Background: Brian Sanders started his career out of college as an InterVarsity staff 
member by starting the IVCF chapter at the University of Tampa from scratch. What evolved was a tightly knit community of young adults who effectively reached out to the poor and disenfranchised of their city. As students began to graduate, they wanted a church that looked like the community and outreach they’d come to know and love. What emerged was Tampa Underground, a network of microchurches. For those interested in the Microchurch philosophy, his book talks about how microchurches differ from traditional small groups, and how to start one. Along the way he adds penetrating narrative on what the American church, particularly large churches, have evolved into.
Plenty of people will walk into churches this weekend and not be discipled, loved or even known. They will not experience fellowship and they will not engage in mission. When the local church is experienced as a spectacle then we have tragically failed the world by mislabeling that experience as participation in the church.
Microchurches are not just small groups as we think of them. Typically these gatherings are about building community and rarely include meaningful mission. Rarely are they transforming the neighborhoods in which they meet.
It is time we stopped imagining the church as something we have to invite people to, and see it as something as something that is blessed to be broken and given to the world.
We are speeding toward a future where our most powerful communities will be understood through the lenses of decentralized networks instead of centralized institutions….I am convinced that contextualized and diverse church networks will soon take the place of the local church as we know it.
A worshipping community on mission is the church.
Launching a worship service (no matter how big) does not satisfy [all of] the basic conditions [of a church].
We use the term micro church, not to mitigate the word church but to help us think abut some places where these three conditions (worship, community, mission) are already being met with more significance.
[In light of Rom. 12.1-2,] When we talk about worship as a condition of the church, we are talking about the applied lordship of Jesus. Sadly, the word worship has come to mean something more narrow, merely the singing of songs….Worship, then is not just about admiring God or praising Him. It is about responding to his mercy by offering all that we are to him and walking as nonconformists in this broken world. We become agents of his Kingdom.
Community
Our deepest, truest longing is for community, a place where we are loved and known. And the church is not the church unless it can satisfy that longing,
[In light of Jesus’ commands in Jn. 13.34-35] It is the large Sunday gathering that bears the burden of proof in calling itself church.
[In light of Jesus’ commands in Jn. 13.34-35], Finding and sustaining this kind of covenant community, then, is tantamount to planting a church. It is actually easier to build a building and gather some people for worship than it is to forge this kind of spiritual family.
Any place where one can go and remain anonymous is not a witnessing church.
Trying to become a community can be an elusive quest. Instead, the best way to bond with people, to build a sense of community or family, is to pursue something else together. [If you and I are passionate about the same thing,] we are comrades in arms, fighting on the front line of the same struggle. if you never do anything for me, I will still feel that bond with you.
Mission
Jesus preached about the Kingdom of God. He promised to set it up by building a church, an assembly of his people who knew they gathered, cooperated and existed in order to fulfill his purpose in the world.
Jesus did not intend to build a church so that we would have a safe place to raise our children or a ready made group of friends to protect and define our lives. The mission of God is given a church, not the other way around. We exist for something more than gathering and growing. Even disciple making is only a part of his mission for his church.
Mission is not something we add to our churches. It is a part of what makes us the church. To exist as something without a white hot commitment to the mission of God to the world is to exist as something other than his church.
There are large gatherings of people all over the world who own a building and have paid good money for a sign that says “church” on the front of it. But unless it meets the minimum requirements for being the church–worship, community and mission–the building and sign does not make them the church. It doesn’t make them something bad either. They just lack the power and witness that Jesus intended.
[The goal of church planting] cannot be to simply gather disaffected Christians, but instead to ask the revolutionary question, “Where is the church needed but not present?”
A church is not something that is planted, but emerges from the seed of mission….When there are large sums of money, method and institutional expectation on our shoulders, we are tempted to cut the corner of mission and simply gather Christians.
Simple. Church. 