Church need not be formal, complicated or run by experts with specialized degrees. We value microchurches because we want people to see Jesus’ reflection in the small and simple activities of ordinary people who love and serve Jesus, people who take on themselves responsibility to represent Jesus in the world.
Microchurch is a holistic lifestyle of everyday worship in which ordinary people are providing tangible service even as they build intimate community.
We aim to point such fellowships of Jesus’ followers toward a deeper commitment to serve a specific people group, as Jesus would, right within their own community. Central to these fellowships is a belief in the everyday nature of worship, an embracing of intimacy in relationship, and a recognition that mission must be expressed as tangible service to specific needs.
An MC starts with a commitment to serve a group of people – perhaps a neighborhood or a certain demographic. Pinpointing a need within that community, the MC creatively develops means to meet the need, providing tangible value and blessing for real people. We believe this should be normal for God’s people (Romans 12:1), a primary means of making Jesus and his gospel known.
Along the way, we intentionally build into each other, challenge each other and encourage each other in love.
Explore see some current ways we are serving the community through microchurch below.
Support Microchurch Start Ups & Service Initiatives
PiVO†
Our lives are journeys, each one designed by God himself. That’s good news!
Unfortunately, we’ll never move beyond the pitfalls and destructive tendencies of our brokenness until we’re able to be honest with others and learn to orient our lives on the God who made us. No matter where you are in life’s journey, what you have done or what has been done to you, PiVO† is a supportive, family-like environment where your story will be heard, your struggle understood and your hope for lasting change can be realized. It is an atmosphere where you’ll find energy and hope to make a striking new beginning.
Give to support PiVO†
To become involved with PiVO†, or a similar microchurch, please connect with us through our contact page.
Old Story New Story is series of 20 short stories taken from the pages of the Bible, each one bursting with lessons about life’s challenges and the hope a relationship with God brings into our daily experience.
More than Bible Study, it’s an opportunity to engage the Creator God and to build new friendships with others who are doing the same. The Story itself is old, but it’s message has produced changed lives – a brand new story – for many who participate. The stories are written in straightforward, contemporary language. Each narrative brings a portion of the God’s big story into focus. Taken as a whole, the Story expresses the truth of who God is, what he has done and what we should do in response.
To participate in the upcoming Old Story New Story, please connect with us via our contact page.
Give to support Old Story New Story.
At 3 feet 10 inches, Dorothy Jean Montague was shorter than most, even among others living with dwarfism.
Throughout her lifetime, she faced a heavy load of physical challenges, but none greater than her confinement to a wheelchair at the age of 42. Intelligent, vibrant and gregarious, she kept her personal battle with fear and discouragement hidden from all but her closest friends and faced the challenges of life with faith in Jesus, defiance against assumptions about her “disabilities” and a deeply abiding joy for life. Driven by her great faith in Jesus, she committed herself to a lifestyle of loving others who experienced challenges; the small, the weak, the broken and the marginalized.
Sadly, Dorothy Jean was to lose her final physical battle against illness, succumbing to complications brought on by Covid-19. In the final months before her sickness, Dot was searching for creative ways that she might actively enter God’s mission, despite her own limitations. She determined she would love to serve neighborhood families raising kids with disabilities. Dot wasn’t able to achieve this final goal, but in her memory and honor, we’ve established DJ’s Kids to come alongside these families, loving and serving them in Jesus’ name.
Give to support DJ’s Kids
We currently follow and support the work of two gospel-centered teachers serving in countries that are closed to the religious freedoms we enjoy.
These men and women are serving among ethnic people groups that have very limited exposure to gospel witness. If you’d be interested in learning more about the work of our friends, we can share more details in private conversation. Please connect with us via our contact page.
Give to support FAITH International
Low pay. Part time. Few benefits. Impatient, demanding customers. Expected commitment to night and weekend work. All of this and more is the common, harsh reality of our friends working in retail and other service industry jobs.
Service Sector is looking to develop worship and community among this group that has often been neglected or completely overlooked by traditional church structures that depend on attending meetings. By building relationships with these local servants, we hope to encourage exploration of Jesus, ignite hope in his love and teaching and eventually see self-supporting communities develop as these men and women give their lives to serve the those who depend so much on their willingness to serve.
Give to support Service Sector
Provision Partners is partnering with local, community-led food and basic supplies pantries.
Often times the church has been guilty of drawing local resources into central coffers and then distributing those funds as leaders see fit for distant programs that have little connection to the donors. This has the effect of disenfranchising the giver from the creative work of service as well as distancing the recipient from their benefactor. Much of what we are doing in our grass roots ministry runs counter these common practices. We’re encouraging our own people and others to consider the needs of their immediate neighbors and to act for their benefit. These local pantries offer free food and basic household supplies to families that have fallen into grave financial straights. As these programs are community-based, they don’t offer any gospel witness. However, our partnering with them in their mission demonstrates to their leaders and staffs that God is concerned with the struggles of the people of our community. We believe these types of partnerships open other doors for more direct gospel ministry.
Give to support Provision Partners
The idea behind Civic Virtue is the encouragement of believers who are living and serving in a particular community to see partnership with the civic leaders of that community as an important aspect of their Christian commitment to love and serve their neighbors. Partnering with community leaders as they seek to bless the neighborhood not only extends the work of the microchurch into the secular community, but also allows the group to become an embodiment of the gospel that makes Jesus known as the servant he is. We are joining community leaders and other community members in planning and working community-wide events such as annual neighborhood festivals. We’ve also participated in a variety of community improvement projects such as park and stream clean-up days and tree planting, as well as attending and serving during the neighborhood’s community celebration of various holidays.
Support Community Engagement Opportunities
In Pennsylvania, approximately 63,000 children are being raised in kinship care, the name given to family members who are raising children neglected or abandoned by their actual parents. The majority of these family members are grandmothers, and many live at or near the poverty line without the benefit of help or guidance from the foster system or other governmental programs. We want to honor and bless these families, especially those that are in financial stress by providing practical help, provision, guidance, tangible love and friendship.
Support the care & support of Grandfamilies
Nothing will change the world more powerfully than the love of Christ shared with a world that so desperately needs it.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Even a small light holds back darkness and a group of small lights can banish it completely.
Merely attending church doesn’t make you much of a church because sitting in a row, consuming church doesn’t make you very good at being the church.
If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit mercy, then it isn’t mercy.
By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
You can’t build the future of the church on passionless, disengaged people. Nor can you build it on consumers.
The difference between humanity and all the rest of creation is that men and woman were made to relate directly with God.
Genuine spiritual knowledge lies in the union of the believer’s life with the truth of God.
To exist without the pursuit of God’s mission in the world is to exist as something other than the church.
Humanity cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God!
Jesus, Matthew 4:4