Church is not a program, a building, or a ministry.

It is a collection of people intending to live like Jesus, while doing life with eachother.

Sometimes we forget that…

No matter what flavour of church we attend it is all to easy to prioritise the responsibilities, programs and traditions that once made it great, even when they no longer serve their intended purpose.

That’s why sometimes we need to pause and ask ourselves some hard questions.

• Why do we have so many members and so few disciples?
• What is it about our church culture that pushes people away who really need it?
• How can we make church sustainable?
• Why is there a pattern of young leaders burning out?
• Why are so many capable people refusing to commit to leadership?

We have all served heavily in local church leadership so we have been observing these challenges for years, the question is, what does it look like to address these issues? How can we get church to be what it is meant to be?

What we DON’T want

We have all seen friction in churches when two groups disagree and ultimately split, this is exactly what we want to avoid. So we are approaching the problem in a completely different way.

We call it “The Outflow”.

At its core this is an experiment. Run by ATT for the benefit of local churches.

We want to take all the things we have learned and the ideas we have developed in the podcast over the last five years and apply that to “church” and see what happens.

The experiment will consist of two parts

1. A monthly event that is designed to be a visitor friendly testbed  for  learning what kind of program best meets the needs of the community we are trying to serve.
2. Small groups that journey together in the intervening time to do precisely what we do each week: Have the conversations you wish you could have at church.

How does it benefit local churches?

We want to share anything we learn in the process, it is our hope that our local churches (and maybe others!?) may steal as many of our ideas as possible to become more effective missional communities without having to go through all the trial and error.

While our findings may only be relevant in communities that look similar to our own, we hope to create a testing model that you could use in any culture or community to find the fit for your area.

Why are you telling me this?

We want you on board with us. Depending on which part of this interests you you can do that in three ways

• Give us any feedback or encouragement, we will happily read it!
• Interested in starting up an Outflow Small Group
• If you are in church leadership and you want your church to participate in the experiment with us

If any of the above resonates with you, send us a message below.