I had to unlearn everything I knew about church

I mean, I knew that church planting was in my future, I just had no idea it would look like this.

I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising, though. When I was young, I didn’t have much of a “traditional” church experience. My parents lived out a life of constant ministry and exposed me to a wide variety of church expressions.

Specifically, they shared in what I would call a ministry of parenthood. They led some Bible studies at Paradise Valley Community College at the time, and we always had college kids at our house. (Looking back now, I realize that my parents weren’t much older than those college kids, and it gives me some new perspective—but I digress.)

In fact, we even had many of those college kids live in our home. It was a place of refuge for many. And while I can’t remember all the details, I do know that churches, Bible studies, small groups, and other Christian events were commonplace in our home.

Still, I wouldn’t have expected or known at the time what our church experience would look like. From my teenage years on, my family and I did attend and participate in a number of fairly mainstream non-denominational churches.

When Nicole and I married, she already knew that I felt called to planting churches in my future. As we considered what that meant, we thought it would look like most American church plants out there. It probably would have been trendy and everything, were we the ones behind it.

But Jesus had something very different in mind.

Though the whole story is too long to tell here, I’ll give the short version. Once Nicole and I finally prayed about when and where to plant this church, we both sensed it should start in Phoenix (even though we were hoping it would be elsewhere) in January of 2010.

And man, after about 4 months of effort and real striving, it flopped. Badly. As much as I thought we knew about ministry, we were quickly awakened to how difficult it is. We even stopped meeting for about half a year, doing nothing else during that time.

But, in the summer of that year, one of the people who was meeting with us gave me a book, Finding Organic Church, by Frank Viola. As soon as I read it, I knew in my spirit that this was what the Lord intended for us. This is what church was supposed to function like.

I emailed Frank after reading the book and, much to my surprise (then), he responded. He graciously invited Nicole and me to a conference in Orlando where other believers gathered in their shared pursuit of such Christian community. We left invigorated and with a fresh vision for what God intends for His people.

After over a decade of meeting in the way that 1 Corinthians 14:26 describes, gathered under the functioning Headship of Jesus, building one another up, and growing together as family, I can honestly say this:

It is the most glorious and difficult adventure I have ever been on.

Jesus has radically changed my beliefs regarding what it means to be the church and I can never go back to church “as usual.” I am inexpressibly grateful for what God has done in this community’s midst (and in me, as a result), and I’m committed to communicating what this shared, contrarian Christian living can be like to all who will listen. In the end, what could be more valuable than Christ Himself? Nothing.