A relatively new blog in Portland called Portland Transport, has linked to a Religion News Service article that discusses a new movement in church planning. The movement is called “New Urbanism” and revolves around the concept of creating smaller more urban churches.
Randy Frazee, a pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, discusses this concept.
(side note: The article describes Willow Creek as a trend-setting Illinois megachurch attended by more than 20,000 people. …I’d love to know what trends this church is setting. If it involves a Christian re-enactment of the movie Willow… I AM THERE! You could have christian dwarfs and christian ogres… it would be great… I’m rambling, but I think I’m onto something here).
Anyway, here’s Mr. Frazee:
Frazee says there’s a “movement brewing” where Christians are striving to capture the values of New Urbanism because of an urgent need.
Frazee compared mega-churches to castles surrounded by moats. A few times a year the drawbridge is lowered to let people in, where they become a subculture separate from the outside world. They become so involved in church life that they are not involved in their neighborhoods, he said.
“You have to disengage from your community to be involved in the church,” Frazee said, describing the problem. “Now the church has become irrelevant to the community.”
….hmmm ….this reminds me of another church I know…
hee hee….
A Christian version of “Willow”.
Sweet.
I guess I don’t really understand the idea of developing churches just for the sake of doing so. I’d compare it to building Lego houses purely for the sake of the builder’s own gratification (except that the Lego bit is harmless…and usually only done by children).
In reality, it’s not an issue of:
“If we build it, they will come.”
It’s an issue of:
“If they need/want it, they will build it.”
Theoretically, a church is supposed to be an organization of human beings in fellowship with one another. This fellowship does not exist for its own sake, because it has no end in itself. Authentic fellowship (defined by the presence of meaningful interpersonal relationships) exists for the people who create it because they want and need it.
The world has way too many needs, too many problems for spiritual communities to exist purely as edifices because we think they’re a good idea. We’re not just talking about obvious material needs in times of crisis, but the every day needs of humans who need to deeply connect with one another. Therefore, any model designed by the church for church expansion to be imposed on a group of people who aren’t demanding it is just a waste.
There are churches out there…there’s no lack of them, and people know where to find them. Why, then, would we create a supply where no demand exists, then spend valuable time and effort creating the market we need in order to sell the product we’ve pre-emptively generated?
In summary, it don’t make no sense.
(NB: This could be an early manifestation of my newfound attitude toward all things American from my whopping 2 weeks of life in Eastern Europe…even at this early stage, it’s become obvious how short-sighted and wasteful we Americans truly are)
Jiminy Cricket, you friggin’ communist, shut your pie hole!
I can see where from one perspective a mega-church trying to farm out smaller sub-churches in it’s own image ala CBC can be a bad thing.
On the other hand, I can see the point as to how mega-churches become irrelevant to the communities they are in. The first churches were groups of people meeting in their homes. The most successful church programs in the last few decades have almost always been the movement towards home meetings and “cell/home groups” that make church about people meeting the needs of people in their communities.
I’m actually surprised that you, Jiminy, came down on the other side of the fence on this one. I would have thought you would have been an advocate for churches that are homegrown as opposed to institutions.
Through some strange coincidence of fate, the last movie I saw before I entered PBC and could no longer go to see movies was “Willow”. How weird is that? (Yes, I’m really that old.)
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear.
I AM advocating homegrown churches (if any churches at all). I’m just saying that I think necessity needs to be the mother of invention, rather than the other way around. If unchurched people want churches, they’ll form them or join them. I’m saying that nobody really needs to create churches just for the sake of creating churches under the guise of a “movement” of some kind. The church isn’t supposed to be a fellowship-mandating bureaucracy…it’s supposed to be a place of fellowship.
And yes, the church needs to be in the community in order to be useful….but how did the (mega-)church ever wind up *out* of the community to begin with? If we don’t know the answer to this question, we can’t logically expect to be able to solve the problem.
And, just for the record, the hands-off, supply-and-demand approach is a quintessentially capitalist idea…so the communist-piehole comment doesn’t just *sound* knee-jerk and stupid (and, it seems, probably racially motivated…if we can say that prejudice against an American living in Eastern Europe counts as racism…maybe it’s just neo-McCarthyism of some kind). It really *is* knee-jerk and stupid.
Frazee makes some well-taken points.
I’m a little confused though. Do I have this straight: He’s the pastor of a congregation of 20,000 but he’s criticising megachurches?
Or did I miss something?