The Greenhouse Network is a decentralized, released, growing family of missional leaders and outposts (non-profit organizations, social impact projects, missional communities, businesses, and church plants) that exists to provide relationship between missional outposts and church plants for sharing resources, provide support for missional leaders, provide access for emerging leaders to existing social and material capital, and provide momentum for the regional multiplication of missional outposts and church plants.

The Greenhouse Network had its beginnings in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, a distressed community northwest of Pittsburgh along the Ohio River. The disinvestment of the steel industry in the 1980s left three generations of poverty with its attendant social challenges. In 2005, a youth development organization called Aliquippa Impact was birthed out of a 100+ year old Christian and Missionary Alliance Church called The Gospel Tabernacle that had begun to experience renewal. As that organization grew, served the community, and developed young and emerging leaders, lessons were learned about joining Jesus in mission among those experiencing poverty. Over the next decade, a family of non-profit organizations, social impact projects, missional communities, businesses, and church plants began to multiply in Aliquippa and throughout the Pittsburgh region with a special focus on post-industrial river communities. 

This movement remained almost entirely organic until leaders in the movement formed it into The Greenhouse Network in 2018. At this time, an incubator called the Greenhouse Lab was initiated at the relational center of the Network to provide a service platform (marketing support, financial support, coaching, and training) to support network leaders, help people imagine and start missional initiatives, and provide pathways for the poor to create their own businesses.

Listen to Episode 21 of the podcast and access the show notes below. 

Future Church Insights: 

(1) Joel shares how the Greenhouse Network continues to grow. 

With so many people on their team working from a community development background, there are certain values that they will not transgress like: listening to the community, identifying the assets already present in the community, etc. As things started to grow, they found that it was important that they grew in a way that fit their values. Once they have a clearer onboarding process, Joel says that this will allow more missional leaders to participate in what God is doing through the Greenhouse Network.

(2) Why it’s crucial that indigenous leaders lead this effort in their neighborhoods.   

It’s important to empower leaders from each neighborhood to eventually lead and take on this development because the goal isn’t to just transport people from the outside in to solve the issue. We need people who are already in these neighborhoods to lead the efforts on fixing the communities problems and to believe that the community has the answers and the creativity for the challenges they face.

(3) A new way to think about innovation.

Most view innovation in the creation of a new thing, but another way to think about creativity and innovation is curation. Curating things in a new way involves integrating different things that Joel and his team have learn from other movements and people that can come together in a way that’s contextually appropriate. 

Goals and Desired Outcomes of The Greenhouse Network:

Their goal is to explore how denominations and existing churches might work in synergy with networks to plant more missional outposts and multiply church plants.

In the next year, the Network (sodalic) will partner with four kinds of churches (modalic) for the purpose of piloting intentional partnerships out of which we can learn reproducible models of sodalic/modalic synergy. The Network will partner with 1) a mid-sized, established church that is already heavily engaged missi...