Podcast | The Summit Fellowships

Avoiding Isolation

It has often been said that among house churches the greatest strength is also the greatest weakness. The strength of the small group church is relationship, flexibility and intimacy. The weakness, of course, is the tendency to become isolated. In this episode I’m going to be talking about the necessity of avoiding the house church “silo” and to be part of the expanding Kingdom of God.

I describe the network of the Summit fellowships as being composed of numerous small group/simple churches which are functionally autonomous (each fellowship is a church). But, in addition, as the term network assumes, each of the small group churches are to be voluntarily interconnected, even interdependent. Over the 30+ year history of the summit community that second descriptive term “voluntarily interdependent” has been, let me say, elusive. But as conditions of the world become more and more unpredictable it may be vital that this limitation be overcome. Moreover, simple churches from multiple geographical areas may find it helpful to participate in an expanded online community.

For that purpose, the Summit community uses a platform called Zulip. It is uniquely capable of facilitating communication within individual fellowships, while allowing multiple, distributed church communities to be interconnected for the purpose of communication, planning, and mutual encouragement. Moreover, as an open source platform Zulip is not tied to for-profit corporate ownership (think Slack, Group Me, Discord and some others).

We invite other small group fellowships, even from different regions, to consider signing on to what I call the, “Online House Church Campus.” Go ahead and drop me a note at info@summithome.org and we can talk about it.