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Emergent

afeature, Church Leadership

Should a dying church be repurposed?

It seems that I’m stuck on thinking about dying or dead churches. Why so grim, Alan? That is a good question. It seems that folks are interested in talking about this topic. For some odd reason, I’ve been thinking about struggling churches lately. Perhaps it is because I’m writing a second book on a related topic. I’m blessed with a growing and fruitful congregation to lead, but other pastors find themselves in a different situation.

Here in Albany, there are a number of congregations (mostly Catholic) who are closing their doors or selling property. According to the Albany diocese, 20% of churches will be closed. One church in particular, St. Patrick’s, is facing a flight from a group to stop the razing of the church. Some want to turn the church into a brewery or consider another purpose instead of a site for a supermarket.

Overit Media in Albany is housed in a former church.

Churches that closed are often bought as private homes, turned into a business, or sometimes bought by another church. I’m sure the members of a closed or closing church don’t want their structure turned into a pub or demolished to make way for a parking lot. Overit Media in Albany is one example of a church building turned business building.

Instead of closing or tearing down a church completely, is there another way?

A recent article from the Economist brought forward an idea that is growing. Since 1980, the Church of England has closed over 1,000 churches. That’s a lot of congregations and people. What can be done to reverse the trend? The idea goes something like this: keep the church building operating and functional, but repurposed the building so that services can be held while housing. The article sites some successful examples:

But there is a new mood in the Church of England… The plan is to turn the church into a community centre that will continue to hold religious services. This has worked elsewhere: Michaelhouse café in Cambridge… serves cappuccinos during the week but the building reverts to its original use as St Michael’s church on Sundays. In Hereford, Bath and York, working churches double as coffee shops, crèches and stores.

Could repurposing a church revive a church and help spawn new life through becoming a center for religious and cultural life? Doubling as a coffee shop and a church? Doubling as a library and a church? Doubling as a cultural center and a church? It is an exciting idea, but it is not a new one. Early church monastic communities featured gardens, centers of learning, and made money by selling goods that monks made.

But, how far could this concept go? Is it making a marketplace out of God’s house of worship or it is following where God is calling us to “be” the presence of Christ?

Read. Respond. Render.

social media, White House

Three ways social media impacted my White House meeting

Yep, that’s me there tweeting away. (Photo: EthicsDaily.com)

As many of your know, I’m finishing up on reflecting upon my meeting with the Executive Office of the President and White House staff (read part 1 and part 2). It was an honor to be among 60 other Baptists who met with several advisers to the President.  One of the unusual facets of this meeting was a media blackout.  None of the tradition media outlets were allowed in this meeting.

The media blackout arose from the administration’s frustrations that past clergy leader meetings were nothing more than a photo opportunity. This meeting was supposed to be different, and so it was. We attendees were allow to tweet during the meeting and used the hashtag #BaptistsatWH. This created a direct link to our friends, congregation members, followers, and community individuals back home. Our four-hour long meeting was unencumbered by reporters interrupting or distracting from the meeting’s goal.

My friend and fellow pastor Dr. William Shiell and I discussed how the administration had a message they wanted to communicate. The byproduct of a media blackout, but social media friendly meeting is threefold:

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Lewis Fellows

Lewis Fellows: Kansas City or Bust

This past week was crazy.  I didn’t have any time to blog or tweet. I traveled to Kansas City, MO with the Lewis Fellows and spent some time with pastors of dynamic churches.  When I returned to New York, I went back to the airport to welcome Gary Long, our retreat speaker.  Saturday the church held our fall retreat on vision – an excellent time.  Sunday was worship.  As you can see, it was a pretty full couple of days.

I want to briefly share with you my Lewis Fellows experience.  Tuesday, October 19 we visited Saint Andrew Christian Church (www.sacchome.org) and had a conversation with Senior Pastor Rev. Holly McKissick.  Saint Andrew Christian Church is a Disciples of Christ church.  Check out the church below:

As you can see, it looks more like a market than a church.  Such a welcoming property and building.  The church is only 20 years old and Holly is the founding pastor.  Below, Holly is standing and we are meeting in the sanctuary.  I loved this sanctuary.  The building is only about 12 years old.

