Ashoka
Written by: Eugene Kim
United States of America ??
Reimagining "church" — Making spiritual community accessible to all
My name is Eugene Kim and after over 25 years in local church ministry, I left my role as a pastor in order to reimagine how we do church and spirituality from the ground up. Because the way we’re doing things now isn’t working.
My church was one of the “successful” ones. We were growing, planting new churches, and expanding to satellite campuses. We were on the cover of our denominational magazine twice. We were blessed with the resources to do creative and thoughtful ministry. From the outside, it looked like we were “winning.”
However, from my view on the inside, things weren’t as good as they appeared. We were growing but it was mostly just “transfer growth” — pre-churched people who were new to the area or coming from other churches. I knew the reality was that the vast majority of people in our neighborhoods would never walk through our doors. The barrier to entry was simply too high.
The majority of people in our seats were passive consumers while the rest were busy keeping the machine running. I myself went through several seasons of burnout from the chronic over-functioning and constant demand for more programming and production. Over time, I saw more and more of the dysfunction, compromises, and conflicts of interest that seemed to be baked into the way we were doing church.
Although I had given everything to this church for over 17 years, it became clear that it was time for me to go and step out into the wilderness. So I stepped down in March of 2020 and founded New Wine Collective, a spiritual and ecclesial innovation think-tank or R&D lab. Our mission is to help heal the world through love and connection by making spiritual community accessible to all.
Simply put, the current Sunday, programmatic model of church is working for fewer and fewer people. Spiritual community is supposed to be for everyone but we’ve made it into something inaccessible, exclusive, and expensive. Meanwhile, people are increasingly divided, disconnected, and lonely. More and more are interested in spirituality and community but not organized religion, especially younger generations. And most people looking for deeper connection simply don’t know what to do or how to find it on their own.
Our solution is to create a fundamentally different approach to church — a new model altogether. We’re developing an online tool that helps facilitate face-to-face spiritual conversations and community. It’s an app that would empower people to co-create their own spiritual community wherever they are, on their own terms.
Imagine if there was an app that could provide clear steps and structure for people to self-organize into a group. Imagine if it had facilitation tools that helped foster meaningful conversations and healthy group dynamics. And imagine if it had a crowdsourced library of resources so that groups could connect to a diverse network that shares knowledge, resources, and expertise from a wide variety of cultures and wisdom traditions. Our model would help people take ownership of their own spiritual journeys and collectively discern what they need in order to grow and thrive. It’s a way of gathering that lowers barriers, flattens hierarchies, and allows every voice to be heard.
Although this is a time of change and uncertainty, computer scientist Alan Kay said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” We want to invent the future of spiritual communities. We’re imagining a world in which anyone can do “church” anywhere.