More information about the Northgate Mall Thursday group

[Steve]

Hi there everyone! It was great to meet and talk on Sunday and hear from people what's going on in their simple church adventures.

I was able to talk in-depth with only a few of you there at the gathering, so as I am posting the time and place that we meet, I also wanted to share my general story for those who didn't hear.

Basically, I had never heard of simple church before a few weeks ago when I stumbled across this bulletin board. (I think it was from a google search from a book I was trying to remember the title of, something random.) What we do in our group may or may not be "simple church" because I don't know the fullness of the term, but it seemed close enough that I was curious to learn more.

My main passion is pursuing and taking on the character of Christ. In my Christian journey, growing up in the traditional church, I knew a lot about what God wanted me to think and how he wanted me to act — in love, in selflessness, in compassion. But I didn't know how to develop those traits. Sermons would end with the question: "Now, how are you going to live differently as the result of God's word?" or Bible studies would say: "Come up with a practical way of integrating God's convictions into your life," but the answer was always expected to be privately considered, privately followed up on, and privately experienced. No one ever asked me what I was actively working on to integrate my faith and beliefs and love of God into tangible and concrete actions of love. No one held me accountable, no one brainstormed with me, no one gave me encouragement when I fell back and no one celebrated with me when I felt God's presence work through me to express his love in the world.

The moment I started to feel this desire to shine a light on my darknesses and see where in my life I was still hiding from fully embracing the spirit of Christ — and to travel alongside others who were wrestling with the same — that was when traditional church began to feel hollow. A sermon-centered church service that was about as interactive as watching a performance on television didn't cut it for me. I wanted to respond, to interact, to wrestle and question and have people know my story and my heart for God, and to know others' in return. I felt convicted that the Christian life was not meant to be lived privately, but openly, each of us depending on one another to grow and change in the likeness of Christ. I felt assured of the priesthood of all believers, that we are meant to be ministering to one another and allowing ourselves to be ministered to, in mutual subservience.

The small-group arena is where I felt like real church was taking place, in that it was participatory and community-building. But most of the small groups I had been in, and those that I had led, tried in some ways to mimic the larger church service. Very often we would use a book or a printed Bible study, by which a particular author would become our the group leader, the one who drove the discussion. It was rarely our lives, the work that God was doing in us, God's presence among us, that was central. (I really appreciate what all of you said on Sunday about church leadership, which often leads to a tiered value of each person within the larger body, and that you shy away from having one person be the hub or locus of the group.) The groups were also rather knowledge-based – not that knowledge isn't a component or element of our journey — but the end goal was often having people acquiesce to a list of ideals or rules or principles _about_ the Christian faith whether or not they were lived out.

Four years ago, I changed the format of my small-group leading to set aside the focus on what people understood about the Scripture at hand and what they thought about the Scripture at hand, and gave the whole meeting over to how people were tangibly _responding_ to God's speaking into their lives. Not everyone was wild about the idea, because this was "supposed" to be a Bible study, and we weren't even studying the Bible at the meetings. (I had opened the parameters to whatever God was speaking to people through, whether that be a sermon, a song, the Bible, through prayer, a conversation, a book, through art, etc.) But a good number of other people saw that this was something they'd never experienced before: a chance to turn all those fleeting thoughts of "I really should forgive this person" or "I really mean to have this conversation with my parents" or "I really need to open my home," and to dwell on them for long enough to let the conviction take hold, and to joyfully complete such acts of love. The journeys of each person were bumpy, with ups and downs with results not always what they expected, but our main goal was never to check off a box so that we could say "good job," but to be with one another in the process, to extend grace and patience and care alongside an encouragement toward strength. One of the women in our group wrote: "The dynamic of this group has demonstrated grace to me in tangible terms—I am accepted and loved just as I am but I am given the strength to become more than I am, more than I have ever been, more than I ever believed I could be."

I had thought that this new small-group format I was using would become all the rage at my traditional church, and that the more I talked about it and the more people's lives saw transformation, the more people would want to join and even lead similar groups. But it has been a struggle to get people to travel this road with me within the traditional church. I think it's something akin to baking bread from scratch versus buying a loaf: from scratch is much more fun, more earthy, more communal, more natural, and more tasty, but it's also more time-consuming, more expensive, more wearying. Baking from scratch is something that I like to do but maybe I'm not going to bake every loaf I eat. The traditional church seems to offer the sliced bread, and people are going to fill up on that most of the time, given the choice. (It's a working theory, at least.)

