The Relaxed Church
Lately, I have heard a repeating phrase that has drawn me to study and speculation. I long to be part of a community of faith that creates playful pathways of healing. If I could walk through a farm full of flowers, talking with a group of people with a cup of coffee and a freshly made piece of sourdough with butter and Vegemite, as my church of choice, I would. But, yeah, I know it’s not about people, and I have allergies, so…
We spent a summer in the wine region of Stellenbosch with my husband’s Ouma, and I have been longing for that kind of experience of God’s presence ever since. Religion brings rules and a sense of needing to be good enough to encounter God’s grace.
What if ministry were comparable to a regenerative farm, one that was sustainable, nurturing, compassionate and kind?
Christians, in my experience, have often been the most unkind people. In their desire to be good, judgment surfaces in every corner of every conversation. This desire for domination, control and submission floats to the surface in many faith communities I have contributed to. The goal of sustainability and care is often misunderstood in the desire for public notoriety, appearance and success.
The word comes from regenerare — to bring forth again what was born before. To restore life to what has lost it. To make new what has become old, depleted, or dead. A rebirth. I believe the new church emerging is facing a clear decision to lean into a season when the old wineskin is to be left behind, and to establish a new presence in the community. In a world of trying hard to gain approval, a regenerative ministry relaxes into presence, creativity, encounter, hospitality, belonging, and healing.
What if this were the church on the corner of our neighbourhood cul-de-sac?
Jesus, whom I encounter throughout the New Testament, was the most relaxed figure in history. He wasn’t flexing his power and discounting the voice of the vulnerable. He knelt and washed feet; he allowed expensive perfume bottles to be broken; he spoke in parables instead of harsh dictation; and he was a man of the underdog.
The relaxed church is not a church that cares less.
The relaxed church is not lazy and unfocused on mission; in fact, it’s the opposite.
It is a church that has finally stopped trying to earn what was always freely given and, in that freedom, has become the most genuinely alive community in its neighbourhood.
What is alive in your community in this season?
The word relaxed will make some people uncomfortable. It sounds like lowered standards, reduced commitment, and an excuse for less effort. That discomfort is worth sitting with because it reveals exactly how deeply the performance economy has shaped not just our leadership, but our theology of quiet regeneration. Quietness is not about a lack of purpose; it is a humble and modest existence focused on honouring God and living in harmony with others.
“And to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.” — 1 Thess 4:11-12
We have confused striving with faithfulness. We have confused urgency with anointing. We have confused busyness with fruitfulness. And so the idea of a church that relaxes feels, to the performance-trained mind, like failure.
But look at what this church is relaxing into.
Not mediocrity or indifference. Presence. Creativity. Encounter. Hospitality. Belonging. Healing.
These are not lesser things than program, strategy, and growth metrics. They are the things the program was always supposed to produce and rarely does, precisely because striving for them kills them. You cannot strive your way into a genuine encounter. You cannot program your way into belonging. You cannot manufacture healing through effort.
These things arise. They emerge. They happen in the space created when a community stops performing and becomes consumed by the presence of God.
What does the church need to relax from?
It is relaxing to be free from the need for external approval. Just scroll through a few churches’ Instagrams and their weekly newsletters. Event bias, looks like achievement, but the testimonies of individual transformation have always been the essence of God’s blessing upon a community.
The approval-seeking church shapes its worship to be attractive. It’s preaching to be engaging. Its programs to be relevant. Its building is impressive. None of these things is wrong in itself. But when they are driven by the anxiety of not being enough, by the need for the numbers to validate the calling, they produce a church that is performing rather than being, that is attracting rather than belonging, that is impressive rather than present.
The approval-seeking church does something particular to its leaders. It makes them afraid. Afraid of decline, afraid of criticism, afraid of the Sunday when fewer people come, afraid of the year when giving drops. And fear is not a generative force. Fear produces contraction, control, and defensiveness. Anxiety is crippling leaders, and the impact of burnout is endemic.
It does not produce the open-handed, open-hearted, radically hospitable community described in the New Testament. Shame says, ” You must earn your place. The approval economy says: you must grow your numbers. The performance church says: you must justify your existence with evidence of impact.
The relaxed church has heard all of this and chosen a different way to measure itself.
The different measure is this: What is alive in our community right now? What is God speaking directly to us about? Are people becoming more whole? Is there genuine belonging in this community, the kind that holds when things are hard, not just when the worship is good? Is the Spirit moving, even slowly, even on an ordinary Tuesday, even in ways that will never appear in a report? A data model that seeks performance as a success model over discipleship.
How do you measure discipleship?
