One Church, Many Congregations - Christianity Today

In late April 2010, more than 50 pastors crowded into a hotel conference room in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The event organizers, a small group of pastors from Chicagoland, were expecting 25 colleagues to turn out for the meeting. But when news got out about their visit, area pastors got excited. Scott Chapman, pastor of a multi-site church called The Chapel in Chicago’s northern suburbs and president of the Christ Together network, shared with the Virginia pastors how Christ Together is helping churches across denominational and ethnic lines unite in service and evangelism to carry the gospel into their neighborhoods. He described a “sustained Christ awakening” that includes churches working together as the One Body of Christ to restore the reputation of Jesus in their area.

After the meeting, Scott Gifford, national director of Christ Together, attended two worship services that convinced him that this vision was taking root in Virginia.

The first was a Saturday night worship event in a predominately African-American Cornerstone Assembly of God in Hampton, Virginia. During the service, Pastor Gerard Duff preached from the Christ Together brochure.

The next morning, at Church of the Ascension in Virginia Beach, Virginia, during Father Jim Park’s homily, the 71-year-old priest pulled out the same brochure and described the movement to his congregation.

“I was stirred by that,” says Gifford. Now these two churches are leading other area churches in an effort to spread the vision for collaborative ministry in their city.

Becoming Christ Together

This activity in Virginia signals the expansion of a network of pastors called Christ Together, which began meeting informally in the Chicago suburbs almost a decade ago. Scott Chapman has been part of this group from the beginning, when he began to feel his church was called to make a greater impact among its neighboring communities.

Around 2002, Chapman explains, “The Chapel began to understand that we were supposed to live like Jesus: to go into our community, feed the hungry, comfort the hurting, and lead the lost back to him. In other words, we were not called to be a church in our community so much as to be a church for our community.” The trouble was, the church quickly became overwhelmed by the need they encountered. With 6,000 people meeting in several locations, The Chapel is a large church with substantial resources. But it wasn’t enough. Chapman soon realized that “no one church, no matter how large and influential, can reach their community alone.” To truly reach the entire city with the Good News, it would take more than one church. It would take the Church.

As Chapman became increasingly aware of The Chapel’s limitations, he began sharing his concerns with other area pastors. To his surprise, he found many of his colleagues were coming to similar conclusions. Together they wondered, What if instead of viewing ourselves as individual churches, we started thinking of ourselves as part of a mosaic that makes up the one Church of Christ in Chicago? To begin answering that question, a group of about a dozen pastors from Lake County, Illinois, began meeting together for prayer in order to seek God’s vision for their area, moving slowly toward collaborative ministry. The network grew organically.

Christ Together pastors partnered with a county school district to rehab an older school building, replacing the roof and floors and installing new plumbing and HVAC systems. Other area pastors began to take note of the synergy some of their colleagues were experiencing. Soon there were nearly 80 local pastors committed to working together. By 2004 the movement had grown too large to be maintained by volunteers and full-time pastors alone.

So the network officially organized in 2005, and the participating pastors chose a full-time regional director, Bill Yaccino, and a couple of part-time support staff to handle administration. They also pledged to support these Christ Together employees with contributions from their own church budgets. This financial support makes it possible for Yaccino to be a “funded ‘freed-up’ city-reaching leader,” whose job is to come alongside churches to help them work together in a way that elevates the name of Jesus Christ in their community.

The benefits of partnership

Christ Together is a “pastor-honoring network.” Rather than operating like a parachurch organization, with its own agenda and direction, Christ Together comes alongside local congregations to catalyze what God is already doing by connecting them to the needs, resources, and relationships already at hand. Mike Woodruff, pastor of Christ Church Lake Forest, says that this is one quality that makes the network so appealing to him.

When Woodruff began as senior pastor, the Christ Church leadership began serious discussions about the church’s vision and mission. After months of prayer and Bible study, they felt called to focus their ministry efforts on the area within 10 miles of the church’s steeple. They would still support global missions, but the church’s new aim was “to proclaim the good news and engage in good works to the glory of God” in their immediate neighborhood. Almost immediately after the leadership came to these conclusions, Woodruff learned about the fledgling Christ Together network. He was skeptical at first. “I agreed that there are reasons for ministerial collaboration,” says Woodruff, “but they take a lot of time, and it’s easier to just do things on your own. That’s a little cynical,” he admits, “but is born out of experience of a lot of meetings.”

