Life by Nate

Neil Cole’s book on the organic church definitely engaged me during the right time in life and of my ministry. In the book, Cole lays out his strategy and vision for his church planting network, Church Multiplication Associates (CMA). What it really comes down to is the house church, or coffee shop church, or parking lot church, or really any location. Cole’s idea is that “where two or three are gathered” there you can have a church. And better to be small and multiply than try to become the largest church on the block.

Organic Church provides much encouragement for planters and ministry leaders struggling with being small. According to Cole this is great! He also notes the importance of going where the people are. His strategy is to win coffee shops, businesses, neighborhoods, etc for Jesus. The book is rich with stories of places full of drug addicts and Satanists being overcome by the message of the Kingdom.

Some of the very helpful ideas were his reflections on the organic nature of the kingdom of God. He spends a large amount of time focusing on Jesus’ parables that portray this (the sower and the seed, the mustard seed, the yeast in the bread) and Jesus’ sending out of the disciples telling them to ask God for workers… as Cole puts it, workers from the harvest itself. Also helpful are his reflections in chapter 11 concerning the nature of connections through relationships. He makes note of the game, 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, and observes that many of us are actually closer to many people than we realize.

There were a few things that tweaked me a bit as I saw that the author and I are coming from very different starting places. One was the all-too-convenient acronyms, alliteration, and breaking down of points. Sometimes things seemed a bit too formulaic for my increasingly postmodern perspective. Cole seemed to me to be a bit traditional in his evangelical approach. I gathered that if we go in with our Bibles out and simply show people, or quote to people, God’s word, they are going to accept it and change their lifestyle. Shortly after this, we are to baptize them. In fact the sooner we baptize the better, even if they are “saved” that very day and all you have is a kiddie pool (p 78).