Let us agitate a problem for you.
You realize your current leadership systems, structure, and staff can’t get you where you want to go. Surely, you’ve been there. What do you do? If you’re committed to a highly centralized form of the church, you’ve got some limitations to overcome. If you begin to embrace a decentralized paradigm, you can be as creative as the good Lord made you.
Recently, we (the KC Underground) were asked to describe the shifting season we’re currently navigating. If you asked everyone on our team what they thought, they’d all describe it differently. This article will attempt to be a collective voice to where we’ve been and where we see Jesus taking us.
The reason for opening the metaphorical hood is to say, “Our paradigm gave us the freedom to hear the collective voice of the leaders in our network, repent, and together build something new.”
Here’s a little context for us.
We officially launched as an organization almost six years ago. A core group of leaders on the west side of Kansas City was asking questions like, “What would it look like to see our city filled with beauty, justice, and the Good News of Jesus? What would our city look like if every man, woman, boy, and girl could have a repeated opportunity to see, hear, experience, and respond to Jesus in their current network of relationships?”
We began the journey with 72 ordinary people committed to becoming disciple-makers, and three microchurches had already emerged from disciple-making in the harvest. We also had one informal Hub (a team of leaders that equips ordinary people to make disciples in their network of relationships).
Within a year, there was another group of leaders in a different part of the city with a similar heartbeat. But they were looking for a family and some systems and structures that would help them flourish. We locked arms and we were officially at two Hub teams in our city. Then it just kept going. Microchurches were emerging in connection with new Hub teams in different geographic regions in our city or among particular affinities.
Fast forward to today, and there are about 95 microchurches, 10 Hub teams, and about 70 unique networks where leaders are working to see a microchurch emerge. We don’t share the numbers to celebrate the growth, though we thank Jesus for his work through us. We share these details because they add context to the emerging problem we were facing.
As disciple-makers, microchurches, and Hubs have multiplied, the first Hub in Shawnee, Kansas that helped formalize the KC Underground increasingly served as a hub for local missionaries in Shawnee and a “service provider for new Hubs.”
That original team trained the other teams, provided mission and benevolence grants across the network beyond Shawnee, provided media support for the entire network, and other activities that a “Hub of Hubs” provides.
As directors from across our network interacted, we heard a similar theme: “We’re a family, but we don’t really act like one or know each other very well.”
While the original team saw everyone as equally important to writing the city-wide story, it wasn’t coming across that way.
Furthermore, we looked around and realized two things:
- There weren’t enough voices speaking into the formation and direction of the movement. We wanted and needed more diversity in all realms: gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, spiritual giftings, etc.
- If we continued in our current direction, we would most likely stay stuck and miss out on what God had in store.
That informal “Hub of Hubs” service from the Shawnee Hub had been a “trellis” to support the network as it grew. There was a natural progression that was beautiful and brought so much life and joy. That natural progression also created tension, a disequilibrium of power and representation, and confusion on some important points of city-wide collaboration.
We needed a new trellis.
We realized that we needed a new trellis to support the diversity of what has emerged and to see even more creativity and contextualization across our city.
About 18 months ago, we had a team meeting. I said, “Hey, this original Hub needs to die, and we need to form a new team with leaders across the network, and then we need to reemerge as just “one of” the 10 Hubs across this city. I know we already see ourselves that way, but I don’t think everyone else does.”
I said some important things, but all our team heard was, “Hey, we need to die.” Just as a point of coaching, it’s not helpful to start off a suggestion with, “We need to die.”
We did a good bit of grieving. Once we got over the initial sadness that we had led in a way that we never intended to lead (and when we chose other language than “we need to die”), we just began to pray and fast and ask Jesus to show us the way.
We came up with a new idea for a Hubbub.
Yes. That’s an actual word. It means a chaotic din caused by a crowd of people. This perfectly described what we wanted to create… though it was clear we could not use this word long-term.
We started workshopping ideas for what we could create with the different Hub teams around the city. We started meeting with leaders and showed them some drawings of how it could look and how we could be one family of families.
You might already be able to see what we could not see then. The general feedback was, “That’s nice. But you’re doing it again. You’re telling everyone else what you want to create. It’s not that we can’t do it. We’re just not getting a voice in the process. This is not inviting us to be that family of families.”
Back to the drawing board. We just kept praying and fasting and meeting and praying and eating together and praying and generally, just trying to ask better questions.
We began making a shift in earnest in January 2024. We’re eight months into some really difficult, but also unifying work.
In some ways, it’s like we are starting again six years in. We’re actually building a new table and the original founders, if you want to use that language, are just a part of the conversation rather than leading the conversation. That doesn’t mean we’re open to changing our original DNA, our commitment to decentralization, or our commitment to ordinary people making disciples and seeing microchurches emerge. It just means we’re not driving the conversation forward.
While we had ideas and snapshots of what was ahead, we wanted to create a process to benefit from the collective intelligence and insight of all the Hub leaders.
We also knew that we, as the original team, couldn’t lead the process. Doing so would only perpetuate the problem that got us here.
We felt led to find an outside voice to provide consultancy on the process and outcomes of this transition. This would help with insight into organizational dynamics/structure and wisdom in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
After reaching out to several outside organizations, we partnered with the Movement Leaders Collective and an organization called Arrabon for a three-year journey to help us transition to KC Underground 2.0. We invited MLC to help us create the new trellis while guarding our core DNA. Arrabon is helping us upgrade our cultural capacity to become a reconciling community in Kansas City.
We’re right in the middle of year one when most of the work happens. Years two and three are more about iterating and redirecting as we learn.
It’s been crazy hard.
On one hand, you know Jesus is saying, “There’s so much more that can be gained when you let my creativity break in and inform where you’re headed.” On the other hand, there’s all this sadness that you’re “losing something beautiful that was.”
You’re feeling the tension of, “We have to guard our DNA,” with the reality that, “We live in a diverse Metro area that requires all kinds of contextualization, and we need wise people serving leaders of leaders to help them do that well.”
You’re feeling the push and pull of, “We don’t want to be too centralized because we are committed to decentralization, but if we don’t have a team of leaders caring for the flourishing of our Hub teams across this city and helping them be a family, we’re not going to see the flourishing of the greater family in the city.”
We’ve sat in meetings this year, said things that were unintentionally hurtful to each other, and had to walk away and do the hard relational work to say, “I’m sorry I hurt you.” Other people have had to decide if they’re going to show back up to do the work.
One beautiful thing that has helped us through all of this is that Jesus prepped us for this work. We refused to be the apostolic types that we are, where too often we ram some new concept through. We have hit pause several times and adjusted our timeline back because we knew Jesus was saying, “Slow down. I’m not in a hurry, and you don’t have to be either.” (And we’re currently in the process of shifting and adjusting again.)
I’d love to tell you the shift is over, and we have a new team in place. But we don’t. We’ve figured some things out, but we’ve got a long way to go. We do think this new team will help us pull together as a family of families in our city that can demonstrate unity and diversity, which we believe will display Jesus to our city in a unique way.
Here are a few questions to consider about change in your context:
- What transition is the Holy Spirit highlighting for us?
- How can we decenter the typical “loudest voices” (the apostolic, the original leaders, etc.) just being heard and tap into the collective intelligence of as many as possible?
- Who could help us travel this journey? What outside resources do we need?
- How well do information, learning, and conversation flow between our network’s different “nodes”? Where are we on the continuum of “closed” to “transparency” regarding our network? How can we increase the flow of information and the amount of transparency in this transition?
