Virtually Paul

Starting the ideal church service

May 20, 2007 on 11:59 pm | In Church, Ministry |

This afternoon, due to what must have been a glitch in the matrix, I found myself sitting in a meeting in an inner city suburb, joining a small group of people who were sitting around discussing how to start a new evening church gathering in a reasonably dilapidated old church building which houses a morning congregation of somewhere between 30-60 people.I’ve got an extremely impressively written document in front of me right now, which outlines the general idea. I don’t think I saw a single person under forty on the busy street between parking the car and walking into this church. It therefore comes as no surprise that “young professional people” are the group that the new service is intended to be serving.

The brief document then wanders through, in all its Times New Roman splendour, the creation of what first appeared to me, as an attempt to blueprint the ‘perfect’ church service. What I found most interesting was that I didn’t see the holes straight away.

• It connects with the culture by being relevant - specifically by being “contemporary” - while “unashamedly but sensitively” presenting Christianity.
• Building a “Christ-centred” community where people learn to love and support one another, can come as they are and be themselves.
• It will happen regularly and remove “unnecessary jargon and unhelpful church traditions” from the presentation of the service, which will also allow people the choice to remain as passive observers who are not “forced” to participate in worship.
• Explaining the Bible with life application and encouraging response.
• It will feature preaching, liturgical worship (written prayers), music and supper as organised by the service team.
• The service will be well-branded and then promoted “by advertising throughout the community”.
• The church building will be getting some minor cosmetic work done (ie. “the addition of colour and light”) in order to “help people to feel more comfortable”.

I watched the individuals sitting in this discussion and found it intriguing, watching as slowly but surely, at least 2 of the most vocal participants completely sidetracked the stated aims, inventing non-specific problems. At one point, almost in mid-sentence, one of them seemed to decide that it might be nice to cater for older people or young families as well. So for a cranky little auditor like me, some of it was pure pain. I could have participated in the discussion a bit, given that I’d been invited by a good friend but chose to hang back. There were also some capable individuals in the meeting who I’m sure will eventually work out where they want to go and get the rest to follow.

At this point I remain a skeptic (or was already a cynic). Some years ago, a very effective youth pastor told me that “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”. I raise the following points as questions.

• Can you, in all seriousness, present the Gospel inoffensively? Sure, you can offer nice little spaces for contemplation and let people dabble in spooky little Christian rituals to see what it’s like to eat small amounts of bread and grape juice. But does that really get you anywhere if they’re just sampling from the spirituality smorgasboard?
• People rarely feel free to be themselves. If they truly felt that they could come “as they are” to a church service, then they’d quite potentially already be attending another one. The institutional church has a reputation for actually really not thinking that people are OK “as they are”. And let’s face it, that’s kind of true. So that leaves people being subversively asked to change by the culture of the Christian community, without understanding why. Meanwhile, well meaning Christians actually don’t realise that their well-intentioned stated aim is actually a bit two-faced if you look at it from the outside.
• Spiritual attracts, theological bores. If you do any reading at all on spirituality in Australian culture, particularly the 20s age group, you’ll find that people are actually considering the more mystic elements to religion - the unexplainable movements of the Spirit of God - to be much more interesting than a lecture on their inherent sinfulness. It’s the postmodern mindset. If you use a word someone doesn’t understand, you may well find that the corresponding spiritual experience intrigues them enough for them to ask another question.
• Explaining the Bible with life application? If you’re trying to get people who live in Melbourne in 2007 to interact with the translation of a compliation of texts written over a period of thousands of years, chances are, you’ll have more luck if you take the person, in their context, to the Bible, rather than the other way around.
• Activities sensitive to the culture? Cafe latte drinking young professionals really want to come and sit in a run down old church building, do some responsive reading, listen to a sermon and eat some raisin toast?
• Walking the marketing tightrope. Events attract people wanting to be entertained. Communities attract people. It is exceedingly difficult to advertise the latter in our culture, which associates advertising with an invitation to consume. Advertising, by default, attracts consumption before community. You can try to spread the word… but don’t put some clip-art on an A5 piece of paper with one of these event names and call it advertising.
• Location sensitive to the culture? A service using traditional church building as a meeting place will undoubtedly come across almost all of its newcomers from personal invitations by people already attending. So if relationships are the key, why meet in the one building that everybody you’re trying to involve never come in to of their own accord?