Getting Rid of Church!

An inflammatory heading I know but at least it’s one that will hopefully draw folks into a discussion.

Of recent months and possibly even the last few years if I’m honest, I have felt uncomfortable in ‘Church’ as we know it. I started my life as a good Catholic boy, was an altar boy for a while, knew my catechism off by heart, said my hail Mary’s and so on and so forth. Later on I wa to rebel against all things God and Church before finding my faith and returning to be Jesus follower and not a doctrine or theology follower.

All in all, I’d had my fill of staid traditional Church. Doing the same old same old just beacuse. Then I found a personal faith in God and the scales fell off my eyes – however, as my walk has gone on I have begun to realise that my supposedly non-traditional free evangelical Church is actually every bit as traditional as my early church days!

And that isn’t good.

It isn’t good for my soul, it isn’t good for my spirit and it certainly isn’t good for my walk. However, more importantly I have recognised that it isn’t good for those I am supposed to be reaching! For years I’ve used the line on friends, family, colleagues, etc that “my Church isn’t like any Church you know” and that is still true.

But only partially so.

As a Church we’ve just finished our annual conference (which in itself has also become traditional) and both of the main speakers had good clear words for the Church body to challenge and encourage – but for me the main one that has come out is that we can’t keep on doing what we are doing. It just simply isn’t working. For me, let alone others but I do know I’m not alone in this. At the moment a Sunday morning goes thus: Praise and Worship for up to an hour, followed by a batch of notices then we take an offering and the children go out and we finish with the word. Sometimes – Holy Spirit depending we will have a time of ministry after the word.

That’s it – week in, week out. Oh, ok … some Sunday’s the pastor gets us to move the chairs out of the way or other minor changes. However the underlying structure remains the same.

And it isn’t working.

My friend, the director of worship and I, have spent a lot of time discussing this and a way forward. He meets with the pastor on a regular basis and at his next meet he is again going to push the idea that we need to change. We need to alter the way we do things. As a teacher he understands only too well that folks cannot concentrate for huge periods of time. So why not get the speaker to make the meeting more interactive – which is exactly what last nights speaker did! Why not hand out notes, or have testimonies or, or … in the meantime we have hatched a plan to do what we can with what we have.

My friend has the power to alter the way the praise and worship times go and this is our first line of attack. He is subtly going to reduce the time spent in praise or worship or both week by week until we are doing maybe 15 to 30 minutes. Top this off with a word which will be up to an hour then already we’ve cut almost an hour of the Sunday service.  No it doesn’t alter the structure, but we believe it will cause teh pastor to think outside teh box again. Something he used to do but of recent has become stuck in a rut.

Alternatively, we could push him towards the following idea – Cafe Church. Or at the very least try and persuade him to think about serving tea and coffee during the service, or even starting the service whilst tea and coffee are served. No great announcement, no summoning to worship (though that is Biblical), just fellowship and a gradual wander in to teh main auditorium to meet with God. It helps that our coffee lounge is linked to the audio system. One last idea is that we do away with the ‘worship team’ and instead strategically situate them around the congregation with radio mics …

So, who’s with us for Getting Rid of Traditional Church?