Friday, December 05, 2003
'Emerging' churches going back to basics
TODAY'S -- and tomorrow's -- churches need to get outside the four walls of their buildings and become "accessible" to people in their daily lives, according to Dr. Eddie Gibbs, professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.
In a keynote address last month to an overflow crowd of church planters gathered at First Baptist Church, Gibbs cast a radical vision.
This "new thing," he told the three-day event sponsored by Outreach Canada, is what Gibbs and other observers have called the "emerging church."
"There still is, to use business-speak, a market for traditional churches. The trouble is it's a shrinking market. It's shrinking quickly," said Glenn Gibson, Outreach Canada's director of church revitalization ministries.
"A whole new type of church needs to emerge. We're in a culture that's interested in spirituality. To use Jesus' metaphor of the wine and wineskins, people still have a taste for the wine. But we have problems with our containers."
Gibson added: "It's time for us to re-think radically the forms. We've got to discover new wineskins. Some churches are going to need to undergo a radical change -- if that's possible. It will take going back to basics and starting over."
Said Gibbs, "My vision for the church is a church that is accessible -- a church that you cannot miss."
To reach that goal, churches -- both established and those just starting -- need to return to the simple, easily "reproducible" model of the first and second centuries, when the most frequent meeting places were in people's homes, he said.
In keeping with that early tradition -- and as a growing number of new churches are already doing -- they need to focus in their cell groups on worship as "the main event and the backdrop of everything that happens," he said.
"We are worshiping beings. And if worship is not part of the rhythm of our lives, it's going to look very artificial when we try it for one hour a week in the sanctuary. We've got to become a worshiping people."
That worship, he added, is increasingly taking place around a meal -- and not just in a home, but also in restaurants and cafes.
In the context of this meal, "the bread is broken and the wine is blessed," he said. "It can be powerfully evangelistic."
"The churches where things are happening," observed Martin Robinson, national director of the U.K. evangelism group Together in Mission, "are situations where the people have been somehow encouraged to speak courageously and unafraid with their unchurched friends about the manifold goodness of God frequently. People are intrigued."
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