At a concert I was at the other night, the headlining act came on stage, and was very good… they definitely had their act together. The singer had this great stance in the middle of the stage, and was nailing the vocals. At acoustic breaks in the songs, stagehands would bring an acoustic out for the 8 bars of the break for either the bassist or the guitarist to play during the low-key part of the song, and it was very slick. The drummer had his chops down, and would bounce the sticks off of the drums rather regularly, catch it, and keep going.

The performance was really, really good, and I was quite enjoying it.

Then some things seemed to go wrong… the audio never completely cut out, but things started sounding a little different, some of the effects going on cut out, I could tell that they were using some backing tracks that had quit working, and while they kept playing, you could tell the band was distracted.

The next song, the guitarist came out to start, and then kind of stopped. Awkward. And then the singer came out and apologized, that they were having technical problems, and they couldn’t give the performance that we had paid for, but that they’d finish the set with an acoustic.

And dramatically, things were far more amazing for the second half of the show. Rather than a huge production, suddenly it was one guy on a guitar and two guys singing. You could hear the emotion in their voices far better. It was much more moving, more authentic. It was real.

Yet the singer, after each song, kept apologizing. He kept talking about how sorry they were, and that people backstage were doing they best they could to get things fixed.

As a musician, I get it. You work hard to design a great performance, and it’s disappointing to not be able to share all of that hard work.

But the simple expression of the songs, with basic instrumentation and raw vocals, was far better, and nothing to apologize for. I left with a far higher appreciation for the band and their talent, but more importantly, the messages of the songs.

How often do we do this in our own lives? We work hard on the outer performance, how things appear, and prop that up with a lot of stuff in the background that can fall apart at any time.

What if we simply lived out an expression – with both the good and the bad stuff visible to those around us – and let our faith, our love, and our hope pour out by that expression of the life within? How much more does the expression of Christ’s life, through us individually and collectively, speak grace and mercy to those around us, rather than our religious performance?

I’m not just talking about music and worship services, either. We perform in our daily lives… that’s the kind of thing that “religion” encourages. Rather than being real, we choose to be someone that others expect us to be, instead of living out the life that Christ freely provides.

Ironically enough, one of the songs in the acoustic set was a cover of “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. “Follow your heart, Lord, and nothing else… be a simple kind of man.” Amen, Ronnie, well said.

In a few days, we will have been living in Gainesville for six months. Like most things in life, the time has passed very quickly – it seriously feels like a week ago that we moved here. Having unpacked boxes and an unsold house doesn’t help that feeling, but even without those things, this time has just blown by.

Life in Gainesville is really pretty great. The kids are in a great charter school – eighteen students per grade, and these teachers are amazing. Life here is generally slower than in the Atlanta suburbs – people actually go the speed limit for the most part, especially in those flashing-yellow-light school zones.  The weather is awesome, though I’m sure I’ll be complaining come summertime.

All of that is like extra icing on the cake, though. What has made this time really amazing is what we’ve been doing with the church here. It’s hard to look back and see a night and day difference from where the community is now versus where it started, but there’s something that has grown among us that none of us would deny.

One of the benefits to how this group has been planted is that with most of us having moved here for this, we have far fewer ties to distract us from community life. While it’s important to be able to guide people out of those distractions and into a focus on the church body, I’m also learning that it is far more important to begin with a group that is absolutely and entirely singularly focused on Christ, and the sense that the church is his physical expression on the earth, and worthy of our full attention. Once you have that established, guiding newcomers into an appropriate focus on community life is far easier to do.

The other thing that has been very sweet is meeting, and being in community with, many different people with similar stories. How they came to Christ, but also how they struggled with the institutional church and how they came to a realization that they would have to leave institutions behind, but also making the decision to leave family and friends behind to pursue it. Nearly everything we’ve felt or had to deal with along the way is mirrored in other people here.

What we’ve found most encouraging, though, is the fierceness and intentionality of sharing a revelation of Christ that is going on here. As I’ve stated before, we’re being planted by leaders for whom this is not a new experience – they understand the necessity of a mind-blowing revelation of Christ, and they know how to share it. We are incredibly blessed to have these leaders among us. While the sacrifices of moving here were – and still are – very great, the blessings that we have experienced have made it worth doing ten times over.

