No More Church On Sundays

In the church planting world I stepped into about 3 years ago, I, like many others, was determined to "change the way people think about church." Unfortunately though, in my initial efforts, I did like many others and only modified the worship service and atmosphere on Sunday mornings. I was honestly doing very little to help people experience an authentic, biblical church community. The shift for me was to finally realize that people must experience church beyond Sunday.

As Overflow Collective, we're defining AND practicing church through a biblical understanding that church is: Followers of Jesuswho experience authentic, transforming community in rhythm with each other as they're pursuing the mission of Jesus. Because of this, God has led us to form multiple churches who then simply view the Sunday gathering just as that... a gathering of the churches.

(If you want to read more about how we're doing all of this, feel free to follow this link and click on "churches" and "gatherings"... http://overflowcollective.org)

By the way, why does our American church culture exist with the idea that "church" happens on Sunday? This idea of church on Sundays via programs and services has become a cultural norm. As a result, we've actually restricted people from experiencing authentic, BIBLICAL church community and possibly even distorted what it means to truly follow Jesus. Take a look at Acts 2:46-47...

⁴⁶ Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple complex, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with a joyful and humble attitude, ⁴⁷ praising God and having favor with all the people. And every day the Lord added to them those who were being saved.

At the same time, we can't ignore all the one anothers mentioned in Scripture. How many American-Christians are regularly experiencing these? Consider what David Platt says in his newest book "Follow Me"...

The Bible portrays the church as a community of Christians who care, love, host, receive, honor, serve, instruct, forgive, motivate, build up, encourage, comfort, pray for, confess sin to, esteem, edify, teach, show kindness to, give to, rejoice with, weep with, hurt with, and restore one another. All of these "one anothers" combined together paint a picture not of people who come to a building filled with customized programs but of people who have decided to lay down their lives to love one another.

If we've communicated church as primarily the service(s) and programs on Sunday (maybe Wednesday too), are we experiencing and practicing all of these on a regular basis? One more quote from the book "Follow Me"...

The New Testament envisions followers of Jesus living alongside one another for the sake of one another. Biblically, a church does not consist of people who simply park in the same parking lot and participate in services and programs alongside one another. Instead, the church is comprised of people who share the life of Christ with each other on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis.

Every follower of Jesus should be living in authentic, accountable, biblical church community. I don't think God excuses the fact that we've taken this clear call to community, which literally bleeds all throughout the New Testament, and turned it into an institutional model where "church" is merely a service or program that's primarily focused around someone's preaching, musical performances, and pre-packaged structure. Much of what we call "church" only fuels our culture of consumerism and is nothing more than our attempt to form a type of Christianity that fits our American preferences. 

As Overflow Collective, we'd love to help you experience a relationship with Jesus in the context of authentic, biblical church community. We're sold out to doing all we can to redefine how people view and experience church. We still have much to learn, but we won't stop learning and adjusting until Jesus takes His church to finally be with Him!