Underground Origins
Microchurches on Mission with God in Tampa
Perhaps like all great stories, the story of the UNDERGROUND is one of love and pursuit – both in the sense that all Scripture is the story of God’s pursuit of us, but also in our reciprocal, albeit imperfect, pursuit of Him.
In the summer of 2006, about 50 of us left our traditional churches to form seven house-based church groups. We loved the Western church, but we hoped for more than Sunday morning worship and middle-class Christianity. Having developed a sense of missionary identity over the preceding decade through loving students and the broader city, we struggled to fit in the prevailing model church. While each of us handled this tension differently, we came to realize that if we wanted more than what we were experiencing, we had to go find and/or potentially be it.
It started with prayer. Rather than coming to God in prayer on behalf of our thing, we committed to interceding for the bride of Christ in our city between the hours of 11 PM and 1 AM. We held a 24-hour prayer room for 40 days. We studied the book of Revelation and had lengthy discussions on what we thought the church should look like. There wasn’t a blueprint or a plan. We were simply desperate and in pursuit of Jesus. This culminated in nine adults and ten children spending nine months in the Philippines to get outside our Western perspective and learn from mentors who were serving the lost and the very poor in the name of Jesus. It was in Manila we gained clarity around three major elements of our network: microchurches; a bifurcated/dual operating system; and our governing values.
Microchurches
Even though we already had over a dozen simple house churches before visiting Manila, we wanted a definition of church that didn’t need to be limited to that. As we surveyed Scripture, we became increasingly convinced that the church was wherever we saw the intersection of worship, community, and mission. More than the tools we commonly associate with these elements, we sought to define their essence. For us, worship is more than a song but more about vertical alignment with Christ Jesus. Community is more than game nights and brownies, but spiritual family organized around a common purpose and mission. Mission wasn’t just evangelism but the proclamation and demonstration of the good news of the kingdom to the lost and the poor.
This primitive ecclesiology allowed for diversity in expression. Microchurches could look like the home-based groups we already had, but they could also be more mission-specific work like a group of believers working with men in recovery or a band of women offering the hope of Jesus to those in the sex industry. It was important to us that if the ecclesia was meant to be an assembly of called-out believers for a purpose, the church couldn’t exist for itself. Calling, for us, then, was and is the centerpiece of the microchurch. Because calling is something that only comes from God, all microchurches are first birthed in the heart of God and therefore can be as creative and diverse as his passions.
“As wide and deep as the impact of our network has been, what has remained true is that, at the end of the day, all we really want is Jesus.”
A New Infrastructure
If these worshiping communities on mission were the church, the question became what kind of support these communities needed. The organic life of the microchurch demanded a new infrastructure, something that would interface the organic with the organized. We designed a dual operating system that prioritized mission over all other enterprises by forming a nonprofit (on the organized side of the network) whose sole purpose would be to serve the microchurches (on the organic side of things). Rather than the small serving or being an extension of the larger entity, the big or centralized structure would exist to serve the small by paying attention to the needs of the missionaries and doing what it could to free them up to be the church God called them to be.
Values
Within this new operating system, we sought to cultivate a missional ecosystem that assumed that every believer is called and sent by Jesus. Because we believed, and still believe, calling is at the center of microchurch formation, we were free to bias toward radical empowerment, reduce command-and-control mechanisms, and protect the autonomy of the churches to pursue the assignment God has given them. What would hold us together wouldn’t be a common methodology or technology, rather it would be eighteen shared values that represented what we believed it meant to be the church in our time. This Manifesto, along with the Lausanne Covenant, the Apostles Creed, and our Leadership Covenant form the edges of what it means to be UNDERGROUND.
As a result, we’ve seen a form of church that revives mission, exponentially multiplying the impact of the church. What started as 50 people leaving their traditional churches in 2006 in search of something more has seen the emergence of over a thousand microchurches in the Tampa Bay area, 22 sister networks around the world, and, as best we can tell, more than 85 networks and 400 brave network/church leaders around the world influenced by the UNDERGROUND’s story and inspired to innovate the church for their place and time. Locally, our modest nonprofit has evolved to offer four departments (media, finance, facilities, and leadership development) to help missionaries do the work God has called them to.
More than that, we’ve seen the growth and development of missionaries. Some of our leaders become respected voices in the city. Some of them have helped positively change state legislation while others have influenced the conversation on particular issues. We’ve seen otherwise mild-mannered disciples of Jesus advocate for children before courtroom judges, state officials recognize leaders in our network for their disaster relief work, and local law enforcement use our leaders as a resource for those in need. Even just recently, a microchurch began fostering two orphaned siblings to keep the kids from separation. Most remarkable though is just how ordinary all these people are. These are everyday people who’ve said yes to Jesus, and the city is better because of them.
As wide and deep as the impact of our network has been, what has remained true is that, at the end of the day, all we really want is Jesus. It’s never been our ambition to replicate the UNDERGROUND in other places. We do hope, however, to stir missional imagination and equip network and church leaders to start contextualized, empowering ecosystems that release the priesthood of all believers in their own cities. If our network is anything at all, it is an act of worship and obedience to the One we love. Whether or not people remember us or know our story is of lesser importance. To borrow a phrase from OMF International’s global ambassador, Patrick Fung, we aspire to “live to be forgotten so that Christ may be remembered” and we dream of a bride wildly in love with the bridegroom.
Tomy Wilkerson currently serves as the local director for the UNDERGROUND Network, a decentralized collection of microchurches spread across the Tampa Bay Area. In his spare time, he can be found enjoying precious moments with his wife, Brianna, and their two kids, Neema and Tomy, IV.