History

NRCC : 1996-2006

A handful of spiritual people gathered together to form NRCC in 1996 for just this purpose. We gathered to find God more authentically, and to rediscover our true identities as Jesus-followers. We had already concluded that the culture wars were over. We also realized that to take on the pragmatic and consumerist values of our society made for an anemic spirituality. Many of us had been deeply involved in the church before banding together at NRCC. Some had been deacons, elders, even senior ministers in other churches. Almost to a person, we had been chewed up and spit out by the empire-building, consumer-driven, culture-conforming values of churches we had attended.

We didn’t want to build another church like the ones from which we had come, so in our spiritually bewildered, disoriented state, we simply gathered together and became friends. We licked our wounds together, grieved our losses together, found comfort for our grief, and solace in our confusion.

We began to ask one another what it truly meant to follow Jesus. We relearned the art of listening for the Inner Voice. We began to challenge many of the unspoken assumptions we had absorbed about God, Church, and being spiritual. We began to see the pollution that had crept into our souls and practices. We discovered that in many ways, we had dressed vice up as virtue, and were ruining our lives with it.
(Romans 7)

From 1996 to 2006 this rediscovery, reflection, and reimagining church was about all we did. We did very little outwardly; had very few programs, did very little to care for our city. We were too spiritually burned out, burdened, confused, and disoriented to do much more. We could not do church as we had known it, but we couldn’t walk away from God either.

Along the way, we stumbled into some ways of being followers of Jesus that were life and light for our souls.

lake

In exile we became quiet. In our quiet, we began to relearn our faith, the Truths of following Jesus that so many others are rediscovering today. Our souls began healing, our perceptions of God were deepened, and our experience of the Divine was heightened. We shed a lot of our unspoken assumptions, and embraced new ones we hadn’t considered.

NRCC : 2007-Present

We would have stayed quietly in seclusion, discovering, learning, and savoring being a spiritual community together, except that in 2007, we were surprised again by the whispers of God. There began to stir within us a restlessness that would not be stilled. We had become quite comfortable in our state of withdrawal, when all of a sudden, care and compassion for the people of our city began to grow strong and deep in our souls.

Stimulated by this inner restlessness, we began several months of community dialogue. We talked together, prayed together, listened for the Holy Spirit of God together. After some time, we came to believe we had sensed Divine direction. If it had been a conversation in words, it might have gone something like this…

God:
There are some people in this city I have assigned to you. Open your hearts to them, find them, and invite them to share this experience of life and light you are having together.

Us:
But God, we can’t do that! We’ve tried doing good stuff before. We tried helping people, we tried the whole “reach-out-to-others” thing, and we got sucked into a vortex of religious performance and exhausting labor. It burned us out!

Frankly, we’re afraid that if we do it again, the same thing will happen.

God:
There are some people in this city I have assigned to you. Open your hearts to them, find them, and invite them to share this experience of life and light you are having together. (as if we had not heard the first time…)

Us:
But God, you really must not understand. Opening our hearts, finding the people… all that stuff requires organization. We’re terrible at organization. We’re small enough now to get by without much of it, but if we invite others to share this journey with us, we’ll have to get our act together. And as you may recall, when we tried that before, we lost our souls.

We’re sorry, God. We’re just not ready to invite people to our community. We don’t know how to do it, and even if we did, our facility is unfinished. Our parking lot is an unpaved field, we don’t have any literature for newcomers to read, we don’t have any programs to help people get integrated. For goodness sake, sometimes we don’t even get the floors vacuumed.

And did we mention… we’re afraid.
We’re afraid we’ll lose our souls if we get back on that “work for the church” treadmill.

God: [silence]

Us: [lengthy pause] Whatever you ask, we will do. Wherever you send, we will go.

handshake

And so in early 2007, we began to talk together about how a community emerges from a season of reflective isolation. We began to talk together about how withdrawn people open their hearts and reengage with others outside of themselves. Once we overcame our fears, the vision of joining together with you on this journey became quite invigorating. We’re looking forward to meeting you. We think we like you already.

toolbelt

So in mid-2007 we began to clean our house to get ready for you, quite literally. We started working on our facility (it is still quite simple, but it used to be un-presentable). We began to write down the good things we had experienced together so we could tell you about them when we met you.

We began to think together about how we could include you in the same sense of spiritual community and non-performance spirituality we have experienced. We designed this website and another one: www.NonPracticingChristian.com to help articulate our experience, and help you decide if our community would be a fit for you.

And now, you’re here. Now you’re reading this.
And now, we are inviting you to become friends with us.

…we’d like to invite you to walk this journey with us.

Epilogue : An Apology to Accompany Our Invitation

gears

We’re still just a little bit self-conscious, a bit nervous, because we don’t really have our act together. Even though we we’re not trying to be slick, we’re still a bit insecure because we’re not. Oh well. There is still some vestigial view in us that a "good" church should be like a well-oiled machine, and we’re just not. So in our insecurity, we’d like to offer our apologies right up front. We are what we are. We’d love to get to know you as you are too.

Our insecurity being voiced, however, we have some very wonderful traits and even more wonderful people. Yes, we’re flawed and like you, quite fallible and visibly imperfect. However, we’re trying our best to live more alert to the Divine Light within us and from time to time, we really shine! We’re miles ahead of where we were last year, and hope to be further down the road next year. We’ve discovered that we do better on this journey when we are together than we do when we are alone, and we’re thinking that is probably true for you too. We would love you to come walk this journey with us.

 

Romans 7

>

We really like the way The Message translates Romans 7:7
Apart from the succinct, surgical command, "You shall not covet," I could have dressed covetousness up to look like a virtue and ruined my life with it.

That phrase became a way of thinking for us. In how many areas of our lives, our religion, our spiritual practice, had we taken some vice or another, and dressed it up as a virtue? For example, religious performance is really hubris, pride, or fear, but we dress it up as devotion, commitment, or zeal, and even though we’ve given it a nice name, it’s still vice, and it will still ruin our lives.

This concept gave us a framework for thinking through many of our unspoken assumptions, and gave us a framework for self-examination.    > back to reading