Why are our churches like they are?
Why do we meet on Sundays?…
Why do we have separate kids and youth ministries?…
Why do we take communion as thimbles and crackers?…
Why do we meet in big buildings?
Why do programs and committees seem so prevalent?
As one who is right in the formative stages of a new community and tossing around a heap of questions about the form we will take in our gatherings I have often had glimpses of why things have shaped up as they have in the established church.
Read on if you dare…
Currently we meet as a team on a Tuesday night, usually at 7.30pm and its normally just the adults who participate in the meeting.
Recently we spoke about the place of kids in our meetings and agreed (not surprisingly!) that we value our children and want them to have the opportunity to meet with us in some form. Hmmm… 7.30pm on a Tuesday night. Kids go to sleep on week nights at that time… When might be a good time?… the weekend?… Maybe… Saturday?… Nope too busy… Sunday?… Sunday!?…
And there are kids of different ages spread right thru from 16 months to 17 years old. Can we genuinely engage them all in what we do? Can we do it every week? Will the kids enjoy it? Will we? Maybe enjoying our time together isn’t the key. Maybe togetherness is, so we will all have a lousy time but have it together?… You think?!…
Or maybe we need age specific groups for them?… A kids minist… and a yout… Come to think of it, its kinda hard for all us to feel ‘close’ when we meet as a big group and to really peer into each other’s lives. I know! Why don’t we have smaller groups?… no! – not small groups – ‘smaller groups’…
We are currently a ‘closed group’ while we weld together as a team and establish some directional stuff, but once we become open it’ll be increasingly difficult to meet in homes when we all want to get together – and while we may be able to split into multiple groups there will be a need for big gatherings at some point. So… Maybe we could hire a venue… a hall… or start a building fund!…
Are you seeing where this baby is headed?…
Eating together is great – we can have communion over a meal. Food really helps us gel and just hang out, but it does mean work each time for people – work that I know Danelle has sometimes found hard, with kids to bath and other stuff to do. Maybe we can still have communion, but make it a more symbolic act… What about we get some small cups and cut up some cubes of bread?…
And what to do each each week? We can’t make it up as we go and we can’t leave it to one person. Why not develop a team to oversee it? The team can pull the gatherings together and get other people involved as appropriate. Actually we might need lots of teams for different things at different times…
Looking ominous?…
Now quite frankly I don’t give a fig if we meet on Tuesday nights at 7.30pm, Sunday mornings at 9.30am or Wednesday afternoons at 2.00pm. I am not worried if we do things all together or sometimes in age groups. I am fine with cheap grape juice and cubes of wholemeal if that is where we finish up. I made a decision a long time ago to do whatever works for the mission and the team, so while I have my preferences I’ll do what works for all of us. Count me in and kick me if I complain!
Folks we have to be careful not to fall into old patterns because they are comfortable, but, we have to be equally careful not to reject old practices simply because they are what we used to do. They may actually be well established for good reasons.
Mindless reactionism and wild pendulum swinging that simply cause us to cynically see the negative in all tradition are traits that do the emerging church scene no favours at all. We often look like petulant adolescents refusing to do what our parents do, simply because we can.
That’s not to say we simply fall into line, sing hillsongs, put on dramas and have 6 point ‘how to’ sermons. (BTW songs can be a good way to worship, dramas often communicate what teaching can’t and ‘how to’ sermons can often be helpful…)
So what do we do?…
Just admit that we are eventually going to follow the well established pattern, book a venue and start a Sunday gig? Come on! You know me better than that.
I keep coming back to the fact that we are seeking to be urban missionaries, and in that we are creating gatherings that are suitable to the context we find ourselves in. We have to think like missionaries and ask what is appropriate to this community. If at the end of the day as we do the serious work of missional reflection it turns out to be Sunday morning with wafers and grape juice and all the trimmings then I’ll be there.
Honestly…
I hope it won’t come to that… partly because I am selfish – I like having Sundays free of regular committments, but moreso because I really do hope we discover new ways of expressing our ecclesiological convictions that are true to both scripture and the context we are in.
It seems many of the emerging churches I have come across are funky, ‘singles clubs’ that don’t need to consider the impact children or young people have. However as we move beyond catering for the disgruntled gen-xers (and as they grow up, get married and breed) we will need to do some serious work of re-imagining church for the families.
It aint easy…