Some thoughts on what's going on here

So I wrote a friend an email and this is what I told her about Clay People, I thought you might be interested.

Now time for probably my biggest project in recent months. Over the summer I went to National Youth Gathering in San Antonio. Because of my commitments to LYO etc. I was in Texas for just about a month. I roomed with a friend of mine on the board, Tim Snyder. We got to talking and began voicing our own personal frustrations with the Church as a whole. Some questions we asked: Why are there so many people who are just Sunday morning Christians? Why isn't the church better preparing people to commit to the lifestyle of Christianity? Why is worship so restricted to a specific formula? Why does the Church put so much emphasis on numbers? What if the Church looked different? What if the Church got out of it's modern context and moved into a context that is more in tune with the culture today?

This is just a hint of the conversations we had. We talked every night until about 3 in the morning, just picking up the conversation where we left off. Anyways, one night Courtney (you know her, she worked at camp, really great person) joined in the conversation, and soon the three of us were all voicing our displeasures and wonderings about the Church.

Eventually, we started to get tangible about things. We all felt that God was clearly calling us to something. So, through these conversations we formed Clay People Community. It's a group of individuals (currently Tim, Courtney, myself, and another friend Penny) that is committed to being a Christian Community, at the core we are about rethinking the Church.

It's all very exciting, we already have some financial partners that are not only giving us money, but they are also helping us as we discern what God is calling us too. Currently, we are working towards setting up a House Church upon our graduation from college. It would be a place where we would all live together, in intentional, holistic community. Ideal we would all find different jobs in very secular settings and then just live out the Gospel in those contexts, starting conversations and inviting people to join in our community. We're hoping to be holding worship services for all who want to attend, and as well as doing things for the community, whether it be serving at local areas, or just cleaning up here and there, or helping with local church group stuff… whatever, as long as it's ministry.

Since that dream is still two years away we are all doing a lot of exploring and reflection about what a holistic Christian community should look like. We are also exploring different ways to do ministry together as a group from different parts of the country, we call it "trans-local ministry".

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