Doing Church Differently

In a few short weeks, Orange Grove Baptist Church will do something quite radical.  Partly to help revitalize its own congregation....and partly to help a sister church that is multiplying rapidly, Orange Grove will turn over the ownership and responsibility (a deed transfer is being prepared as we speak) of its facilities to Iglesia Bautista Fuente De Vida - a new Hispanic congregation of the Southern Baptist Convention.  Here's the twist....Orange Grove Baptist Church isn't going away.  Far from it.  The idea is to leverage the physical resources that God has blessed us with so that two congregations can further His mission on Earth.  Iglesia Bautista De Vida has nearly 100 members but no place to call home.  Orange Grove has a home but lacks the people that bring so much life and energy to a church.  The two congregations have found a way to share a common physical plant...putting both congregations in a better position for success.  And by "success"....I mean impacting the world and changing lives....inside and outside the church building...in an authentic, God-lead way.  Perhaps our efforts will inspire others to look for other creative ways of "doing church".

While ours might be a creative approach, what these two congregations are doing is actually nothing new.  The Winter 2013 issue of ONMISSION highlight a number of church revitalization efforts and many of those projects involved congregations sharing physical resources.  There's a link to that ONMISSION issue on the main page of this blog. 

A couple of weeks ago, there was an article on al.com about two Mobile, Alabama congregations - one Methodist and the other Presbyterian - that have decided to share a building.  Here's the link to that article:

Two Churches, One Building

I'm reminded of a passage I read in David Platt's Radical on the topic of church assets.  On page 118 he wrote:

In that moment I realized the extent to which we, as churches and Christians across America, are in some cases explicitly and in other cases implicitly exporting a theology that equates faith in Christ with prosperity in this world.  This is fundamentally not the radical picture of Christianity we see in the New Testament.  Further when we pool our resources in our churches, what are our priorities?  Every year in the United States, we spend more than $10 billion on church buildings.  In America alone, the amount of real estate owned by institutional churches is worth over $230 billion.  We have money and possessions, and we are building temples everywhere.  Empires, really.  Kingdoms.  We call them houses of worship.  But at the core, aren't they too often outdated models of religion that wrongfully define worship according to a place and wastefully consume our time and money when God has called us to be a people who spend our lives for the sake of his glory among the needy outside our gates?  [Italics are my emphasis] 

Through this blog, I'll provide regular updates on this new journey our two congregations are about to undertake.  Stay tuned!  And since this is a new journey....."Godspeed" to both our congregations!