So 18 months ago, my wife and I, along with two women who'd been in our traditional-church small group, felt called to meet on our own, outside of the church auspices, as a Christlikeness-centered support group of sorts. We just call it a Christlikeness group for brevity's sake. Our hope was that we might be able to find other people who loved Jesus but didn't feel comfortable within an institutional church, or who went to a traditional church that didn't have small-group community gatherings, that would want to join us in a very basic approach to being the church, to be there for one another as Christians. We want people to feel vital in their connection to God, whatever their other forms of worship and community are. Our vision would not to be grow big per se in a centralized way, but to form a loosely connected network of groups around the city, if it indeed grew much at all. I was really excited to hear on Sunday about the Simple Church group that has a variety of types of meetings on different days in different locations in the city just to foster connections and life together.

Two other random things I thought I'd mention: First, we are meeting at the food court in Northgate Mall at the moment, largely because it seemed to me that people might be more willing to stop by and check us out if we were in a public place. (I know I felt more comfortable meeting in Third Place Books this week than if it had been in someone's house.) But the intimacy and relative quite of someone's home definitely has its advantages, especially in terms of intimacy and attempting to do worship, so I'm not entirely sure what our long-term meeting place will be.

Second, we bring our 2 1/2-year-old son with us to the group because we want him to grow up being comfortable as part of the group, hoping that over time he will participate with us, that he will see us being vulnerable, that he will see how central a relationship with Jesus is to us, that he will be cared for and known by other mentors and ministers in his life than just his parents. I was really encouraged to hear from you all about the group of teenagers who had recently shared openly before their peers and their parents about what was going on with their spiritual lives. We would definitely be looking forward to that day. We also realize that we are very blessed to both work from home, and can set our son's schedule according to making it out to the Thursday group — he usually sleeps from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m. We are realizing, though, that such a schedule only happens to work for our son, and wouldn't work for most children, to over the long run we might need to change our meeting time or add additional groups to accommodate people will different schedules. I'd be curious to know how other groups ended up choosing their meeting times and dates over time.

So, with that story told and all the caveats made, here's the nitty-gritty info:

Place: Northgate Mall food court, near Starbucks
Time: most Thursdays, 7:15 p.m.-9 p.m.
(We won't be meeting on Thanksgiving, for instance, but we'll meet on the 12th, 19th, and December 3. You can email me after that to make sure which dates in December we'll meet.)
Contact: mail AT stevelansingh DOT com

I'd love to see any or all of you at one of our meetings, or just to talk sometime over coffee. Thank you for being such a warm and inviting group of people and for the encouragement of knowing others are out there trying to be authentic and intentional in approaching God face-to-face rather than through ritual. God bless each of you!

--Steve Lansingh
(facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/stevelansingh )

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Hi Steve,
Great reading your post, and I can sure identify with a lot of the various experiences and thought processes. I enjoy many points you make, and feel like I could write volumes in a resonating response, but perhaps better to save that for face to face time! I look forward to joining your Thursday night gang at Northgate Mall sometime, will connect with you before coming to be sure of your meeting.

Thought I'd comment on, "I'd be curious to know how other groups ended up choosing their meeting times and dates over time." -- Our group was getting started when we were pregnant with our first daughter, who will be 8 next month. The other families either had no kids or they were older. Thus, it simply worked really nicely to have folks come over to our house so we could manage babies, and we loved hosting - a good fit. (By the way, some of our group had spent about a year meeting in a public place - Crossroads Mall - but we too missed the intimacy of the home for talk, prayer, worship. Seems like both have their place, eh?) We developed the pattern of putting our girls (the second will be 6 next month) to bed at 7pm, and they are up around 7am - similar to yours, only 3 hours earlier! So we host the Saturday night gatherings, our girls enjoy the time with everyone, then we put them to bed, and go back to the gathering that's right there at our house. We start at 5pm with potluck, and end up putting our girls down around 8pm on "group night". There's another family that has now been coming for a couple years that also has young children, and they often leave earlier than others to get their kids home to bed. We picked Saturday night because people in our group were scattered all over - north seattle, west seattle, eastside - and traffic would be light on Sat eve, and we wouldn't be so worried how late we went that night. Just works logistically. But we also do a "guys night" on Wed - was going before our Sat night gang, so had a precedence already then - and recently started a Tues night bible study at 7pm for snack/coffee and study - this is what works logistically for those hosting (not us). For the Saturday night time, we started out doing it once, then did it again, then went to once a month, then twice monthly, 1st and 3rd Sat nights. I say a little more about this over at simple starts. Your story and ours makes me think that it's whatever works with the people involved.

hope to see you again soon,