Recent years have witnessed a buzz around place-based community and the various models for expressing it—house groups, geographically organized small groups, missional communities, serving teams, and so on. Missional communities seem to be cracking the code and expressing this most biblically and realistically. Combining intentional spiritual formation, relationship-building and a geographic strategy, missional communities are flexible enough to engage the culture without being stuck in a rigid model.

Neighborhood models are another attempt though they are heavily dependent on a highly formalized structure. The values and awareness of being with and serving neighbors is the real win. Building relationships, initiating spiritual conversations and meeting needs is the big win – but intentional formation is not as strong without a variety of specific group-based gatherings within the geographic area. What we discovered is that 1 of 2 things (or both) must be present to make this model work.

Either you must have weekly on-campus mid-sized classes akin to Sunday Schools (organized geographically), or you must have a strongly integrated network of small groups to bring depth to the loosely affiliated neighborhood relationships and activities. A neighborhood-focused model also seems to work better with certain neighborhoods and not with others. It is not transferable church-wide unless the entire church demographic is already clustered into self-identifying neighborhoods.  Start-ups churches using the model rely on intentional small groups to provide depth, and traditional churches often have classes for adults. Either one of these must be present to bring strength to the model.

Let’s look closely at what makes this model work or flounder, based on feedback from churches who are trying it, and the recent experience of Willow Creek.

To be continued...