From a Senior Pastor & Board of Trustees to a Sodal-Modal Team
Building for success in the emerging paradigm of The Way of Christ and His Apostles
In late 2021 our small church of about 50 people began making a transition from Sunday morning worship services and monthly home groups, restructuring ourselves around the concept of “church as an extended family network”. This meant that we formed three neighborhood-based churches who began meeting weekly in homes for a meal and then discussion about how to continue the difficult, but critical, process of processing our lives through the gospel and apostles’ teaching.
These changes had been part of a long process involving an intentional succession of one-minded leaders that began back in 1998, whose terms overlapped one another, each one picking up the work of the previous and carrying it forward. In 2002, for a brief moment when all four of these leaders were present in the situation working together, we recognized the need to move in the direction of becoming a network of small neighborhood-based churches who function as an extended family. However, in an effort to carefully shepherd the church and not harm any of those who we were responsible for before Christ, we adopted a strategy to carefully shepherd the church, recognizing that making too many changes, too quickly, could result in a destabilization of the entire effort to build a strong church community and inadvertently defund the livelihoods of the very leaders who were working to shape this church as a family.
By the time the baton was passed to me in 2021, enough progress had been made, that I was able to accelerate the process. This was due to several factors. Some in the church had embraced the ideas and had a genuine commitment to becoming a family. Others had either retired and moved away, had passed away, or were of an age where they were reliant on us for day-to-day support and weren’t going to walk away from their support system. And lastly, my income was not tied to my role as a church leader. All this freed me to be more aggressive with paradigm transformation.
But even then, we were not instantly successful. Families I thought would easily grasp the value of these changes (even some families I thought would help lead the way for others) floundered, complained, disengaged and a few eventually left. After about three years of gathering this way, we had lost two key families plus a few others on their coattails. But we stuck with it and leaned on other churches in our network to help us process these losses and keep moving forward with resolve. Also, the First Principles Series, which we had been studying as church for 2 decades, began coming alive for us in ways we hadn’t anticipated. This series, which is organized around the key church-establishing concepts from Paul’s early, middle, and later letters, had been living in our heads, but we had been filtering the concepts through our old church traditions. It wasn’t until we began gathering as families around a meal and conversation that the reality of the teaching that Paul delivered became clear and meaningful.
But as we made these changes, a new set of challenges began to arise, and we realized that truly being a family together required a different set of commitments, a new set of habits, and a new leadership structure. Gone were the days where a pastor and a worship leader were sufficient to pull off a Sunday event for 150 people. Now, each gathering needed a shepherding leader and each cluster needed an elder. Fewer people required more well-trained leaders, more leading women, and a serious commitment from everyone in order to pull off successful meals in our homes; AND it required all of us to engage in meaningful dialogue around the gospel and its implications and regular “one-anothering” throughout the week. We had come to understand that this is what it looks like truly be a family together.
Several years later, after most of the dust had settled, we were able to assess the remaining traces of institutionalism that were holding us back from fully functioning as a family. Many of these related to the organizational structure of our church, the framework of which was laid in the 1940’s. Those founding documents dictated institutional oversight and management structures. Meaning, we were a senior pastor-facilitated, congregationally led organization, rather than a well-shepherded, apostolically led church network. It was time to address the next level of issues.
Part of that adjustment meant overhauling our founding legal documents to reflect the reality we were all committing our lives to. It wasn’t just about updating those documents to fit the style of a new leader, but completely reorienting them around the paradigm of the way of Christ and His apostles (1 Cor 4:16-17) the New and Living way (Heb 10:1-20) . New Jersey requires a Constitution and Bylaws and a Board of Trustees, so I still had to work within the cultural system, but I also needed the end result to reflect Christ’s design. The most revolutionary aspect of that overhaul would be the elimination of a congregationally-led system that hid behind an elder-suggested set of recommendations and a pastor-facilitated set of religious services. Instead those documents needed to reflect a two-fold leadership structure of apostolic leaders (sodal), so that the church could fully engage in our stewardship of building a hub like Ephesus in partnership with other leaders from around the world who had diaspora situations in our area (the NYC metro area); and shepherding (modal) leaders who would help them shape every aspect of their lives around the gospel, allowing them to become a cluster of churches that function together as a kerygmatic community, becoming a support-base for the progress of the gospel across our region, throughout our slice of the world, and across the globe from network-to-network.
What does this sodal-modal leadership structure look like? Something like this:
Chart by Michael Vos
One question I consistently get from those outside looking in, is how we maintain accountability in a church with no senior pastor or board of trustees. My answer is that we do have trustees, but they aren’t businessmen running an organization, they are apostolic leaders setting the direction of the church and challenging our churches to fulfill their stewardship, and we do have shepherding (pastoral) leaders, but they aren’t preachers or administrators, they are “parents” shaping an extended family of households. These questions tend to come from others still in institutional church situations, and are mostly interested in financial accountability, or avoiding one leader having too much power. Their approach and focus are on creating financially successful institutions with a balance of power, not on maturing households and training leaders for the progress of the gospel.
Below is a chart that reflects how accountability works in institutional settings, in communities, and in situations with little to no structure. As you can see, communities are not without “chain yanking” accountability, but they also do not function as straight up hierarchies.
We are continuing our process of orienting our lives together around Christ’s grand strategy (Eph 3:8-12) and we will continue working on ourselves and working with other churches and networks to shape a one-minded movement around the way of Christ and His apostles.
