Today I had the opportunity to speak to the ‘Giraffe’ group, a bunch of young Lutheran Christians who spend a month in an intensive learning / camp situation.

I had just 15 minutes to speak to them about Forge / missional church and emerging ecclesiologies. The deal was that I get the quarter hour and then they break… and then any who are interested can come back and chew things around a bit more for the hour after. I was told to expect maybe 2 or 3 of the 25 to come back because it was late in the day and they were all pretty tired.

As I sat waiting to speak to them the presenter before me went overtime, 2 minutes… 5 minutes… 10 minutes… 14 minutes… and as I was waiting I wondered what I would say if I had just one minute – if they were on a tight time schedule (I was hoping they weren’t!)

It made me ponder condensing my spiel into a sentence – or a single memorable thought… It was atually me trying to grapple with the essence of what I am called to – it was a helpful process.

Want to know what I came up with?

As I started to speak to them I said “I believe its fair to say that 90% of your friends will never want to come to a church service with you. overboard free download Do you agree/disagree? How does that make you feel?”

The National Church Life Survey done here in Aus shows that 10% of Australian Christians currently identify/like the way we do church – and 99% of us all do it the same! But 90% don’t like it – maybe 70% of them would even say it sux.

The question I was asking is ‘how do we connect with the 90%?’ How do we connect with those who will never walk thru our doors and never intend to?

I took 15 minutes to discuss this with them… we took a break… 25 out of 25 came back…

Hot topic I’d say…

Great bunch of people too!

Today helped me sharpen my own thinking as to what it is I am on about and how to present it with clarity in a short space of time. How do we live as missionaries in our own land?

I have really appreciated the thinking of Justin Baeder over the last few months. He asks some great questions and is willing to have a crack at giving an opinion – something it seems is a bit lacking in the em church scene at times.

This is a challenging post on the question of what makes a missional community. I don’t actually agree with Justin here (my comments are on his site) but I am also grappling with the dilemma he discusses.

How do we accept people where they are at but also call them to radical discipleship?

Can a church do both?

Interested yet?

A few Forge conferences ago I listened to Mark Sayers provide an excellent overview of how the emerging church has emerged – so far…

It showed the various shifts in thinking that have happened so rapidly already and it helped me see the thought processes we have all been growing thru.

Here’s my summarised adaption of what he said (as best I remember) feel free to correct me in the comments if you are reading Mark!

Stage 1 – What Shall We Sing? – Mark didn’t actually say this but I reckon the whole hymns / choruses, worship wars saga was the start of something. It was a recognition that there may just be a different way to do things. But ouch… The pain of such a futile debate! And yet I have a feeling it may not have been as futile as I once thought. It at least began the process of thought. Can we do things even a little differently? Is there a ‘right’ way?…

Stage 2 – Contemporary Worship – Some churches bit the bullet, took the hit and went and bought a drum kit and a keyboard. We began to sing songs that sounded a bit more like what you would hear on the radio. We began to allow some variety into the worship service – but it developed into a fairly predictable routine – 4 fast songs, (which we called praise) 4 slow (which we called worship) and then a sermon. There was no fundamental change in the DNA of the beast.

Stage 3 – Gen X Worship – As above but with dim lights and candles. I don’t think I’m overstating it? Perhaps the only other real change was funkier and/or louder music. There was at least talk of the fact that an emerging generation were seeking some different things. We read books like “Inside the Mind of a New Generation (or something like that) and saw that community was a priority, process was more important than product and so on… you know the drill.

Stage 4 – Alt Worship – The alt worship crowd recognised that we do not all learn, worship, experience in the same ways. They saw that there were five senses and it was ok to smell, touch, taste things in church. Some very creative expressions of worship emerged but my experience was that it was mostly about creating a better more engaging experience for the already Christian. Something was mutating but by and large it was the same animal.

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Perhaps the most signifcant commonality to all of the above is that they generally use an attractional ‘come to us’ approach. Mission occurs as more people join the gathering and the more attractive the gathering the more likely people will come.

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Stage 5 – Incarnational Faith Communities – Also known as the Emerging Missional Church. I sense this is where many of us are at today. The key difference between this arrangement and its predecessors is that IFCs seek to understand the culture first, then do mission and then create worshiping communities. It is a go to them approach rather than a come to us. It is a fundamental reconfiguration of the DNA.

Now… having been part of all of the above – and at each stage feeling like I had ‘arrived’ or ‘found the secret’ I am now wily enough to know that we are not there yet – I think! As much as I resonate strongly with the IFC conceptualisation of the church I’d like to see where we are in 10 years time. (I also realise that my 5 stages are quite linear and things are never that simple!)

In 10 years times will we look back and smile at our quaint ideas that we were going to die for, or will we still be here.

Are we there yet?…

Yesterday Alan Hirsch sent thru a pdf file of chapter 1 of his book Shaping of Things to Come to be distributed to those who would like to check it out.

If you’d like to read one of the most significant em church books around then email me and I’ll send you a copy of the first chapter.