Soma Family of Churches

Heritage

Soma grew from Soma Communities in Tacoma, Washington, planted in the 2000s under leaders including Jeff Vanderstelt, and took shape as the Soma Family of Churches — congregations across the US and beyond sharing a common way of life more than a common headquarters. Its signature is the missional community: a group of ordinary size that eats, serves and shares the gospel together in a particular neighborhood or network of relationships, as the basic unit of church rather than a program of it. The name is the Greek word for body.

Theological family

Evangelical and gospel-centered in the Reformed-leaning key of its era: identity in Christ — family, servants, missionaries — as the frame for discipleship, with everyday faithfulness prized over event Christianity.

Who decides what

A family of self-governing churches led by elders, related by covenant, shared training and mutual care; Soma is a family, on its own account, not a denomination.

What a first-time visitor would find

Sunday gatherings are typically simple — worship, teaching, communion — because the load-bearing life is in missional communities meeting around tables during the week.

What it has always cared about

The table as the center of mission; discipleship in the ordinary — work, meals, neighbors; equipping every member as a missionary to somewhere specific.

Its gift to the wider church

Soma gave the American church a working, teachable model of the missional community — its language of family, servants and missionaries and its everyday-mission training have been absorbed by churches far outside the family.

Commonly confused with

With house-church movements — Soma churches gather publicly and are led by elders; and with Acts 29, with which some Soma churches have overlapped, though the families are distinct.

Range of views inside it

Churches vary in size and worship style; the missional-community architecture is the family trait.

Where Soma Family of Churches churches are on the map

1 Soma Family of Churches congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

• Virginia — 1

Moments this body was part of

• 1982 — The network era of church planting

  From the 1980s onward the energy of American church founding moved into relational networks: Vineyard organized under John Wimber from 1982, Acts 29 formed in 1998 to plant churches across denominational lines, and city after city saw congregations of different traditions fund and coach one another's plants. Networks ask a different question than denominations did — not "whose are you?" but "who are you helping start?"

  Church planting became the ecumenism of practice: a Baptist church coaching a Presbyterian plant sharing a building with a Pentecostal congregation is now ordinary.