N ew doesn’t have to mean more, or even totally different. Perhaps “new” can mean a reclaiming of what originally was. I’m thinking particularly about how the church looks in this modern age—an age of dwindling churches, deconstruction, technology, and a loneliness epidemic. For example, to be God’s church, we don’t actually need all of our buildings, meetings, staff, and curriculum. Though those elements will probably always play into the current practice of the Western church tradition, the broader church is changing; it has changed in the past, and it will continue to change. Being the church isn’t always about conforming to the current culture or popular practice; rather, the message of Jesus was one of transformation, of invitation, of opening up the kingdom for more than our minds—and our ancestors—could ever imagine.
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Here’s my story of planting a “new” expression of church.
I didn’t know that I would be a church planter. I was in seminary, continuing my education after my undergrad. I had started seminary because I didn’t quite know what I was called into, and more education didn’t hurt. Little did I expect to find a calling, let alone a passion about how I felt I was supposed to interact and impact the church. And little did I expect my calling to be a mission rather than participating in an already formed church.
Upon moving to a new city, away from the communities that had a big impact on where I felt known and seen, I started to ask a question: “Why can’t the church be both what we grew up knowing, in part, and also a communal living home?” I had known that community—and communal gatherings—were essential to not only my own wellness but the church’s as well. And I wanted them to merge more seamlessly than what we had come to expect and act, at least in the Western church traditions.
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A church on mission through everyday actions
I planted Oikos, which means “family” in Greek, one year after expressing my heart of merging our lived-in community and the church. I lovingly called Oikos “the church of the mundane,” meaning that it was through our everyday actions that we were being the church—our intentionality in connecting with our neighbors, our willingness to open our homes, to know our local schools, to notice when someone has moved, and for the corner stop employees to know our names. Oikos existed as action rather than place, in the community, loving our neighbors, telling and acting on the good news of Jesus. It didn’t mimic my experience in the Sunday-gathered churches; instead, it embodied communities that had a great impact on my spiritual, mental, and whole being.
We started by having a monthly meal. People would bring what they could, we would pray for the meal, and then we would simply talk and tell others about our month. There was no orchestrated plan or order of worship; it was simply fellowship with our neighbors. We then started wondering about what our neighbors needed and began a monthly outreach focus: Easter feedings in the park, free garage sales, childcare, trash pick up, and planting local gardens. We were trying to show up in the ways that our neighbors needed, and they started responding and helping us in return: filling our love pantry, letting us borrow tables, giving us a ride, connecting us to local resources.
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Our most extreme way of outreach involved how—and when—we opened our home. When neighbors were evicted, they stayed a night with us. When children didn’t have a safe, supervised place when a crisis arose, we sheltered, fed, and cared for them. Oikos was trying to be simple in our approach of living out our identity. We were belonging to our neighbors and our neighbors to us, we were persistent in our invitations to our everyday activities, and we expected the Holy Spirit to join us at our meals where we regularly broke bread with any who would come.
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This idea of church was hard to explain, harder still for others to accept as a church, but my continued push back of “are not God’s people on mission the church?” kept the focus in the forefront of not only our hearts, but our supporters’ understanding of who and how the church really is—and can be.
We have since moved homes since the beginning of Oikos’ origin home, but that doesn’t mean that Oikos, or our call to be the church of the mundane, of being people on mission, ends. Oikos was never a place; it was a call to action and an identity for us to love our God and our neighbors well. It was us faithfully living into the church identity of today while practicing the methods of the first churches. Oikos, family, is who we are. It is who we are always called to be and create, no matter if we live in a city, the country, an English-speaking country, or not. This is the Church: being on mission to love God and our neighbors together.
Rev. Savannah Willesden
Rev. Savannah Willesden is an ordained church planter in the Reformed Church in America. She most recently planted a fresh expressions church in Lincoln, Nebraska.
