Three Key Challenges Facing the Human Race:
• How do we understand and manage life and death as human beings?
• How do we live together despite the significant differences between our world- views and cultures?
• How will we live together on this planet in a way that respects the ecosystem and those who will live after us?
Some ponder these questions and are overwhelmed by futility – what could any one of us do in response to these big questions? Others respond with a passive optimism – that the world will sort itself out on its own.
Yet others see that in Jesus God is moving to meet those needs and heal those hurts – to reconcile all things to God. We feel called to join God addressing the big questions facing the human race.
The Catacomb Churches is an attempt to assist people to discern how God is calling them to participate in God’s healing of the earth and its peoples. We will be a community of formation for and support of ministry in daily life and a community of partners working together to participate in God’s love for the world.
The restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism which has nothing in common with the old but a complete lack of compromise in a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount in the discipleship of Christ. I think it is time to gather people together to do this. . .
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Letter to Karl-Freidrick,
January 14, 1935
The Catacomb churches is a vision to revive the ancient practice of interconnected house churches with a mission to
Call, free, prepare, and support participants in God’s healing and creation of the world.
The Catacomb Churches are neo-monastic house churches each with a distinct focus of leadership and service in the world.
In Jesus, God reveals:
- God is committed to loving and healing the world
- That God won’t stop until all is healed
- God invites us to participate in this healing
- That our participation is one way God heals us
In the early centuries, Christians met in catacombs to bury their dead. In the Catacombs they were free to remember Jesus’ vision for the world and to support each other in living out that vision in the power of God. In the Catacombs they were free to remember they were dead to the larger culture in baptism and freed work to bring healing to that culture. The Catacomb Churches is an attempt to revive the ancient practice of connected house churches and to strive for some clarity about what Jesus was and is doing.
Jesus led people to a deep understanding of what it means to be human in our baptism and to become nonviolent leaders as God’s Way (Reign) breaks into and emerges within our world.
The Catacomb Churches has been authorized by the Northwest Washington Synod of the ELCA (Lutheran) and the Diocese of Olympia (Episcopalian).
The Catacomb Churches are going live in March of 2012 in Snohomish County Washington.
Terry Kyllo can be reached at terry “@” catacombchurches.org
The Catacomb Churches is an open and affirming congregation for all people, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people.
