The Distillery Church

Small Participatory Gatherings

It is our understanding that one of the fundamental problems of the modern church is its ability to attract and encourage mostly passive participation to their Sunday gatherings. Everything in the service seems to guarantee this type of un-involvement. The seating, the preaching, the worship, and the dismissal of the inactive participants ensure that the same crowd will return week after week.

 The seats are all facing forward towards the platform or pulpit. The view from down there is usually of the back of the person’s head in front of you. This keeps people from feeling free to talk and commune with one another.

 Typically one person will get up front and talk for 30 to 45 minutes about a topic or subject of interest (preaching). This oratory style is known by professional communicators to be one of the most ineffective ways to communicate to a large group of people. Yet, preachers at churches all over this country do it every Sunday morning. Again, when the preacher speaks, everyone must be quiet and focus solely on him. Talking is discouraged.

 Worship involves for the most part, a very energetic, practiced and professional worship band that plays up front. Many times there will be solos and instrumentals that draw the crowd in during worship. Singing is done by the audience to God.

After all is said and done from up front, the audience is dismissed to go home. Week after week it is the same routine, and people who go to churches like this become passive members if they stay. Sure there are the few that feel a special calling to do something more, but it is usually just a few.

We believe that this pattern only serves to reinforce the crisis of “Beliefism” in followers of Jesus everywhere. Beliefism in regards to Christianity is the assumption that all we have to do in order to be right with God is believe in Jesus, and say a few words in a prayer and that’s it. Everything else is optional. Our goal as a community is to heed the words of Christ and produce real disciples of Jesus that are active in every way, and we believe that this begins with our weekly gathering.

How does this look?

The success factor of our gathering is in how small we can keep it. We will encourage groups of 30 adults or more to multiply into two different gatherings. Our hope is to eventually have multiple gatherings that occur all throughout the week in homes, public places and in our facility according to the preference of our leaders and participants.

We do not “preach” in our gatherings. We discuss the scriptures together seated in a circle or semi-circle facing each other. Likewise our musical worship is done in the group and with the group.

People are encouraged to speak out words of encouragement as God leads them to.

The worship band does a quick run-through of the music prior to leading in the gathering, but they are raw, rough around the edges, low key and human.

We take communion each week together as a ceremony designed to align our hearts and minds as we focus on the words and actions of Christ.

After the discussion time, the last thing we do is pray for each other’s individual requests that are spoken to the group beforehand. Afterwards the group is dismissed from the meeting room and allowed to “hang out” as an extended part of our gathering.