Jason Evans 9 April 2009 General 570 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

We thought it appropriate to address some of the questions that have come up in response our recent update. Feel free to get in touch with us if we do not address any questions or concerns you might have.

Does this mean that the Collective is going to stop?

No. Far from it. As we said in the letter, there a variety of people doing wonderful things now. There are several communities just getting their legs under them. This isn’t dependent on the availability of the Evans’.

Does this mean that you do not believe in paid leadership?

We think that our common Western Christian assumptions of who gets paid for what should be critiqued. But we still think it’s valuable to make people available to coordinate and guide things from time to time. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a couple people take on a small stipend for certain things in the future. But that isn’t Jason and Brooke any longer.

Should I give to something else now?

That is completely up to you. Most people contributing were doing so out of there personal relationship with Jason and Brooke. While they will no longer be available full time, resources will be needed for a variety of projects we have currently and coming up. For example, we would really like to establish a second community house, that in part helps house some of the homeless people in our community. We don’t have the funds to do that currently.

Why didn’t this work?

There’s a lot of ways to probably answer this. We’d argue it did, in a sense. Some of it comes down to the fact that we could not attract funding from the outside very well. We have never been interested in the metrics that qualify most church start-up projects for funding. And we decided not to accept money from groups we felt uncomfortable with theologically. What we did hear time and again was how financially strapped most Christian organizations are. And because of this, they are fearing their demise. Rightfully so. But we also realized from this that it was even more important to simply go back to doing things in a manner that can hopefully show others that there is another way to be the church; one that is sustainable in uncertain times.