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LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Underground Church Book Review
Submitted to Dr. Dempsey
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the completion of
DSMN 630-001
Small Groups
by
Kaitlyn Burrell
April 23, 2022
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“The Underground Church” is a powerful book on the lessons a group of individuals
learned after they formed a church called Tampa Underground. These people were not satisfied
with the church today. They read through the book of Acts and looked at their own churches and
found so many inconsistencies. This book isn’t a call to leave the church. It’s a call to change the
church. And the author of this book, Brian Sanders, shows us how he did it.
In his first chapter, Sanders discusses the origins for the idea of Tampa
Underground. He writes, “Every moment begins by coming face to face with a mystery…It is in
that first moment when we are threatened by the vastness and the mystery, when we find God.
He is active throughout the process, but he is never more real to us than in the place of desperate
impossibility, when we feel there is no way to do what he has sent us to do.”1 He talks of
forming a campus ministry at the University of Florida. But even in the success of that ministry,
he was restless. He talks of the work he and his students did in the inner city, loving the least of
these. When those students graduated, there was a dissonance felt between the Jesus they had
pledged to follow, and the Jesus preached in the comfortable middle-class churches. They left the
church not because they were frustrated with it, but because in the end they could not escape the
nagging, burning belief that there was more to the church. They had childlike belief that
something greater was possible. They chose to define a church in this way: a group of people
who were consistent, devoted, and surrendered to relationship to Jesus Christ, totally accountable
and connected to people and each other, and engaged in his mission, making disciples and
proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God.2
1 Sanders, Brian. Underground Church: A Living Example of the Church in Its Most Potent Form.
Zondervan, 2018, 28.
2 Ibid., 34.
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In his next chapter, Sanders writes about their vision about wanting their church to reflect
God’s heart for the poor. He writes, “Inclusion and care for those who are poor and marginalized
is not just a box that churches need to check, it is a defining practice that reflects our deepest
understanding of the good news.”3 The mission that they created was to embrace the mission
(task) but also not neglect intimacy (relationship). The mission of the church is more than just
outward obedience to the ways and teachings of Jesus. It is a matter of heart change, and it
requires the development of intimacy in our relationship with God.4 The task now was to create a
church structure that enabled them to do that. They dreamed of a church that was of missionaries.
That was not isolated or formalized, but deeply in love with Jesus and equally as connected to
each other. A church that when gathering to worship, would be a gathering of the sent ones.
Sanders writes, “Church is made up of its people, who are all apostles (missionaries); its
equippers, who are servants, and its infrastructure, which is centrifugal (moves outward).
Equippers need, therefore, to help empower, and pledge to meet the needs of those who meet the
needs of others.”5 Because the endgame of the kingdom is to see the whole world know the
gospel of the reign of Jesus, we need a more radical (and somewhat riskier) structure than a
sheep pen.
In discussing the foundations for the church, Sanders writes, “The number of people you
can fit in your building should no longer be a primary metric for a vibrant, verdant, and
missional community. Instead, we should be measuring things like the creativity and diversity of
the networks we are forming.”6 He states that the change from institution to network will take a
3 Ibid., 45-46.
4 Ibid., 46.
5 Ibid., 56.
6 Ibid., 69-70.
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least four foundational shifts in cognitive and practical life of the new community. There four
are: size, the size of the thing we call church, calling, the way churches are born, servanthood,
the nature of church leadership, and abundance, the mindset that allows churches to grow, thrive,
and usher in the kingdom.7 He explains how the church in its most potent form is actually small.
He writes of the ecclesial minimum for their underground church is worship, mission, and
community. The what of church, the rest, the how, is left to the localized leader to dream, create,
and contextualize. This is the next level of empowerment because it is not just giving people
permission to lead, it is also giving them creative control over what they lead. Asking people to
hear and respond to their own passion and unique calling captures both the dynamics of
movements and the Western need for creative autonomy.8
Sanders next discusses how everyone has a missional calling. Calling is the intersection
of two things: intimacy and mission. It is personal. The Father is speaking to us personally,
which represents a very intimate connotation of calling. “God calls you because he loves, knows,
and has something just for you. It astonishes the mind and fills the heart. This is why people need
to know they are being called-because mission must begin with that moment of being known and
loved by God.”9 The next part of this calling is mission. We all carry a suspicion that we are
made for something-that life is not without meaning and that the creator God has made each of
us in his own image to create and build like he does. We know (or at least we hope) that there is
some task to which we alone are called. We long for something that will have us eternal purpose
and satisfaction.10 God is calling forth his kingdom, and we are not just meant to pray his
7 Ibid., 70.
8 Ibid., 79-80
9 Ibid., 77.
10 Ibid.
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kingdom come, but to live towards that end. Each one of us has a job in ushering in that kingdom
and speeding the day of its coming, and there is nothing in this world that will give us the same
joy, sustenance, or satisfaction than living in that calling.11 The underground was founded on the
idea that everyone is both called and capable of discerning that call. The result is a diversity of
missional church expression that are creative and innovative beyond the imagination of any
single leader. They discovered that when people listen to their calling, niche ministries emerge,
reaching into gaps they didn’t even know were there.12 The ministry ideas are creative and in
many cases utterly original. The approach affords at least the possibility of total penetration
because the God who sees all things, inhabits all places, and loves all people will without
prejudice or ignorance is the one doing the sending. No strategy will reach every kind of person
except a strategy that mobilizes every kind of person.
Next Sanders discusses the foundation of servanthood and states is what is means to be a
preacher of a Christian leader is to stand on a stage with a microphone, then have we not
needlessly reduced the pool of people who can lead to the number of people who have a good
stage presence? Reviving the concept of servanthood, therefore, as the primary quality of
Christian leadership is necessary for the kind of movement we imagine. Empowerment means
helping people to hear their calling and to understand themselves as servants to a groups of
people who are lost or poor and in need of a kingdom.13 In his next foundation Sanders talks of
the foundation of abundance. He says that we have to reimaging how we see the world. There is
abundance and we are called and equipped with every good thing we need. If we keep thinking
11 Ibid., 78.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 82.
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of disciple making as raising loads of money and building huge physical structures, we fail to see
the abundance at our fingertips for free.
In his next chapter Sanders writes on the tensions of creating a culture. And he wrote that
the culture they inevitably created was one of paradoxes. He listed six so called tensions that
they danced between: knowing and not knowing, a culture of experimentation, humility and
confidence, a culture of submission, prophetic and personal, a culture of embodied protest, unity
and diversity, a culture of respect and missional priority, life and death, a culture of passion and
suffering love, clouds and fire, a culture of practical dreamers.14
Later in another chapter Sanders writes on the travesty of the American church to be a
church on the sidelines. He writes, “It’s tragic because the world is waiting for the church, this
sleeping giant, to awaken to its abundance of gifts, energy, resources, and networks. It’s tragic
for the lost to wait in vain for someone to bring the gospel to where they are. It’s tragic for the
King of the kingdom, who has given his authority to us all, to watch his unopened gift lie
dormant. And it is tragic for us, because the real joy is not in the game where everyone is
watching, but in the game where everyone plays.15
This book is a game changer for the church. The ideas expressed are revolutionary and
sorely needed. It is time for believers to live in the authority they have been given in Christ. The
book empowers while also spurring vision. It cultivates a longing inside the reader to be a part of
a church like this. It does an excellent job of tearing down the church but not demoralizing it.
Instead, it calls the church to the potential it has. I would challenge church leaders everywhere to
read and study this book. It is impossible to not walk away changed.
14 Ibid., 118.
15 Ibid., 178.
