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The Underground · Tampa Bay

Church, small enough to go anywhere.

Fifty of us asked a plain question: if you strip away everything that is not essential to being a church, what is left? The answer was worship, community, and mission. Jesus sends ordinary people. The Underground is what it looks like when they go — in every corner of a city, picking a fight with a big problem in his name.

Read Underground ChurchThe ecclesial minimum
Welcome

Years ago about fifty of us, mostly graduates of a campus ministry, could not find a church we fit. So we asked a plain question: if you strip away everything that is not essential to being a church, what is left? Our answer was worship, community, and mission. Everything on this site grew out of living with that answer in Tampa.

Brian Sanders
“What makes a group of people a church is that they worship together, are committed to each other, and undertake mission together.”

Three frameworks, each from a book

01
Worship, community, and missionMore is allowed. Less is not a church.
02
The missionary frameworkThe center exists to serve the people who are sent.
03
The six seasons of callingBonding, learning, serving, creating, giving, leaving.

Seven lines through the work

The Ecclesial Minimum

The Ecclesial Minimum

Worship, community, and mission are the ecclesial minimum. Church can include more than these three, and it cannot include less.

The Missionary Framework

The Missionary Framework

The centralized church is an incubator for sending missionaries. Its work is to serve the people who serve others, and in that service to multiply the mission.

Dynamic Calling

Dynamic Calling

Every believer is called. Calling changes about six times over a life and still lasts, through six days and a seventh of reward, rest, and reign.

Re-forming Church

Re-forming Church

Leavers leave for reasons worth hearing. Empowered staying and revolutionary leaving are both faithful paths toward a church God would recognize.

Remember the Poor

Remember the Poor

The Underground's commitment, after Jesus, is to remember the poor because God does. The poor are central to the mission.

Contextualized Holiness

Contextualized Holiness

Holiness, in Different, is positive difference: the character of God, imitated in a real place, close enough to love the world.

Collaboration and Union

Collaboration and Union

Later work asks what leadership looks like when the people in the room do not work for each other. The five keys are not in this corpus.

The Microchurch Pathway

The Microchurch Pathway

A formation journey from definitional clarity through incarnational practice to network sending. Archived 2026-09-25 when the seven-theme set replaced these stubs.

Seasons of Calling (Overview)

Seasons of Calling (Overview)

A lighter introduction to vocational seasons — full pathway coming soon. Archived 2026-09-25 when the seven-theme set replaced these stubs.

Incarnational Presence

Incarnational Presence

The Six Seasons of Calling

The books, in the order Brian lived them

The 6 Seasons of Calling
Different
The Underground Church
Microchurches
Life After Church

Founder of the Underground

Brian Sanders founded the Underground Network in Tampa, a network of microchurches organized around worship, community, and mission. Brian is the author of Life After Church, Underground Church, Microchurches, and The 6 Seasons of Calling.

4trade books
3,000books read in ten years
5printed endorsements of Underground Church
Read the biography

New essays, when they are written