Brian Proffit interviewed Tony and Felicity Dale, co-authors of The Rabbit and The Elephant about rabbit churches and elephant churches. For ease of reading, the responses below include both of them—which makes sense because they seemed easily able to complete and complement each other's thoughts. Check out their Web site here.
You made the very significant move to leave England and come to Texas. So you answered that call to minister in a strange land.
Yes, "strange" being the operative word. It was an adventure. Coming over from England 22 years ago was a challenge... us and 4 kids and the 12 boxes the airline would let us bring aboard. Felicity used to say she felt there was more cultural adjustment coming here to the States than when she went with me out to Taiwan. It seems as though the British and Americans are two people separated by a common language.
It seems to me that The Rabbit and The Elephant cuts at the heart of something happening in the church today. Middle-sized churches are struggling, while we see megachurches growing and house churches gaining momentum. In the book you talk about the great ability of rabbits to reproduce quickly, but it's also true that a single elephant has an enormous impact on the world around it. Are rabbit churches always better than elephant churches?
That sounds like a loaded question! I hope we've been able to communicate that we owe a huge debt to traditional churches. That's why we normally describe them as "legacy" churches. We really want to honor and bless everything that's been formative in our background. In my own case, my parents were missionaries and their parents were missionaries. There's a very strong tradition of being blessed by having been brought up within the legacy framework. So I think the question isn't whether one is better than the other. I think it's very evident that God is using both. As you've already pointed out, it's fascinating that there's tremendous growth among the megachurches still, and there's also tremendous growth going on in this simple organic church movement. I don't think it's a question of better, I think it's a question of different and of trying to understand what the Holy Spirit is doing in terms of reaching a postmodern generation for Himself.
Increasingly, church as we know it in the West has become irrelevant to the society around it. And the very fact that it's pretty much hidden away in its cathedrals has continued to contribute to the growing irrelevancy. Especially in the cities—I don't think that's as true in small-town America, but especially in the cities. So in that context, we tend to think what is happening out there? And one of the things we find so encouraging as we look out on this extraordinarily rapid spread of simple church movements is that this clearly isn't a man-orchestrated thing. Take folk like ourselves who are supposedly fairly well known—we'd be astounded if even 1% of people who are involved in house churches had ever heard of us or read anything we have done. The Holy Spirit is just doing something out there, and it's multiplying spontaneously all over the place.
What we're finding too is that there's increasing cooperation in some places between the mega and the micro. And we're exploring ways in which we can work together to impact our community.
Tell me more about that, because that's something I had not heard before. It seemed to me that there's more of a divide.
Let me put it in context. As you look at movements in terms of what's gone on, not just in the last hundred years, but throughout Christianity, typically whatever happened last tends to become a persecutor of whatever happens next. That always seemed to us a tragedy in church history. So very much one of our prayers over the past ten years has been, "Lord, if you're going to allow what's happening in our churches to take off, please let us from our side really be seen to bless and give credit to where we've come from. And please let those places we've come from find a way to bless and release us into what you seem to be leading us into." And I think one of the remarkable things over the last ten years as we've watched things begin to explode across the landscape is the remarkably high degree of trust. I don't mean to say that there hasn't been any criticism in one direction or the other—there sadly has been some. But the vast majority of people on both sides of that equation have been very open to listen to, and explore with, each other.
Now more recently with an intentionality that we'd never initially intended, we felt like the Lord was saying, "Find a way to bring the very big and the very small together." So we reached out to the folks at Northland in Orlando where Joel Hunter is the pastor, and to the folk at Austin Stone where we are, because we knew that in both of those contexts the Lord had already been speaking to the very big churches about finding ways to cooperate and work with house church movements. And Joel Hunter, a couple of years prior to that, had reached out to us and said the Lord had spoken to them and told them to find ways to bless the house church movement—and to say that their church and their resources were at our disposal, what could they do to help us? What came out of that was they produced a video for us based around one of Felicity's books called the Getting Started manual. That video course has been used all around the world, particularly in mission situations to help people understand the house church movement.
With that background, 18 months ago we reached back out to them and said, "Why don't we just get together to compare notes and wait on the Lord." And out of that is growing some really interesting cooperative stuff.
Next week we'll hear some more about that really interesting stuff!
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