Extended family (oikos in Greek) is crucial to understanding how God created the church to exist and function and began to explore what might need to start happening in our staff teams and laity if that’s to happen.
I want give some practical handles on how to begin doing this in your context. I promise, this will be short and sweet.
It should also be noted that I didn’t come up with these 6 principles. My good friend Kheld Dahlmann is entirely responsible for these. So here are some principles for creating an oikos:
1) Shared vision (What do we exist for? In other words, in what way is this community going to bring heaven to earth?)
2) Shared resources
3) Extended family (= more than a nuclear family, we’d say a minimum of 15-20 people, max of 50)
4) Mom/Dad (leaders in “fathering” mode)
5) Prayer
6) Common meal
We show this video a fair amount at the Learning Communities that we do, but this is a window into the hunger that our culture has for these kinds of family expressions. It’s a short advert done by Walmart and Coke that one of the current team members in Pawleys led out two years ago with the advertising agency she was with.