Ross from less travelled alerted me to this article, which is pretty challenging to those (such as ourselves sometimes) who are tempted to assess our own church and mission endeavours along traditional criteria.

The article details a Monday night casual gathering centred around music, community and sharing discussion - the sort of model that many of us might find familiar in our explorations in new models of church. He goes on to say:

And now a confession. After ‘2 seasons’ (12 weeks) I discontinued this ministry.

My aim was to move people from this ill-defined gathering into more intentional ‘process-evangelism’ type groups. The congregation (!) had other ideas. They simply wanted to hang out… to have freedom to turn up or stay at home.

I couldn’t cope with the irregular nature of things and the seeming lack of gospel progress.

Talk about blind! Here was a bunch of people - many of whom had never been exposed to Christianity - and I was expecting them to jump through my hoops. Pathetic.

The tragedy is that some of the people I mentioned… have not been since.

I reckon we had a genuine ‘fresh expression’ (to use the lingo) and I did not recognize it as such.

Bottom line? I killed a church. “Ecclesiacide’. Very serious. Sorry.

Over the past little while with our GenX congregations we have been a little frustrated with some of our ‘gospel progress’ too. We have had a number of new people drift in and drift out again, and we have had an impact on numbers with a number of committed members of the community moving interstate or overseas.

We are commencing our kind of annual process of reevaluation of our congregations where we look out our style, location and connection points and it is really easy to become discouraged when things don’t go as well as we hope. It is a struggle sometimes to appreciate the positives of our congregations (of which there are many) rather than the ways that they do not measure up to our goals and vision.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 9:36 am by dan and is filed under challenges for the church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.