Holly comes out of the Southern Baptist tradition, but was ordained in the Disciples of Christ church.  The sanctuary is welcoming and seating is structured in a “U”.  Holly’s take on leadership was interesting.  She talked about making mistakes, as all pastors do, but learning from them.  She was honest and candid about her leadership and ministry.

Below is a pic of the cross that hangs in the sanctuary:

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Churches

Small Churches Are The Next Big Thing

small church

Brandon J. O’Brien at Christianity Today’s Out of Ur blog, has a really interesting thought about the future of small churches.  The perception is that small churches are dying and are even the reason why Christianity is waning. However, O’Brien pulls from a number of sources to explain why the small church might be the next big movement:

In a conversation last week about the virtues of small churches, a pastor friend of mine, Chuck Warnock, quoted a passage from John Zogby’s 2008 book The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (Random House). Zogby prophesies that “The church of the future will be a bungalow on Main Street, not a megastructure in a sea of parking spaces. It’s intimacy of experience that people long for, not production values.”

On the face of it, I couldn’t be more pleased with that prediction. I’ve pastored two small congregations and am now a member and deacon in another, where my wife serves on staff. My experience with these churches has led me to believe that small congregations are uniquely positioned to carry the gospel into the world in the 21st century. Few things would make me happier than if the “next big thing” in Christian ministry conversations was the small church.

Interesting take.  Certainly, the Emergent Movement has taught us that small churches can do big things and reach people previously thought to be “unreachable.”  Also, “house churches” have been known to start mega churches because of their simplicity and small community.

O’Brien also says there is a danger involved with small churches:

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Book Reviews, nuChristian

Q&A with Author Russell Rathbun

Author Russell Rathbun spoke with On the Bema about his new book, nuChristian: finding faith in a new generation (Judson Press).  Russell is a founding minister with Debbie Blue of House of Mercy, a pioneering emergent church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Rathbun is also the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press,2009) and the critically-acclaimed Post-Rapture Radio (Jossey-Bass, 2008). He lives with his wife, two kids, and dog KoKo in St. Paul.

OnTheBema: You begin your book with examining the postmodern framework. Christians need to understand it. Where do you draw the line between understanding postmodernism and using postmodernism to a church’s advantage without compromising the Gospel message?

Russell: The way I understand it, Postmodernism, is not a “thing” we can use or not use, it is just the way the world operates. It is the underlying ethos of our time. It is important to understand that the Post-Baby Boomer generations came of age and are informed by this ethos (whether they realize it or not). There has been a radical shift in how truth claims can be made. We can not assume that dominate Western Christian ideas (which may or may not be the same as the Gospel–often they are not) hold sway in the way they once did. This is why it is important to be in relationship with people instead of being in a debate with people. In the end the debate doesn’t matter, loving your neighbor as a response to the love of God through Jesus Christ is what matters.

OnTheBema: You make a good point about how Christians need to make disciples rather than just converts. You say, “We are not called to save people, we are called to love people.” (pg. 43) This is a radical departure from Evangelical Christianity’s emphasis on “saving souls.” Why do you think evangelism ends at the altar call?

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worship

Church Warehouse Part 2: Theology of Wood and Concrete

I wanted to follow up on my last post about worship and ministry space with another article from Christianity Today, entitled “Theology in Wood and Concrete.”  The article is about 6 churches and their brief stories about building their ministry space:

If churches then had seen what they had in common with modernism, they could have allied their sense of responsibility with cutting-edge design. Instead, churches, which were the architectural focal points of early American settlements, left the conversation of progressive architecture. But in the past few years, missions-minded Protestant churches have begun to rediscover architecture.

The following churches decided that their buildings were an important part of their ministry, not merely afterthoughts. And while many churches are moving toward traditional design, these churches believe there is still something to be said for a contemporary approach. They believe that buildings can express the values of congregations, bringing new meaning to the act of stewardship in architecture.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/may/35.33.html

worship

Does My Church Look Like a Warehouse?

