Every community has a story.  Ours began as a prophetic word given to Ben & Carolea on October 21st, 2005.  Seven years later, on the anniversary of that word, the church was born. With a passion for New Testament Christianity, we noticed 5 key ingredients from Acts 2:42-47 which we incorporated into our services:  apostolic teaching, food, fellowship, prayer and presence-based worship.  Over the years, our understanding and application has changed but our passion has not.  We’ve become more missional and we’ve relentlessly striven to find a church model which looks like the book of Acts.  But like much of the Body of Christ, we struggled to find it.  This brought us to a crisis of decision in October 2020.

The 20/20 Model — Gathered & Scattered

In the context of a global pandemic and after a series of “God-incidents” we asked ourselves what (if anything) are we supposed to learn from 2020?  We believed God had something for us if we would listen.  We noticed that the Global Church is growing the fastest in areas of persecution (such as China and Iran).  To our knowledge this growth has not been hindered by Covid-19 whereas the Western Church was dramatically affected.  Our public gatherings were halted or hindered.  We scrambled to move “on-line".  Our momentum, our programs and our outreaches were all drastically impacted.  This is on top of spiritual decline which has prevailed in the Western Church for decades.  Few would argue, it’s time for revival!  But we asked ourselves, is it also time for structural change?  Is it time for a new wineskin?  If a virus can do this to us, what would persecution achieve?  Could we withstand persecution and prevail as the early church did?  And if God graciously poured out His Spirit upon the earth, resulting in a great harvest of souls, how would we disciple those masses?  The Persecuted Church would likely continue doing what it’s doing now — making disciples in House Churches (only faster).  We decided we needed a new wineskin — one that facilitates discipleship and can produce leaders quickly.