The Potter’s House Story:
Let’s start a new Church
Remember when you were 10 years old and you started that after-school club in your parents’ garage? That’s just what we did. Well, sort of . . .
It all began in Corey and Robin’s kitchen in Maple City, Michigan, on a cold and bitter Saturday morning in the winter of 2005. Frustrated by contemporary Christian popular culture and saddened that so many of their friends had negative experiences with Christianity, they asked each other, “What if we started a new kind of church? What would it look like?”
Then came the now-famous ‘Maple City Miracle.’ After consuming some hot and spicy Thai food and spending some time in their respective meditation caves, the two young ministers emerged and simultaneously presented each other with identical sketches of Hildegard of Bingen. In each sketch there appeared seven symbols, which, when deciphered, yielded seven identical principles that they wanted to follow in creating this new church.
They both agreed this new church would have to be:
- Christian and not religiously generic
- Intellectually honest and rigorous
- A progressive stimulus for peace and social justice, consciousness-raising, and general acts of compassion and goodness both locally and beyond
- Grounded in the Good News of God’s grace and love for all people, and not the bad news of shame, guilt, fear, or religious manipulation
- Welcoming of GLBT folks and other historically oppressed groups
- Open to a wide range of worship styles and experiences from a variety of traditions
- Committed to offering healing to a broken and hurting world
The story continues…
And it really took off when they met a guitarist named Doug…
