Planting a church that is… One of the main discussions our pastoral team has is on creating culture within the plant as well as structure. I’ve been a part of two extremes in past lives…too much structure and emphasis on performance and too little structure and no emphasis on excellence, so like a dog who is afraid of humans because of his past life as an abused dog, I think all of us on the team have buttons that when touched sends us on the defensive. In our desire not to create a "mini-me" church—replicas of our past lives, we have to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
The question that comes to my mind is how can we have structure without having hiearachy? I have also found that when searching for a church, alot of the people that I thought were not looking for traditional church style, end up wanting it because they think "that is what church is"! We find ourselves talking all the time about what we want Wounded Healer Fellowship to be. In reading, "The Shaping of Things To Come" by Michael Forst and Alan Hirsch, we accept that "the missional church will be adventurous, playful, and surprising. It will gather for sensual-experiential-participatory worship and be deeply concerned for matters of justice-seeking and mercy-bringing. It will strive for a type of unity-in-diversity as it celebrates individual differences and values uniqueness, while also placing a high premium on community."
Bishop Gladwin in his book "Love and Liberty: Faith and Unity in a Postmodern Age" believes that the emerging church will have these four features in common:
- focus on the journey of faith and the experience of God;
- desire for less structure and more direct involvement by participants;
- sense of flexibility in order and a distinctly nonhierarchical culture;
- recognition that the experience of church is about the sustaining of discipleship.
Reading what the church "should be" and actually "becoming it" is the process…like I said, it isn’t easy.