For the last 20 or 25 years, it has become popular a church to build their worship and ministry space to look like a warehouse or storehouse (or use an actual warehouse).  After being a part of three capital improvement projects at three different churches, I have found there is a whole theology to church buildings.

The “Emergent” or “Emerging Church” and ultra contemporary church movement has found that many people are attracted to buildings that do not include religious symbols.  And, church buildings  should be more utilitarian than religious. Most of the time, building a church in a warehouse is an economical way to do church.   Aside from the  “store front” church, churches who desire to tone down a worship space do so for marketing reasons.  Mega and ultra contemporary churches try to draw in burned out Christians or seekers (the unchurched) who want church to be different than the traditional church service (3 hymns, sermon, and altar call).

Christianity Today wrote an intriguing article about how there is now a reverse trend in trying to attract seekers to churches.  The trend seems to be that now seekers and churches are reconsidering what they thought they wanted in a church building.  The article cites a survey which states that seekers  prefer a church to look like, well… a church.   The article reads:

….unchurched adults prefer Gothic church buildings to utilitarian ones, challenging the conventional wisdom that medieval-looking churches feel out-of-touch and stuffy to seekers.  LifeWay showed over 1,600 unchurched adults four pictures of church buildings, ranging from mall-like to Gothic. The majority preferred the most ornate church.

Not exactly scientific, but this survey shows that deep down inside, a church’s building says a lot about how the church sees itself regarding theology, evangelism, and Christ.  This study came out of  LifeWay, the publishing and ministry arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

It is my firm belief that people want to seek the Divine in church community and in worship.  Based on anecdotal evidence, I have found that there is a segment of the church going population, who after several years at a ultra contemporary/mega church, desire to recapture the essence of what it means to worship, learn, live in faith, and fellowship in a congregation that seeks to be more dynamic and deeper in their approach.  Over the years, I have been a big fan of Robert Webber, who died recently.  Webber who began life as a Baptist and then switched denominations to become an Episcopalian, rediscovered liturgical worship with a contemporary twist.  In his book, Ancient-Future Faith he states:

Worship Renewal, then, is not a matter of gimmicks, but the recovery of the Christian vision of reality enacted by the community of God.  pg. 32

Then, Webber goes on to say:

In the 1980’s evangelicals sought to neutralize space to make the seeker more comfortable.  This worked in the 1980’s but is not the way to go in the postmodern world.  The inquirer needs to be immersed within a space that bespeaks the Christian faith.  The very narrative of faith which we seek to know and live is symbolically expressed in our space… Space becomes the visual image of the connection between the known and unknown. pg. 108

For Webber, and I agree, worship and our church buildings communicate who God is.  Symbols are important.  Symbols point to a great reality.  The cross is a symbol.  The communion table is a symbol.  The church is a symbol.  If we neutralize a church space, then are we neutralizing the symbol of the church?   Postmodernity has indeed reshaped our understanding.  Webber addresses the church within postmodernity:

In a postmodern world that has become increasingly interested in communication and space, it will be necessary to feature the relational seating of God people around the symbols of water, the pulpit, and the Table.  These are the primary visual images of God’s work in the history of salvation. pg. 108

I have a number of engaged couples who come from other churches looking for a church to get married in because their church does not “look” like a church.  They do not worship in a traditional looking church, but they want to get married in one.  That just shows how our culture is evolving and how Christians view worship space.

Churches and pastors should resist the empty showy gimmicks and trendy ideas about church and worship.  Instead, we must seek to put a theology behind our church and church buildings instead of only relying on marketing tactics.  There is a richness contained in the 2,000 years of worship, teaching, and theology that the church mothers and fathers have given to us.   There is nothing “wrong” with a contemporary church that meets in a warehouse, but the trend of the lack of Christian symbols and lack of focus upon theologically centered worship space is troubling.   When churches are able, they should think about building or obtaining a worship space that reflects Christian theology.  I should make it clear that many people have come to Christ in these trendy churches and these churches are meeting a need.   But, at some point, people are going to want more than flashy lights, loud bands, and Starbucks.

What do you think?

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