Introducing RePLACING Church—Our First Podcast Partnership!

For almost three years, The V3 Movement has been providing top notch articles on Church Planting and the Missional Life. We’re excited to move into a new arena, audio, with our new partner Ben Katt of the RePLACING CHURCH podcast.

We need your help to get the word out about this podcast! Tell your friends, and subscribe and review on iTunes.

Meet Ben Katt

Hello Friends of the V3 Movement!

In light of the new partnership between the RePlacing Church Podcast and the V3 Movement, I want to take a moment to introduce myself.
First things first: I’m a follower of Jesus, a husband to Cherie, and a dad to Evie, Jackson, and Zara. My family lives in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood along Aurora Avenue where we share life with some really inspiring and resilient friends. I am part of the Thresholds Community, a fabulous team of people that helps form leaders and communities. I love karaoke, Pearl Jam, and the Green Bay Packers. I like my salsa spicy, coffee strong, and beer hoppy.

Learning to Love Local

I started the RePLACING CHURCH Podcast last January, but my work of re-placing the church, of inviting and challenging followers of Jesus to embed themselves and live in proximity with one another as the church in their neighborhood, began much earlier!
A decade ago, Cherie and I left the Great Lakes region and arrived in Seattle for a church internship. I had passed through seminary and denominational processes, church planter assessments, and church planting bootcamp. According to the tests, I was a visionary, a communicator, a Type A leader. And so the the stage was set for me to launch an attractional, Sunday event-centered church plant, right?
But, as it turned out, the Spirit had been replacing that idea for some time. Work with kids in an inner city elementary school and migrant workers on a Michigan fruit farm, a summer stay in a rural Mexican village and a year of weekly (charismatic!) prayer gatherings in college, and experiences in an intentional living community and community coffeehouse were preparing me for another expression of church.
And then, on top of all that, a neighborhood summoned me: I fell in love with Aurora Avenue on the east edge of Greenwood in Seattle, an old stretch of state highway lined with fast food joints, used car lots, and run down motels; a place where many neighbors are unhoused, exploited through prostitution, enslaved by substance addiction, and abandoned to mental illness.

Planting a Place-Based Church

In 2007, informed by life experiences and contextual realities, Cherie and I began the work of cultivating Awake Church, a neighborhood church expression along Aurora Avenue in Seattle, one of the least churched cities in the country. While we gathered on Sundays from day one (when there were 10 of us in the back of a sketchy coffee shop), our focus has always been to follow Jesus in the neighborhood as we live in proximity to one another. As a result, in 2011, Awake launched the Aurora Commons, a neighborhood living room and resource center where I served as the founding Executive Director through 2014.
Over the years, in the spirit of Jeremiah 29, the Awake community has been committed to “seeking the peace and prosperity” of Aurora-Greenwood. We’ve rented and bought homes, planted gardens, gathered, grieved, shared countless meals, run a transitional housing initiative, created art, partied, protested exploitation, prayed, run a neighborhood news site, played at the park, empowered leaders and so much more. It’s just getting started! Most Sunday mornings you can find us gathered for worship in the back of a Chinese restaurant on Aurora Avenue. At the end of 2015, I concluded my time as Lead Pastor of Awake, but my family and I remain an active part of this neighborhood church expression.
As soon as I began place-based “church planting,” I realized how critical it was to connect with other like-hearted practitioners. And so, in 2010, along with Tim Soerens and Paul Sparks, I co-founded the Parish Collective, which has grown into a network of hundreds of neighborhood-rooted faith communities in neighborhoods throughout the United States and Canada, and co-created the Parish Collective’s annual Inhabit Conference. In 2014, I launched Cultivating Parish, a Seattle-area network for leaders of neighborhood church expressions in the Seattle area, and before that I led the Seattle-area Leadership Development Network with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, the denomination in which I am an ordained minister.
Last year, as I reflected on the past decade of cultivating community as a neighbor, church planter, pastor, and nonprofit executive director, and on a decade of supporting community creators and church planters through coaching, training, and connecting, I sensed that God was calling me into a new phase of serving the church. I’ve learned so much about planting neighborhood churches over the years – I’ve made some great decisions, and I’ve failed; casted clear vision, and confused the people I was leading; thrived, and burned out; empowered people to use their gifts, and sometimes forgotten about my own.

Why I Started RePLACING CHURCH

Out of a compulsion to share this experience with others who are bravely cultivating church expressions in their own neighborhoods, and a desire to continue the work of encouraging, empowering, and networking neighborhood-focused leaders and communities, I joined a group called the Thresholds Community and launched RePLACING CHURCH, an initiative through which I coach, train, and consult individuals and groups who are imagining, creating, and leading neighborhood church expressions.
This is where the RePLACING CHURCH Podcast comes in! It is one of the ways that I hope to help, challenge, and encourage church planters and other church leaders as they try to discern how to join the activity of God in their neighborhoods. Each week on the podcast (episodes drop on Tuesdays!), I explore thoughts, share stories, and interview guests at the intersections of spirituality, community, and social change in our neighborhoods. I engage church and neighborhood practices and struggles from all sorts of different angles, such as leadership, community development, vocation, innovation, wellness, justice, and creativity.
[Tweet “The RePLACING CHURCH Podcast helps planters and leaders join God’s activity in their neighborhoods.”] I’m thrilled to now offer the RePLACING CHURCH Podcast as a partner podcast of the V3 Movement, an organization with whom I share a common desire to equip leaders and communities as they seek to join God in the renewal of all things in their particular contexts. I’ve been grateful for my growing friendship with V3 over the past few years, and I’m eager to begin this new phase of collaboration! I also look forward to making new friends as a result of this partnership!
Let me know your thoughts (and rate and review on iTunes!) about the podcast and send any suggested topics my way on Twitter, Facebook, or email at ben@replacingchurch.org.
Godspeed,