Verges

a Biblical thought...
My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn't know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can't know him if you don't love. (1 John 4:7-8)

a Book thought...
If you study the Bible and it doesn’t lead you to wonder and awe, then you haven’t studied the Bible. (p34 Bell)
a Dave thought...

I came across this great interview on http://www.leadershipjournal.net/ with Pator David Gibbons, pastor of NewSong in California. David has deliberately turned his 4000 member megachurch into a 100 smaller congregations he calls verges. Here are some of his wise words...

I visited other churches and discovered that the Evangelical Covenant denomination there had 4,000 people in roughly 400 churches. It hit me. Back home NewSong had about 4,000 in four congregations. I saw four churches with 4,000 people versus 400 churches with the same number of people, and the question I felt God posing to me is, Who's stronger?
The four hundred churches. You could knock any one of them out, and the rest would keep going. So much of our default protocol is centralized and built around one leader.

Most verges would be 30 to 100. That size has a lot of power especially for young adults, because they want intimacy but they also want energy of a larger group.
Something as small as a house church is very fragile, not sustainable in many cases. And if you look at how modern armies and special forces move, they work in units of three, 12 through 30, and about 300. My guess is the biggest movement in churches of the future will be among those 30 to 300.

We call them verges, short for convergence, because they are a convergence of the best features of a small and a large church. I believe this size is going to be the most effective in many places around the world.

From the beginning of NewSong, we had a dream of planting a church in every major urban center in the world. But the form we were trying to replicate was the megachurch model. Of course, to have a megachurch, you have to have a megaleader.

Verges to me sound a lot like corps, maybe The Salvation Army model is coming back in vogue.

Just a thought.