Social Architecture (20) Church

Following Jesus example, the church should be restoring Tens, Fifties and Hundreds in the places where we live. Every church should be attached to a particular locality. Ideally, there should be one Church at each location and each location should have one Church.

In my book, Being Church Where We Live, I described how a church should function as a local community. Each church should be led by four or five elders, each with a different gifting, submitting to each other to produce unity. Each elder would provide oversight for about five or six families. If all the families overseen by one elder lived close to each other in a local community, they would become a Ten. This group of connected families would be able to fulfil all the functions of Tens, as described above.

If the church had five elders, each providing oversight of a Ten, the entire church would be a Fifty. If specific needs arose, a couple of local churches could link through their leaders to become a Hundred. The leaders of the Hundred would ensure that the justice, protection and welfare are provided to everyone living in their community.

If Christians moved back to a more biblical model of church, Tens and Hundreds would be restored back to our communities. However, we would have to get out of their cars and auditoriums and move closer together.

A neighbourhood church could be a unifying factor in modern urban society, if Christians formed Tens and Fifties in the places where they lived. They would restore cohesiveness to the neighbourhood.