Welcome to the new blog…   derekmooney.com.  Sounds narcissistic, I know, but in reality that’s all anyone’s blog is.  It’s all about me here – or, at least, it’s about whatever I want it to be about.

I moved everything for a few reasons.  First of all, the name showmethemooneys.com was originally imagined as a multi-family site, focusing primarily on my siblings and I, sharing family news, etc.  I probably had that idea a couple of years too soon, because nobody was interested in blogging at the time, and by the time they got interested, I had already taken this blog on as purely mine.  Which is fine.  I’ll resurrect showmethemooneys.com if/when Amy decides to blog (the name was her idea, after all).  The name makes sense as a family update site, which I’ve never really put a lot of effort into that.  In the meantime, all the old links should still work.

The reason I moved the blog now was because Blogger was removing FTP publishing, which I had been using for nearly five years to publish my blog to my own domain.  I didn’t want to move to a blogspot domain, and then move again.  I had already been considering re-purposing this blog a bit, as well as making the jump to WordPress.  I figured that now is as good time as any, and it was actually far easier than I had feared, thanks to the amazing tools and plugins available for WordPress.

As far as shifting the purpose of the blog, I intend to post less frequently about politics.  I haven’t posted much here about politics in the past year mainly because Facebook and Twitter both provide a better way for me to make smaller comments.  I might make longer comments on here from time to time, but it’ll be far less often.  My viewpoint on politics haven’t shifted, but perhaps my priorities have.  If you want to hear my thoughts on politics, Facebook is probably your best bet (www.facebook.com/derekmooney/).

The reason to re-purpose this blog is because I intend to post far more frequently about what’s been happening with us here in Gainesville, Florida, and our experiences with Frank Viola, Milt Rodriguez, and the rest of the amazing people God has led here to be a part of this.  The past six months have been nothing like we expected, and everything we imagined.  I’ll post more about that later on, but for now, suffice it to say that a new purpose for the blog deserved a new name, and a new look.

I even seriously considered cleaning some old posts out, moving them to another archive blog, etc.  I decided against it.  I’m still proud of most of what I’ve written, even if I look back now and see some misguided priorities here and there.  No matter, that’s the story of my life.  In some ways, the blog is as much an archive of my life for others to read down the road, for better or for worse.

A couple of technical things:

• If you’re subscribed via a feedreader, please update your feed settings to pull from feeds.feedburner.com/derekmooney.  The old feed link will work for awhile, but at some point I plan to try to redirect it and eventually shut it down.
• I installed an iPhone plugin, so give it a try.  The wpTouch plugin is really nifty.
• I do plan on updating the theme at some point.  It’s somewhat low on my list of priorities right now.
• I’m going to be working on a blogroll – if you’d like me to add your blog/website to the links section, add me to yours (please link to www.derekmooney.com, with either my name as the title, or “Dig in Deep”), and leave a comment with a link to your blog.

If you haven’t yet heard the news, it’s big – we’re moving to Gainesville, Florida in August. This comes as a surprise to just about everybody, and as a shock to some, but this is something we strongly feel God is calling us to do.

First, I’ll get the easy stuff out of the way. I am not changing jobs. I’ve been working at home for the past few months again, and I will be working at home from Gainesville, as well. Hearing that, people then ask why we’re moving to Gainesville. I usually give them the “short” answer – there is a church group starting there that we strongly feel called to be a part of. The frequent follow-up question is whether I’m going to be on staff at this church. Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

God has been pulling us away from institutional Christianity for a few years. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you’ve seen the process somewhat. It started when we began to feel that there was “more” to church than what we were experiencing, and left the church we had been a part of for five years (and the denomination that I had been a part of my entire life).

Part of that process put us into a house church. If you’re interested, you can read a good recap of my journey up to that point. While it was far more relational, and was a step along the journey God had in mind for us, He was also leading us to something far more organic than what we were experiencing there.

