Craig from Musings asks a pertinent question:
“People who travel outside of their suburb to go to a mega-church might end up going to their local church down the road and supporting their local congregations. For the emerging church models, home churches where the whole street meet in a local home down the road might be more commonplace than large churches that draw from a whole region. It makes you think, doesn’t it? “Link
I think Craig might be right – churches that demand their people drive across the city to their building a number of times a week to drop off their kids or attend services may have to rethink their impact on the environment and rising price of petrol. Rock on house churches!!!
BTW – if you are interested in house churches and are kicking yourself because you missed the National House Church Conference last week in Denver (don’t blame me, i mentioned it plenty of times) then you might want to read blogger Bill Reed’s account of the conference at DenverHouse.
Technorati Tags: emerging church, house church
Not only housechurches…
We walk 200m down the road to our parish church (anglican/episcopalian).
What we lose in (potential) theology/wonderful worship sessions/powerful sermons we make up in getting stuck into the community.
The problem is that in a consumer culture, we are used to picking and choosing churches just like everything else. If the one close by is not good, we go somewhere else which is better. Which is all very well, but causes great problems for the small rural/suburban churches.
J
yes . . . which brings us all back to the idea of “parish” . . . something the Brits know all about
Wouldn’t it be consumer culture that would drive people to choose the most convenient location?
Megachurches have no appeal to me, but my first criterion for a church is not how close it is to my house.
Within reason, community must not trump belief. In the extreme, what if your local “church” was a bunch of wiccans?
My advice is go as close to home as you can, to a church whose creed or statement of faith, or whatever it’s called, you can accept without hesitation.
makes me think back to a conference where Sally Morgenthaler was a speaker. talking about community, she mentioned an intriguing thouth that our community might be our place of work or recreation… urban cultures sometimes are quite different than your regular parish structures. myself, on another hand, would fit into the parish model anyway because my officie is in the livingroom… 🙂
my advice is to be the church, rather than going to, or having it!
so simple it’s beautiful…
A Serious Challenge For The Church
Wouldn’t this be an interesting church-state case? Can such regulations be enforced against a mega-church? How would it affect the ministry of the church?