[» a culture of:encouragement, fun, trust, risk]
Reproducing is at the very core of the culture of Community Christian Church. On every single level there is the desire to reproduce oneself. The very first all-staff meeting that I sat in on this question was posed to the staff: “If this building were to blow up right now (morbid I know) who would replace you? One caveat, they can’t be in this room right now (basically, they can’t be staff.)” This question was asked of everyone including Dave (the lead pastor)… no one was beyond reach of this question. This is how deeply it is ingrained in the culture.
Just because it’s ingrained into the culture, however, doesn’t mean that they are by any means “experts” in the field of reproducing themselves—in fact, I’m not sure anyone can really be an expert in reproduction. Why? Because it’s such a messy process. There is no clear-cut process because each and every time it’s different. That’s what you get when you work with all sorts of different people… a messy process. But it does work, it just takes work to make it happen, and although Community is not an expert in the field, they certainly do it better than any other church I’ve ever seen (does that make them the expert?).
This culture of reproduction is broken down into a few different levels: artists, leaders, coaches, staff, campuses, churches, movements. It all starts with reproduction at the smallest level. Much like there is macro-risk (risk on a big scale) and micro-risk (risk on a small-scale) there is also macro-reproduction and micro-reproduction and it takes a lot of micro-reproductions to reproduce campuses, churches and ultimately a movement. Community is very intentional in their reproduction, it’s not a haphazard sort of process, however at the same time it just seems to happen. Everywhere you look there’s an apprentice leader for this or an apprentice coach for that… everyone learning, stretching, growing and reproducing. It’s really rather amazing.
Our dream for San Francisco is to reproduce on a couple of different macro-levels, but none of that will be possible unless we’re really good at the day-to-day reproduction on a micro-level and in the process reproduce disciples who are fully devoted to and completely in love with Jesus. This is part of our dream, and Community (not to mention the NewThing Network) will certainly have played a major role in the process… and the future.
Related posts:
- a culture of encouragement
- a culture of risk
- a culture of trust
- the power of the apprentice
- a culture of fun
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