We Are Church Francis Chan

Working With We Are Church Francis Chan

The book We Are Church Francis Chan talks about is essentially his push to get pastors and churches to stop running ministries like businesses and start building communities where people actually show up for each other. It's not a manual with step-by-step workflows. It's more of a provocation, and if you're looking for a download link or a quick summary, you'll find it scattered across his sermon series and various Bible studies that grew out of the same material. I picked up on this back when I was pastoring a small congregation and honestly found the whole thing both liberating and deeply frustrating. The liberating part was the permission structure. Chan basically gives you an out from the pressure to grow numerically at all costs. The frustrating part was figuring out how to actually implement any of it when your church staff thinks growth in attendance is the only metric that matters.

We Are Church Francis Chan

Here's what most people miss about the framework. Chan isn't arguing against church structures. He's arguing that the primary unit of a healthy church isn't the program, it's the people living life together. The common mistake is to treat "we are church" as a slogan and then run the exact same five programs you were running before, just with different branding. That doesn't change anything. The practical side of this starts with three moves. First, you stop organizing your calendar around events and start organizing it around relationships. Second, you shift resources from external outreach that requires people to drive somewhere to internal investment that happens in living rooms. Third, and this is the part nobody wants to hear, you accept that most of what you're currently doing as a church leader is probably maintenance work disguised as mission, and you cut it down significantly. I ran into a specific problem when I tried to roll this out. We had about forty people in our weekly gathering and I wanted to move them into smaller groups, but the usual small group model didn't work because most of our people had just moved to the area and didn't know anyone yet. They weren't looking for a Bible study, they were looking for friends. So instead of forming traditional small groups, I organized them into neighborhood pods of six to eight people who met on their own streets and shared meals and handled each other's emergencies. No curriculum. No leader training. Just proximity and commitment to show up.

That approach took about three months to stabilize and honestly it felt like chaos in the beginning because there was no clear hierarchy of accountability. People would call me with problems and I'd have to redirect them back to their pod. Some leaders in the congregation thought I was abdicating responsibility. What was actually happening was I was forcing the body to function as a body instead of keeping everyone dependent on the pastor. There's a counter-intuitive thing about this model that bears mentioning. You might think that removing programs and structure would make things loose and inefficient. In practice, the opposite tends to happen within about eight to twelve months. Accountability gets sharper, not looser, because when you're accountable to the people sitting next to you at breakfast instead of an abstract church council, you can't hide. People notice when you're checked out. They also notice when you're in trouble. The downside is that this doesn't scale the way traditional church models do. If you want to open a second location or grow past about sixty to eighty people without fundamentally restructuring again, this approach hits a wall. It works best in communities where people already know each other or where geography naturally creates bonds. If you're in a suburban context where everyone drives everywhere and nobody lives near anyone, you have to intentionally create that proximity through housing decisions or meeting placements, and most churches aren't willing to do that.

For resources, the core content is available through Francis Chan's website and various podcast platforms. There's also a study guide that churches have adapted for group use. If you're looking to implement this practically, I'd suggest starting with just one thing: identify the three people in your church community you're closest to and then ask them to commit to doing life together outside of any church-organized event for ninety days. Everything else builds from there. One more thing that isn't obvious from the book. The title We Are Church Francis Chan isn't really about ecclesiology in the academic sense. It's a critique of how Protestant Christianity individualized faith to the point where people read their Bible alone, attend church alone, and make discipleship decisions alone, and then wonder why everything feels hollow. The solution he proposes isn't another program. It's simply returning to the pattern of the early church where the gathering was the community, not a performance attended by individuals.