A clear biblical model I have found of measurement is the fruit of the Spirit. A shift in the way we rate our sermons, elderships and youth calendars.
How kind is our church?
How patient are they waiting in the kids’ church queue?
How generous are they in our neighbourhood?
Here are six thoughts I have been contemplating about the measure of a “Relaxed Church“.
These six things are not a program. They are a posture. They describe the quality of a community that has learned to receive before it gives, to tend before it produces, and to trust that the life of things belongs to God. A relaxed church is not a lazy one.
Have you ever felt less loved in a relaxed house than in an intense one?
PRESENCE
The act of listening deeply with compassion. Before any of the other five become possible, a community must learn to be genuinely present to each other, to the neighbourhood, to God, and to the ordinary moments of ordinary days. Presence is not attendance. You can be in the room and be entirely elsewhere. Deep listening with compassion is the decision to set everything you are carrying aside and give the person in front of you the full weight of your attention. Not to fix them. Not to prepare your response. Simply to be with them in what they are carrying.
How are we going to be present and give attention to the people in our community?
CREATIVITY
In the beginning God created. A regenerative community participates in the ongoing expression of God’s Rhema word. The first thing we are told about God in Scripture is that God creates. We are made in that image, which means we are, by nature, makers. Creativity in the relaxed church is not a department or a program. It is the quality of a community that is free enough to make things, to try things, to fail and try again, without the failure being catastrophic. Creativity is not for consumption; it is for breaking open inspiration in organic, natural ways.
Writing, cooking, gardening, music, story, design, conversation, all of it is participation in the creative nature of God. And creativity cannot survive in a high-stakes approval environment. It requires exactly the kind of freedom that the relaxed church is learning to inhabit.
How creative are you in the act of expression in your community, not in the pursuit of performance at a Sunday gathering?
ENCOUNTER
What happens when presence, hospitality and creativity make space for the unexpected? You cannot engineer an encounter. You can create conditions for it; the table, the meal, the unhurried conversation, the space where something is allowed to unfold rather than being directed toward a predetermined outcome.
The striving church is always moving people forward from visitor to member to volunteer to leader. The relaxed church creates spaces where people can simply be, and in that being, meet each other and, sometimes, meet God in ways that no program could have planned. It is a common ground that draws people into generosity and expression. It is not forced and manipulated. It is a localised enigma of connection and growth. It is the grandmother holding space for the new Mum. It is the neurodivergent finding space for their own expression of worship. It is a quietness that draws conversation and laughter, bringing relief to the grief-stricken.
How recently did you have an encounter with the Divine that made you pause to reflect on your life choices?
HOSPITALITY
The first act of a regenerative community. Before anything can be given, a space must be made. A table must be set. A door must be opened. The Greek word is philoxenia; the love of the stranger. Not love of the familiar. The reason why sourdough became so popular during our lockdown periods is that we long to create sustenance from simple things.
The programming of the local church has become so complex in its effort to become something like a Broadway show. Hospitality in the relaxed church is not a function; it is a living organism that creates a sense of belonging for those who were once strangers.
Hospitality is the quality of a community that is genuinely glad you are here. It is shaped by inclusion and diversity. In a relaxed community, people learn from one another. It has enough interior space to be curious about you rather than to assess whether you will fit. Acceptance is the cornerstone of hospitality. Jesus cooked more fish on the shore than he preached in the synagogue. The essence of hospitality is the love of the one who does not yet belong, until belonging is made.
How long has it been since you sat with food after a church service and listened to the story of another?
BELONGING
The fruit of presence, creativity, encounter, and hospitality tended to grow over time. Belonging cannot be produced quickly. It is the fruit of repeated, ordinary, unhurried presence over months and years, the same faces in the same place, the accumulated weight of small kindnesses that become the thing holding a community together when the hard seasons come.
The striving church is always chasing the next growth curve. The relaxed church tends the people who are already there — slowly, patiently, with consistent attention that builds the deep roots of real community. Belonging grows in the gaps between the programmes, in the conversations after the service, in the friendship that develops when two people keep showing up to the same place and eventually get to know each other.
How much belonging do you feel in your community?
HEALING
What becomes possible when belonging has become real. Genuine relational healing, the kind that reaches into the places where shame, loneliness, and grief live, always requires safety. Safety and church have not been resonant in my experience.
Safety requires trust. And trust is built slowly, through consistent, non-anxious, non-demanding presence over time. Have you felt safe in the hallways of your church communities?
The striving church is often too urgent to create the safety that healing requires. The relaxed church, the one that is not in a hurry to move you along to the next stage, creates the conditions in which people finally feel safe enough to bring the things they have been carrying alone.
