McGavran - tried to initiatiate people movement in India for 16-17 years - did not suceed in mass conversions, but 1,000 people did become Christians.

"Bridges of G-d": Reaching people through relationships

• The church growth model was applied to suburban churches in America (was the unintended result that they became like mission stations?)

Three Major Models of Culture:

• Culture as One (Western culture being more advanced)
• Culture as Many (A way of life depending on different people)
• Culture as Flows
  • This model is said to have taken root around 1995
  • Culture is mobile; not limited to time or space
  • Culture is not tied to a space or geography
  • Culture is influenced by globalization and technology
  • Culture is carried by movements of people
  • The global economy is interconnected (World Bank, IMF)
  • Ideascapes - political interconnections
  • Circutive culture (producer + text + consumer)
  • Theme: deterritorialization- territories were originally associated with people and now they are no longer associated with a specific people group (helped to foster place vs. space)

PLACE (physical location) vs. SPACE (sharing space but not physical location. e.g. facebook)

• The mission of the church should be thought of not only in terms of place, but also in terms of space. It used to be that space and place were always the same. That has continued to shift.
  • If not, we are ignoring social realities
  • How do we think missionally about virtual relationships?

Implications of SPACE created by technology (e.g. facebook):

• Place and space are moving farther and farther apart and now people are moving from place relationships to space relationships.
• Technology assigns greatest importance to the mind
• Discovering someone's identity is no longer tied to physical encounters, but is available for people to see at all hours
• "Disembodied selves" connecting with one another
• The virtual world has become real to us
• The virtual world does have a social dimension/community

Books of interest: The McDonaldization of Society, The Globalization of Nothing, The McDonaldization of the Church

The Emerging Church

What would an indigenous, missional church look like in the West?

US (growth of suburbs and suburban churches) vs. ENGLAND (no suburbs, different kinds of churches)

Listening to the Voices:

“I read the Gospels over and over. Nothing I was doing on Sunday was what I thought Jesus would be doing if he were here.”
Joe Boyd, Apex, Las Vegas, USA

Church has been a show instead of a community (e.g. Sunday night service as a show)

• How can the church become a way of life?
  • Home groups - formed community
  • No times on websites (times by telephone calls)
  • "What time is your family?" doesn't make sense just like "What time is your church?"

Church in Sheffield (UK) flipped the equation relating to energy spent on a Sunday service. Instead of spending 90% of time on the service, and 10% on the community, they reversed this.

Visions, York,UK and Sue Wallace

Church connected to club culture

• Worked Friday nights at the club (would not tolerate anything they wouldn't tolerate at church)
• Sunday worship had nothing that wasn't strange to the club culture
  • Used secular songs in church - creating a connection to the songs heard in non-church places
• Allowing cultural forms to develop instead of imposing particular cultural forms

In detail and from class powerpoint: Visions (York, NY) worked for clubs on Friday nights, providing visuals for local promoters, and had worship on Sunday nights. From an integrity standpoint, they wouldn’t do anything at the club on Friday that they would not do on Sunday in church. Their life in the world must remain consistent with their faith commitment. (They had only heard this from missionaries, but not from the West. Come empty handed to the people, not bringing a cultural form, but serve and see the cultural forms emerge in the culture with faith.) Correspondingly, they would not do anything on Sunday that they wouldn’t do at the club at Friday- their faith had to be expressed in ways that was native to the culture around them. Living in the culture as local, and yet pointing to the One beyond the local, helps keep the Emerging Churches’ worlds intact. When worship and witness are in sync, as with Visions, it creates a 24/7 spiritual life for their participants in overcoming the ‘secular’ aspects of their lives with reminders of God. Sue Wallace (of Visions) explains, “The reason we embrace culture in worship is not only to make the place feel like the ‘home’ to those coming into it from the outside world, but also to make us take our worship from our church space into our world. When you are in a shop or a pub, and you hear a track that has been used in church, it forges connections and makes you think about God.” When we bring our own culture to God in worship, then that experience extends to our daily lives when we are away from the community. These ‘secular’ worship expressions become reminders and clues of God everywhere.

Emergent Church: an organized form of the emerging church
Emerging Church: the movement of emerging churches