lifeasmission

Going Public

October 24, 2006

The way suburban churches typically remedy this problem is through advertising and marketing.  Since people are forced to use cars to travel between the sorts of zones I mentioned above, churches need to give people a reason to travel to them.  Sadly, this technique perpetuates an unhealthy bent toward consumerism and individualism.  Advertising and marketing, to be successful, need to be demographicaly targeted and we wind up focusing on one group to the exclusion of others.  We also allow people to believe that the church is a vendor of religious goods and services and that they would be better off at our place than the other.  We need to find a different way.  I will offer 2 suggestions and I invite others.

One way to go is to decentralize (not abandon) the corporate gathering in favor of emphasizing the primacy of smaller groups which meet in homes.  Meeting in homes makes the church’s gathering public to those who live in the neighborhood by localiizing it where people live, where they walk, and where they play.  Here, neighbors can talk to neighbors, they can see who comes and goes, they notice if there is something happeing on a regular basis.  Where a church community gathers is no longer an arbitrary space or building, but the place where people live, where lives happen, and where life is more naturally shared.  If these communities who meet in homes managed to maintain a focus on the community in which they were gathering, and not merely on themselves, I think there would be great potential for recapturing the helpful dimension of a public witness/presence as the church gathers for worship.

Another possibility would be to choose as a location for corporate worship a place central to where people gather.  This may look different from location to location, but what remains the same is being deliberate about choosing times and places to worship so that others take note by virtue of the fact that they are there anyway.  Imagine a church community who rented space at a strip mall and decided to hold their corporate worhip gathering at a time when people would most likely be there and take note (granted, this has the potential to revert to sending an unintended consumeristic message). 

The point I am trying to make is this – the synagogues of Jesus’ day, where people came to worship, were public fixtures, people had the chance to see and hear what was happening as Christians gathered for worship.  Similarly, the church communities Paul established were publically visible (hence all the trouble they got in).  Urban contexts lend themselves to continuing this dimension of christian presence, but suburban contexts do not.  It will take some creativity on our part, then, if we are ever to see suburban churches cause any kind of buzz within their communities merely because of the manner in which they gather.

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