Stories heal. And stories can only be told in communities that are present enough to hear them.
How heard do you feel in your community?
Jesus Relaxed
Jesus moved at a different pace than his disciples expected.
They were always trying to get him to the next place, the next crowd, the next opportunity. He kept stopping. For the woman who touched his cloak in a crowd. For the children the disciples were trying to send away. For the one leper who came back to say thank you. For the conversation with Nicodemus that went on most of the night. For Zacchaeus in the tree. When did you last invite someone you didn’t agree with to your house for dinner?
He was not in a hurry. And his unhurriedness was not passivity or lack of urgency. He knew exactly what he was doing and where he was going. It was something more like what the Psalms call selah, a pause, a rest in the music, a moment of stillness in the midst of the song.
Mark 6:31 “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”
Jesus said this to his disciples after they returned from ministry. Not: debrief the outcomes and plan the next campaign. Not to spend time reviewing the number of people sitting in pews, reviewing the parable told, or scolding the youth pastor over the number of people in connect groups.
Come away. Rest. Be with me in a quiet place. The work will still be there. The crowds will still be there. But first, rest. A relaxed church. A holiday kinda pastor. The one who sits around the fire, who wants to be with his people, not try to escape them.
This is the Jesus model for leadership. Not the driven, scalable, metrics-focused model the contemporary church has largely adopted. The unhurried, present, relationally rooted model of a teacher who ate with people, walked slowly, asked good questions, and trusted that fruit would come from the quality of the connection rather than the quantity of the output.
What the Wild Ones Are Looking for…
The next generation has been raised in a world of relentless performance and approval-seeking. Social media has made the pursuit of approval structural, built into the architecture of daily life, quantified in real time, and impossible to ignore. They don’t want your programs. They don’t like your sermon and bad jokes. They want your honesty and attention. Many of the young people leaving the church are not leaving because they have stopped believing. They are leaving because the church feels like one more performance environment in a life that already has too many.
They are not looking for a better program. They are not looking for more relevant content. They are not looking for a hipper brand or a more engaging speaker. They laugh at your social media.
They are looking for a community where they are known by name, not managed by a program. Where their questions are welcomed rather than managed. Where faith is visible in how people treat each other on an ordinary Wednesday, not just in what is said from a stage on Sunday. The greatest gift to the relaxed church is a personal text or phone call, not another WhatsApp group.
The relaxed church is a counter-cultural gift to this generation. Not because it asks less of them, it may ask more, in the sense of deeper commitment, deeper vulnerability, deeper investment in a real relationship. But it asks without the approval economy attached. I recently spoke to a pastor and said to them, ” What if the church spent the same amount of time on creating social media posts that they did at tables with their community?
What if the church went dark overnight on social media and invited people back into environments through direct invitations and referrals from conversations in their neighbourhood? What if we went gorilla marketing and truly built an Acts community? A local buy nothing page, where we swapped, gifted and gave from our lives in a way that created neighbourhood hubs.
It says: you do not need to perform your faith here. You do not need to have the right answers, the right emotions, or the right spiritual experience. You do not need to be further along than you are. You just need to show up. And we will be here when you do.
A Tapestry Across the Neighbourhood
The regenerative church is not a building, a service, or a brand. It is a tapestry woven from many threads, each one essential, each one contributing colour, texture, and strength. Pull one thread out, and the whole is diminished. No thread is more important than another. They are simply different. And the tapestry holds together not because one thread is in charge but because they are woven together. The power structures of the church must be renewed in this season.
This tapestry spreads across the neighbourhood. It is not contained within a Sunday service, a church building, or a denomination. It is present in the Tuesday morning cafe, in the meal brought to the family who just had a baby, in the conversation at the school gate, in the elderly woman who is visited every Thursday, in the young man who is welcomed to a table where he had never expected to belong.
The regenerative church does not bring God into the neighbourhood. It recognises that God is already there; already moving, already present in the hunger and the loneliness and the searching, and it joins that movement rather than trying to manage it.
Acts 2:46-47 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
The growth was not a result of strategy. It was a result of presence; the presence of God moving through a community of people who were genuinely available to each other and to their neighbours. They broke bread. They were glad. They were sincere. They had favour with all the people. And the Lord added to their number.
The Lord added. Not the leadership team. Not the growth strategy. Not the metrics of the world. Jesus.
In a world of trying hard to gain approval, a regenerative ministry relaxes into presence, creativity, encounter, hospitality, belonging, and healing. And in that relaxing, it becomes the most genuinely alive community in its neighbourhood.
What if God were saying, “Stop trying so hard…”
Hey Church, calm down.
