1. A thought came to my while I was attending a 'Ten Days on the Island' forum thingo. I looked around and saw that the room was 'filled' with middle-aged arty women. And I thought:
'I wonder how well the church is going at reaching this group'
And then I tried to do some (no doubt flawed) assessment of how this audience would respond to the average church: male leadership, famiy focused, not very high brow...
And I thought that you would need a sort of specialist women-minsitry to reach them.
And I thought: It's hard to balance the rightness of building and healthy biblical model of Christian community, and yet also encouraging the church to have a form that is accessible for outsiders, whose cultural structures are vastly different.
And I thought of the teenager emo's who were turning up for the next forum, no doubt because they were on an excursion with their art class. And I thought: yet again, the form of community they are used to is the absolute opposite of Sunday morning church with lots of kids and mums and old people.
On the one hand, the countercultural nature of the church community is ultimately appealing, that's true. But in the first place? I wonder...
2. At the church planting conference that I have referred to in previous posts, Martin Robinson talked about how to church plant in regional areas. He suggested that perhaps 'cluster planting' was a good option, so that from the word go, you have a network of churches that can support one another.
This is an interesting idea. I wonder what other contexts might suit this strategy?
Volume 8 Number 7
