Wednesday, June 16, 2010

For all of you alt church folks

The pews can be round, the alter can be a stove, and the elements can be ice tea and lasagna.

Check out this church:  St Lydia's in New York.
St. Lydia’s is a Dinner Church!  We gather each week to cook and share a sacred meal, just as the first followers of Jesus did.  We sing simple unaccompanied music, explore scripture, offer prayers, and feed one another. 
And this recommendation from Morning Walk Media:

Why do something as old-fashioned as “Wednesday night church”?
One answer is Biblical: it's what Jesus did, and it's what the first Christians did before they got sidetracked in building a global institution. Christians need to be together for friendship, for witness to God's power in their lives, for mutual support and pastoral care.
Second answer is practical: It's difficult to imagine any promising future for churches where people only spend an hour of Sunday worship together – mainly in passive mode – and don't come to know each other. Christian community is incarnational, interactive and intrusive, not a tidy audience experience.
Third, you will reach a much broader constituency. Most Christians have lost interest in Sunday worship. If that's all your congregation offers, then they lose interest in you. You need to do more – not more perfecting of Sunday worship, but more occasions when people can pursue their faith yearnings, some of them in fellowship.
If you start a midweek fellowship, you open a door to young adults, for whom Sunday morning is uninviting; to teenagers, who sleep on Sunday morning but would gladly shoot baskets and hang out on Wednesday evening; and to families, who dread the ordeal of getting kids to church on Sunday, but rally to a midweek meal that someone else prepares. 

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