Organic Community

It has been a long time since I last posted...my apologies.

This week we will be studying the concept of an "Organic Community" at Terra Nova. This term means a lot of things to a lot of people. I want to set out here my working definition of this term and get some feed back before Sunday.

An organic community fosters naturally occurring relationships and creates spaces for them to grow and flourish. An OC is focused on people as opposed to programs.

Some further explanation...

Naturally occurring relationships are those relationships that grow out of commonality (i.e. proximity, common interests, mutual friends, etc). In other words, an OC strives to create space for these relationships to be established and then grow rather than focusing on creating a program that forces people into relationships. An OC leverages what naturally happens and waters and feeds those relationships so that they can grow into healthy, thriving communities.

An OC might have programs (probably will!), but the focus is always on the people. The programs are only thereto help people grow in relationships. As soon as a program becomes more important than the people who run or for whom it was developed, it is scrapped.

Personally, I think the majority of churches in America today are far more programmatic than they are organic. That is pure opinion and I admit that. I hope Terra Nova can break that model and be a truly organic, connected community.

I guess time will tell.

Any feedback?

Under the Mercy,

Jason