Christianity Returns To Roots As Cells Replace Churches Worshippers Redefine Community Based On Common Faith

Linda Tirico’s church is in the living room of her Liberty Lake apartment. It’s in a shady corner of Manito Park. It’s two tables pushed together at Starbucks.

In Tirico’s church there is music, prayer, Bible study and communion, just like in the big buildings with stained-glass and steeples.

But there is no robed preacher, no sermon and no collection plate.

“This is not your grandmother’s church,” says the Rev. Flora Bowers, the head of the United Methodist Church in the Inland Northwest and Tirico’s boss. “This is a truly new thing.”

And a truly old thing.

Tirico’s church - CommUnity ConneXians - is much like the earliest Christian churches, where small groups of faithful worshippers met quietly in private homes.

For the past year, Tirico has pioneered the experimental form of worship in the Liberty Lake area on behalf of the United Methodist denomination. Now that the bugs are worked out, she’s ready to show anybody and everybody how to do it.

Tirico knows a lot about normal Christian churches. She was raised and married a Roman Catholic, but left that church after a divorce.

She was sitting in a park one day near her New Jersey home when she met a Methodist minister who was starting a new church.

She became an elder in that fledgling congregation. It took 11 years to gather 350 families and raise $1 million. At the dedication of the new building, she sat in the front pew in shock.

“A million dollars and 350 families,” she moans. “Think of what we could have done.” Then she lists a number of social projects, including starting a new school or building houses.

During that period when she was raising up the new church in New Jersey, Tirico began her studies at Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, N.J. Soon she was focusing her work on small worship groups.

The idea is not entirely new to modern Christians. Catholics and most Protestant denominations have been promoting small prayer groups as a remedy to the distant feeling many worshippers have at large services. Pentecostal and Evangelical congregations are structured so that worshippers gather for large services on Sunday, but also meet in small groups throughout the week.

Tirico has taken the idea one step further.

“Why not remove the pastor completely?” she says. “Get rid of the building. We need to start over with a whole different premise.”

It’s an idea that makes more sense when it is framed in the context of church membership.

Religious denominations, along with civic organizations like the Elks and the Kiwanis, have been bleeding members since the 1960s.

Despite a “spiritual awakening” throughout the nation, mainline Protestant churches remain in crisis. While people may be searching for spiritual truths, sociologists point out that beginning with the baby boomers, each generation is increasingly suspicious and distrustful of large bureaucratic organizations.

To the chagrin of some of her fellow Methodists, Tirico’s church is not about getting people to join the Methodist church. Nevertheless, it was an experiment the Methodist Church in the Northwest was willing to pay for, because of the potential of spreading the Christian message.

“You can spend from now until the day the Kingdom does come and (this generation) is not going to join,” Tirico says. “It’s not about getting members. It’s about getting likeminded people together for God’s work.”

Her goal, she says, is to make it possible for seekers to find God.

That’s how she got from New Jersey to Liberty Lake.

There aren’t a lot of churches in Liberty Lake. One of the fastest-growing areas of the Inland Northwest, the people of Liberty Lake are demographically the least likely to be church members. Many are young (ages 25-45), middle and upper-middle class, well-educated and highly transient.

Although there is no reliable research, Tirico and other pastors estimate that between 50 and 80 percent of Liberty Lake households do not attend church.

The reasons are too numerous to list, said Michael Christensen, assistant professor of spirituality at Drew Theological Seminary.

“The established institution called the church has just about run its course over the last 2,000 years” he says. “It’s time for the next church, the post-modern church.”

That’s a tough message for the dwindling group of people who continue to find comfort at traditional churches. Christensen points out it will be necessary to provide traditional worship as long as people continue to find it meaningful.

But eventually a new version of church will replace the old one.

Rather than being centered around a building, it will be centered around a community, Christensen says. Thanks to computers and the Internet, people are bound together less by physical spaces and more by ideas and goals.

Rather than being centered around one charismatic leader - a pastor - cell churches will run on the gifts and the callings of all the members, he says. Congregations often fall apart when the pastor leaves.

Rather than meeting on Sunday mornings, the group meets whenever it is most convenient.

“Why do we make people choose between soccer and church, or even sleeping in and church?” Tirico asks. “We tell people if it’s important, you’ll make it a priority. But that oversimplifies the complexity of life for most families.”

Diane Skalitzky, 48, works for Merck Medco Rx Services in Liberty Lake. For most of her life she was an occasional Christian, going to church mostly on Christmas and Easter.

After joining Tirico’s pilot group last year, Skalitzky said she experienced unprecedented spiritual growth.

“It makes you go deeper into what’s really going on,” she says. “Everything becomes less routine because you are giving as well as receiving.”

Claire Ryman, 17, joined the group because she wanted to share a spiritual experience with her father. She is a devout member of the youth group at First Presbyterian. But Sunday morning worship “just doesn’t cut it” for her father, she says.

Although she was skeptical at first, she has become a proponent of Tirico’s approach.

“You end up sharing stuff on a spiritual level with your parents,” she says incredulously. “That doesn’t happen very often in a conventional church.”

If the small groups of the future - or cell churches - follow Tirico’s model, they will be forever changing. New members will always be welcome, she says. As the groups grow beyond 20 members, they will break apart.

And instead of pledging money to pay the salary of a clergy and the upkeep of a building, each cell group will come up with projects or charities they want to support. They may build houses for poor people or send food, clothing and money the Third World.

“There’s an entire culture in this country that does not know what community looks like,” she says. “It is becoming increasingly urgent to change that.”