Nevertheless, Woodruff was pleasantly surprised. It became clear to him that the Christ Together vision dovetailed nicely with his church’s own newfound direction. Woodruff was aware that Christ Church would not be able to fulfill this vision on their own. Christ Together presented an opportunity to extend the church’s mission without having energy and resources leeched by an outside organization.

Christ Together is structured so that “it really supports the churches rather than being an umbrella over them,” says Woodruff. The network isn’t led by a high-profile leader or promoted through the media. Instead, activities are organized at the local church level, such as hosting ALPHA training for other local churches or holding county-wide prayer meetings. In other words, the ministry is “done through the church leadership instead of around it.”

“Part of the genius of Christ Together,” Woodruff continues, “is that participating churches can opt in or opt out of a handful of events designed to help churches work together.” That means that individual churches don’t sacrifice their autonomy for greater collaboration.

While the service aspect of Christ Together garners the most attention, it is not the aspect that truly animates the movement. Dan Weyerhaeuser, pastor of Lakeland Evangelical Free Church in Gurnee, Illinois, claims that the “relationships of trust” that pastors develop with one another “is what makes Christ Together work.” There are 25 churches in Weyerhaeuser’s district, and the pastors of all of these churches meet monthly for prayer and annually for a retreat. The retreat, Weyerhaeuser says, is where the unity of vision is developed that results in collaborative ministry. “When there is trust, lots of informal partnerships emerge.”

More than 500 church leaders attended the most recent regional Christ Together gathering. A team made up of members from several area churches led the pastors in worship. John Ortberg appeared as the guest teacher. The pastors also convened in smaller groups for practical dialogue on a variety of ministry issues.

“The atmosphere in the place was electric,” says Chapman. “When you experience that kind of unity, you begin to understand what God had in mind.”

Christ Together exists to help “the whole Church bring the whole gospel to the whole city.” This vision has become a reality in one Chicago suburb. Every church in Gurnee, Illinois, has joined the Christ Together movement. Together they are strategizing about how they might do something no one of them could do alone—extend the gospel to every person in town in the next couple of years.

According to Dan Weyerhaeuser, the nine churches in Gurnee have a combined membership of around 5,000. Gurnee has a population of roughly 30,000. That means that one sixth of the city’s population attends a Christ Together church. “If there were 60 people on an island and ten of us were Christians,” says Weyerhaeuser, “we would say, ‘We can do this!'” The Gurnee pastors are brainstorming ways to mobilize their members to reach their city for Christ. How does Weyerhaeuser account for this remarkable unity of vision? “When you do Church God’s way, there is blessing that we can’t anticipate or even understand.”

Growing churches God’s way

As Christ Together gains momentum in the Chicago region, related movements are forming in other cities. In order to support these fledgling movements, Christ Together has expanded its leadership team. Scott Chapman is devoting about half his time in Christ Together initiatives, and Scott Gifford is the full-time national director, helping churches all over the country unite to carry the gospel into their towns.

In January 2010, Gifford accompanied Scott Chapman to the event in Hampton Roads, Virginia, promoting city transformation. Chapman spoke about the Christ Together vision for bringing churches together around the Great Commission. To their delight, Gifford and Chapman found many pastors whose hearts were burdened over the fragmentation of the Church in their region.

Since then Gifford has made nine trips to Hampton Roads, each time to facilitate conversations about how to unite the churches in the area so that they function as the Church.

During one of his visits to Hampton Roads, Gifford heard a news report about dwindling supplies in a local food bank. Gifford suggested that this was a great opportunity to show what the Church can do when it works together.

Together, through both food and financial donations, Christ Together churches in Hampton Roads collected over 15,000 pounds of food. To prove their support for their sister churches, Chicago area Christ Together churches agreed to match that figure. All together the Church in Chicagoland and Hampton Roads gathered over 30,000 pounds of food to help feed the hungry in Virginia.

New definition of success

Christ Together believes that God wants to change the definition of church success. “Instead of thinking about attendance in terms of our church’s attendance, we need to think about the Church’s attendance. Instead of celebrating our baptisms only, we need to celebrate the Church’s baptisms.” In this way, Chapman believes, Christ Together is a step toward fulfilling Jesus’ prayer for his followers, “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”