Love Leiden

Here is a list of core values for our ministry here in Leiden.  At the moment it’s just a draft and will be added to and tuned up a bit later.  As always, please feel free to comment.

• High emphasis on ‘indigenous’ – must reflect real post-modern Dutch culture
• Very simple structure, small team of lay-leaders with a team leader – a ‘first-among-equals’. Avoidance of creating a new institution with timetables, programmes, reams of paper.
• Genuine family-feel relationships at the core of the ministry
• Encouragement from the start of a holistic 7 days-a-week spirituality, therefore emphasising the importance of genuine relationships rather than focusing on a Sunday ‘event’
• Hype avoidance, more of an underground feel
• Focused on the unchurched, church transfers largely unwelcome
• Hospitality crucial, especially combining sharing food together with communal worship
• Participation modelled as a natural part of Christian life and worship, it is through participation that we express ourselves, and therefore worship God, and serve one another
• Making disciples the focus, instead of preaching/teaching. Not that semi-formal teaching will not happen, but rather that growth comes most naturally through relationship – copying the leaders’ lifestyles, encouraging and challenging others, one-to-one coaching, etc.
• Reaching out to the poor and rejected, focus on practical outreach not proclamation, demonstrating Jesus’ love rather than just telling people about it
• Highly missional – worship, community and mission all on an equal footing
• Aim to multiply at around 25 committed people
• Plan for continually training two leaders
• Living a good example of Christian life suitable to be copied
• A church built on the three-self principle: self-governing (local leaders), self-supporting (not reliant on outside resourcing), and self-propagating (focused on mission)
• Starting with an end in mind – we plan to hand over local leadership of any sustainable church at the earliest practical point
• Trust in the Holy Spirit when handing over and moving on, Pauline model of continued oversight with locally grown leadership
• We are joining in with God’s already active mission in Leiden, Misseo Dei, rather than starting a new evangelism program. This means actively seeking people in whom God is already working – people of peace, natural networkers, people seeking spirituality, etc. We aim to mimic Jesus as much as possible, living and working among the people rather than ‘reaching out and hauling them in’.
• Proximity – the majority of the leadership should be living, or at least working, in the area where the church is focused
• Hospitality, “no eating, no meeting!”. Need to check if this is culturally appropriate in a coffee-based culture.
• Deliberate decision not to plan in detail the form, feel, name of the church in advance. To be indigenous this must be done by the church as a whole.