The first command is our first priority: Love the Lord your God.  Your face, O Lord, we will seek.  Our deep desire is not ministry growth or success. All we want is God.  Whatever we do in ministry, may it be the result of this experiment: what happens when a group of people set apart their lives to seeking His face? The outgrowth of that is the true Church. A supernaturally led Church that seeks the lost and cares for the least. This is our ultimate dream: to participate in ministry defined by its pursuit of Jesus, so that it is so very clear that He alone is glorious.  This is first. Primary. The center.

So we pray for harvest, innovation, leadership, supernatural provision, gifts of the Spirit, creativity, powerful sermons, inspired Bible studies, unity, resources, divine appointments, expanded vision, physical strength, open doors, management excellence, protection, and incredible times of worship. But what we most want is God Himself. To know Him. To be found in Him. We want to do what we do not out of an achiever’s need to accomplish, not out of a competitor’s need to win, not because it’s what everybody else is doing, or because nobody else has done it yet. We want to live the natural outgrowth of our relationship, intimacy, and friendship with Jesus.  Thus, our main thing is not leadership or preaching; it is seeking Him. This is our life. We are God-seekers.

The need of our day is not another successful church. The need is a work characterized by God, not by business principles, hard work, and natural talent. We seek Jesus. We are defined by Him. Your face, O Lord, we will seek.

We are not to take this for granted with our people or our leaders.  This is not merely one of our many activities; this is the main thing. No minimum requirement mentality.  At the center of our leadership is leveraging every bit of our influence to cause people to seek God. This is our call: to make people thirsty enough to drink living water and woo them by the Spirit to seek His face.

For the unregenerate we call this evangelism. But there is another form of evangelism needed for the believer. We get lost too. We lose our way. But this we know, because we have done the experiment a million times: our call gets rediscovered in the pursuit of God. Vision becomes sharp in the secret place. Mission comes alive when our hearts are set on seeking Him. Leadership is amazing when the leader brings direction that came from hours spent burning in God’s presence. Words have authority when the tongue has been silenced in a time of listening. Hope is rekindled, faith is stirred, peace is obtained, promises are embraced, fears are stilled, opposition is exposed. Draw us in O Lord!

We don’t just need another good church. Or another missional movement. Or another group of natural Christians. What we bring to the table is a God-obsession that translates into a God-pursuit, and the outpouring of this radical pursuit of God is a radical community on radical mission.

Jesus never told us to plant churches. He told us to make disciples, so our church planting strategy is simply this: We. Plant. Disciples. 

There is no other way to Biblically wrap our heads around this. The world is over-saturated with Sunday gatherings. But a lot of those gatherings lack the one thing that actually make up a church that is being faithful to Jesus’s call: disciples. God-seeking, soul-winning, disciples who make other disciples. 

We realize that when you plant disciples, regardless of the number of people or the way they gather, the full expression of the church always follows. If you plant disciples, you always get a church. When you plant a church, you rarely get more than a Sunday service. 

We are not after Sunday services. We are not after the traditional ABCs of church: attendance, buildings, and cash flow. We are unabashedly going after capital D disciples. We are not trying to fill pews with believers who are disgruntled with the church they just came from. We want to run after the lost and raise them up to be disciple makers themselves. We want a book of Acts church in the 21st century. We want to help ordinary people become passionate followers of Jesus Christ. 

We want to plant disciples.  

Acts 2:42-47.  We love this passage. It is one of the earliest and purest descriptions of the church found in the New Testament. Believers meeting and living life together, but not just in buildings. Not just on Sundays. Not just in a church service. They met continually as they tried to learn how to live out the way of Jesus in every aspect of their lives.  

But even in this raw, organic pursuit of Jesus the early church developed a bare bones structure that has been successfully used throughout church history. Their way of discipleship could be transferred and caught regardless of the socio-political landscape, making it immune to any backlash or persecution: 

They met together in the temple courts and broke bread in their homes… 

What a beautiful representation of how the early disciples lived out the way of Jesus: worshipping together, on mission together, and in community with one another. In the temple but also in their homes. In both their public life and in their private lives. There was a macro expression of the church gathering as well as micro expressions. There was an extended family of the faith that transcended any boundaries or barriers that would have traditionally held them back and kept Jews and Gentiles from coming together. It was counter- cultural. It was untraditional. It was beautiful. 

We at the Greenhouse are so moved by this depiction of the early church that we are devoted to seeing this 1st century reality manifested in the 21st century church. 

We recognize that it is not only the structure that brings life but a focus, love and desperation for Jesus. We understand that you can build it and they might not come, which is why we are not putting our trust in buildings, programs, or the newest church conference hype. 

We are simply trying to reconnect with the ways the early church practiced radical, life-on-life discipleship that ended up changing our world forever. 

It’s not that we are opposed to Sunday morning gatherings. If lost people are hearing about Jesus, followers of Jesus are being refreshed, and souls are being recalibrated with His rhythms, we celebrate. We don’t think that traditional weekend gatherings are a bad thing; we just don’t think they are the only thing. 

Faith is more than just Sundays. Discipleship is not simply taught; it is caught. Jesus told His disciples to follow Him, and for the next three years they did. Paul told his disciples to follow him as he followed Christ. And he didn’t just mean when church gatherings were taking place. In the same way, we are calling disciples to a 24/7 lifestyle… because Sundays alone won’t cut it. 

This is why we take the Acts 2 both/and approach to church life. We believe there are things the macrochurch (weekend gatherings) can do that the microchurch (weekly community gatherings) cannot. We also believe there are things that can happen at the microchurch gathering which are crucial for real discipleship to take place; things that simply cannot happen at the macrochurch gathering. We believe both of these types of expressions have a place in creating an authentic discipleship culture that captures the essence of the Acts 2 church. 

And this paradigm has wildly directed our church planting approach.  We are a both/and church planting movement.  We will not separate the macro and micro gatherings.  This is our ecclesial minimum and a must for Greenhouse church planters.  The both/and approach is immovable, but how this fleshes itself out is up to the apostolic creativity of the planter.