We have no official name.

The thinking was as soon as a church has a name in today’s world, it becomes a brand. If it’s a brand, then it is in competition with other brands and needs to be marketed so people will buy into your brand, just to keep it going. With many of us experienced in various ministries and church plants, we didn’t want just another brand. We wanted something more.

We wanted a community with a simple focus on genuine spiritual (trans)formation together.

Yet for practical reasons, we needed to call our group something. We’ve had several nicknames over the years (Eastside Fellowship was an early favorite), but Liquid was the one that stuck. The term is loosely tied to the book Liquid Church by Peter Ward which resonated with many of us as we ventured into this uncharted territory. Ward made distinctions between form and function and asked the question: what comes first, structure or purpose?

“The church must be like water — flexible, fluid, changeable. This book is a vision for how the church can embrace the liquid nature of culture rather than just scrambling to keep afloat while sailing over it.

“Ward urges us to move away from the traditional understanding of church as a gathering of people meeting in one place at one time to a dynamic notion of church as a series of relationships and communications. In the Liquid Church, membership is determined by participation and involvement. Liquid Church is continually on the move, flowing in response to the Spirit and the gospel of Jesus, the imagination and creativity of its leaders, and the choices and experiences of its worshippers.”

The name Liquid came to mean congregational freedom to adapt to the changing needs of those within our community. As we got away from the idea we go to church to recapture the profound truth of we are the church, we began to see the church as a network of relationships — alive, moving and growing. It’s no longer thought of as an organization, but a tribe, an organism, the living body of Christ here on earth.

We are a tribe of people coming together to survive in this world, and our job is figuring how to best help one another live. How do we move along with and guide these interdependent relationships into deeper trust, hope, joy and love for God and one another? The form of our time together became a distant second, subject to the goal of spiritual transformation of us as individuals.

“Jesus said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.’”

–Mark 2:27

Perhaps we could engineer a new structure to better bring about those results. Could we build something far less mechanical and more responsive to human life? We were ready to jump in and work together to figure it out.
 
 

Kameron

Idea explorer. Visual storyteller. Conflict mediator.