   (As it was yesterday, I don’t speak for the group.  This is what I think went well.  Other group members probably have other things they loved.)

Here are four things I think we got right over the last three years…

1) The sharing of Jesus’ love through imitation as the reason for the church.

In other churches I’ve been a part of the church itself was the end goal.  Why did we have Sunday School and Worship services?  Why did we make the change for Sunday School to Small groups?  Why did we learn evangelism tricks and go to great lengths to talk about Jesus?  To grow the church.  Why did we work to let our friends know how excited we were about everything happening on the church calendar?  Why did we find creative reasons to invite them to attend (pancake breakfasts, special speakers, musicals, concerts, etc…)?  To grow the church.  Why did we do after school programs, and put on basketball leagues, and throw block parties?  To grow the church.  Everything we did had the end goal of growing the organization we called the church.

One of the things we did right with the Thingy was to change the definition of success.  I knew the Thingy was having a successful week when people shared stories about how they had lived as demonstrations of Jesus’ love in their communities.  It didn’t matter if there were three of us there or if the whole team was present.  In fact often group members (myself included) would miss gatherings because they were hanging out with people from their tribes – and we considered that a win.

In the Thingy I’ve found a church that exists to be on mission with God.  For us growing a gathering of believers has never been the point.  The point has been (and will continue to be) living on mission with God, sharing His love in the world.

2) The death of ambition and growth of surrender.

Part of changing the score card for me has been the death of ambition.  I’m speaking of both personal and organizational ambition.  When we were only a few months into the Thingy a church planting guru took several of us out to eat.  He asked us what our vision was for the group.  Like a good ambitious church planter, I reveled in the dreams of multiplication and unprecedented movement like growth. On the surface this was ambition for my organization (which is a form of ambition contemporary church culture considers acceptable).  Under the surface though lurked personal ambition to be known as the leader of such a movement.

As the Thingy went along and I battled fiercely with personal and organizational ambition.  Nothing ever happened on my timeline.  Strategies I thought would be the magic bullet that would solve all the problems of Baltimore and make a great name for me amounted to nothing.  Finally it all died in me.  Through the death I learned that (for me anyway) organizational ambition always leads to personal ambition.  There is great freedom living in the freedom of, “How ever you want to use us Lord, we are available.”

3) Discussing the Bible for life change.

This was something that flowed from the group.  Read a passage and then ask, “How should our lives change because of this?”  Fantastic discussion came from that simple question.

4) Every member has a tribe.

When we began we were faced with a choice: imitate Jesus together as a group, or individually in our own worlds.  We weren’t involved in the same circles, so to pull off the “do it together” approach we would have needed to leave areas of life and start new stuff together.  Instead (slightly inspired by Seth Godin) we decided that each member should develop his/her own mission field.  This move helped with so many other aspects of our team culture.  We never needed money for events.  There wasn’t a need for centralized leadership and vision to organize stuff.  People were free to explore their giftings and interests, not needing to serve the greater good in an area they wouldn’t otherwise care about.   We called the groups of people we sought to imitate Jesus among “Tribes.”

5) Membership defined through lifestyle not through programs.

In theory joining the Thingy meant adopting a lifestyle of imitating Jesus in a tribe.  I don’t know that we have accomplished this yet.     As I wrote before, attendance at the weekly meeting has always competed with this thinking; but I believe making this understanding a reality is the key to redefining what it means to live as the church in the future.  My next post will contain more on this - I will write about what the Thingy is now and the changes we have made.