What do I mean by organic? There are many ways to describe that. One way to say it is this:

[It is a] church that is born out of spiritual life instead of being constructed by human institutions and held together by religious programs. Organic church life is a grassroots experience that is marked by face-to-face community, every-member functioning, open-participatory meetings (as opposed to pastor-to-pew services), nonhierarchical leadership, and the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ as the functional Leader and Head of the gathering. (see “What is an ‘Organic’ church?” at housechurchresource.org)

The other key to an organic church is that of apostolic leadership. This style of leadership functions by providing a glorious revelation of Christ as a foundation, assisting the church in growing into every-member functioning, and watching out for problems that will inevitably arise. Apostolic leadership instructs the church in how to live by divine life, how to experience the fellowship of the divine community, and prepares and equips others for apostolic work. These principles are not based on modern or ancient ideals of leadership, but on the foundation of how Christ trained the apostles and how they trained their successors to spread and express the Kingdom of God.

Many house churches lack a commitment to organic church life. Fewer still have any kind of apostolic leadership or even a desire for one.

One of the problems we have run into is that we feel very isolated when it comes to our view of the church. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining when I say this, but our efforts to share with others what God has revealed to us has largely fallen on deaf ears. I now realize that this is because we are sharing from a theoretical and intellectual perspective rather than from a perspective based on experience. Basically, we cannot create something that we have not yet experienced.

Which leaves us only one choice: to go somewhere to experience it.

The church group in Gainesville is being started by Frank Viola along with some of his other co-workers. Frank Viola is the author of many books on organic church life, including Reimagining Church and From Eternity to Here, among others, as well as a new book coming out later this year that takes the theology of his existing books and describes more practical examples.

We met Frank personally late last year, and as we were sharing our struggles and thoughts, he invited us to come and be a part of this group in Gainesville, FL. There are several people moving to Gainesville from around the country, some of whom we have already met, who have had experience with organic churches. Some of them have been involved with planting and equipping organic churches around the country.

We initially resisted, not even really taking it seriously. Moving to be a part of a “house church” sounds a little crazy. I also had my jaw surgery and that kept us from really thinking about it much.

But God didn’t leave it alone, and He seemed to close pretty much all the other doors. Nobody we knew was really interested in the kind of thing that God had laid on our hearts. Even the group that would have represented the best fit here wasn’t going to work, for a couple of reasons. And as our interactions with Frank and others increased, and we understood more of what God designed the church to be, we yearned more for an opportunity to experience it.

From a practical perspective, why move? We love this house. We like the area. Our kids were in a great private school. All of our close family is nearby. We have lots of friends in the area. We have a lot of history here. Things are comfortable, and for the most part, things are great.

But staying comfortable is not a reason to resist God’s call.

We are moving to experience the very thing that God has revealed to us and laid on our hearts. It is not something we can initiate without having first experienced it.

Furthermore, we are not starting something new with our peers, trying to figure this out as we go. We are entering into this with mentors, who have done this before, many times, and who understand the glories and riches of a Christ expressed through divine life. We may be losing proximity to family and friends, but we will be gaining spiritual fathers and mothers, who understand our desire for a church free from religion, free from clergy, free from institutionalism, free from denominationalism, free from legalism, free from pentecostalism, free from evangelicalism, free from passivity, free from treating church like a business, and free from anything other than Christ and Him alone.

And as much as we wish we could experience that here, it has become increasingly clear that we will not have that opportunity.

Sometimes it takes great pain to follow God’s call. It was difficult for Israel to leave Egypt. It was difficult for Israel to leave the wilderness and enter into Canaan. It was difficult for Israel to leave the comforts of Babylon and return to rebuild Jerusalem. But God had a destination in mind for them.

He has a destination in mind for all of us, as well, one that would not just turn us from stones into living stones, but to take these living stones and through divine life form a house within which he can dwell.

How long we will be in Gainesville, and where we will go from there, only God knows. We do know, however, that during our time there we will be trained and equipped, prepared for whatever God calls us to do and wherever He calls us to go.