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Blink and You'll Miss It: Participating In What God is Doing

I was fortunate enough to hear Mike Yaconelli speak at a conference in Edmonton the year he died. I remember it with powerful clarity. Mike was talking about his experiences in what he called "the slowest growing church in North America." When I heard the phrase I thought to myself, "I can give you a run for your money on that one." I was sure I was attending the slowest growing church in North America, a postmodern-gen- X-emergent-Millenial-you-label-it-what-you-want kind of church called The Gathering.

The Gathering started seven years ago with the intention of creating a seeker service so relevant and entertaining that people who didn't even like church would flock to see what we were doing. We had the big sound system. We had professional musicians. We had talented actors and technicians. We were using dynamic images in our PowerPoint slide shows, and the sermons featured movie illustrations when it was still highly controversial to do so. Instead of pews, we had tables and chairs. Coffee was served during, not after, the service. We didn't wear dressy clothes.

We were "cooler than thou," one of the best shows in town, with new people attending on a regular basis. The problem was, hardly any of them stayed. Nearly four years after we started The Gathering, numbers were barely higher than when we'd begun.

Fox Creek

My earliest recollection of Christian community is of a church plant in a small town in Northern Alberta called Fox Creek. It's one of those places you don't even have to blink to miss. In those days, Fox Creek lacked a fellowship of evangelical Christians, so my parents and some families started one.

It began as a house church; a house we later purchased and lived in. As a result, when I thought of church, the image that came to mind wasn't of a building—it was of people. We later went to a building we called church, but people who went there also came to our house after services or vice versa. There was no paid staff; everyone pitched in to help. Janitorial duties were rotated among the members. Congregants led worship; I have many fond memories of my father playing choruses on an acoustic guitar, or of myself at five years old singing "Jesus Loves Me" at the front of the church with a plastic electric guitar. The man who performed the lion's share of the preaching duties worked a full-time job as a maintenance worker for the local gas plant.

Medicine Hat

So when my family moved to Medicine Hat, a large city by Albertan prairie standards (you'd have to close your eyes for a good ten minutes to miss it), the larger, more institutional congregation didn't resemble church as people—it was definitely church as building. My parents became involved, but I sensed instinctively that something was different. We had the option to just show up, to contribute nothing to our church but still take something out of it.

Years passed. I graduated from high school, and in that year we lost our youth pastor. A search committee was formed, but the youth group was left to fend for itself with only two parent sponsors, neither of whom was interested in adopting the role of spiritual director.

Our youth group was hungry to go deeper, to learn the Word together, to pray together, and to grow together. Though I don't think we'd have ever phrased it so, we hungered for spiritual community.

'Summer Camp Brought Home'

So we began meeting for Bible study in the basement of my parents' house. It would be years before I'd draw the connection with those first formative experiences of Christian community in Fox Creek and those basement meetings; but the connections were there, stretched out across the years.

Word spread among our network of friends; the Mennonite Brethren youth lacked a paid leader as well and began joining us. People sat wherever there was available room or stood in the doorway if there wasn't any. Then the Alliance group swelled our numbers and we started meeting in open air spaces, either my backyard or local parks.

It was intense; it was like having the summer camp experience brought home. Our informal meetings as friends became imbued with the spirit of our Bible studies and prayer meetings. The group was our church—not church we simply attended, but church we lived. Conversations could easily shift from discussing Metallica's Black album to praying for the members of the band. We'd taken responsibility for our own journeys with Christ, simply because we had no other choice. If we weren't going to do it, no one else was going to do it for us.

'Adult Leadership'

In the midst of this experience I was called into the senior pastor's office. Rumor had reached his ears of young people meeting for Bible study and prayer without the church's official permission or leadership.

"I wouldn't say it's without leadership," I replied.

"Adult leadership," he corrected.

"Several of us are adults," I informed him with all the maturity I could muster into my 19-year-old voice.

He strongly suggested we stop meeting together. It wasn't church sanctioned. There was no accountability. It wasn't controllable.

I felt angry; the community we'd become was more real and closer to what I understood church to be than any Sunday morning worship service I'd ever attended. It had been a taste of something real and vibrant.

Edmonton

When The Gathering began, I'd been living in Edmonton for six years. Edmonton isn't the sort of place you miss, whether you blink, close your eyes for a moment, or even take a short nap. Being the capital city of the province will do that to a place. In Edmonton, it's not the place you blink and miss—it's the people. Finding community in a big city is a daunting task. Big cities breed big churches, where it's easy to remain another anonymous face in the crowd. I was working at a large church when The Gathering began.

It was started out of a hunger for things a group of kindred spirits felt the church ought to have been doing but wasn't or wouldn't. We desired a place where we could play the style of worship music we wanted to. We longed for a place where the messages were relevant to our generation, taught with visual language. We sought a place where we could serve coffee during the service, not after. So we started The Gathering, which was "church for people who don't like church."

These were among the elements that coalesced into The Gathering, but their role as a cause for this new movement was actually incidental—as incidental as their effect later on. The Gathering was borne out of the shared frustration of our inability to find a place where authentic Christian community could be experienced. We didn't articulate it that way at the time, but looking back, that's really the yearning we had, more than the style and form of the worship experience.

Pseudo Community

The churches we were attending or working in were what I'd characterize as fake or pseudo community. I use the term "Crest smile church," where we shake each other's hands and comment on how "blessed we are in the Lord," calling each other "brother" and "sister" through smiles so forced we're wearing the enamel off our perfect teeth. It's the sort of community we'd experienced throughout our lives as Christians; church as the place to be perfect, not broken, regardless of what we might say about the sinful human condition in the hypothetical or general sense.

So we left behind the plastic handshakes and saccharine smiles and started meeting as a home church. Within only a few short months we were meeting in community halls, and then we moved to a chapel located in West Edmonton Mall, the largest mall in the world. We thought we'd created a genuine community, but in truth we'd really just traded in one form of fakery for another.

Now we existed in a false fellowship of "the cool." We were our denomination's Gen-X experiment, the only one of its kind. We were postmodern, we were alternative, and we were proud of our achievement. Reveling in how edgy and different and "real" we perceived ourselves to be, we congratulated each other, the Crest smiles replaced with a sanctimonious smirk.

Stage Two

We'd been sure we were at the second stage of community, the difficult disclosure. It wasn't until I stepped down as the main leader that we really experienced the chaos of community struggling to become healthy.

Two years into the ministry we broke denominational ties and moved to a radically congregational approach, where we had no paid leadership, partially due to finances and partially due to dissatisfaction with what we'd begun to suspect was just the same old cake with different icing.

Without a paid pastor, we all became accountable. And I believe it was at that point that we really began to forge The Gathering into a real community. When you've got someone to go complain to about a problem, you never really have to put Jesus' words from Matthew 18:15-17 into practice. You never have to worry about coming up with a solution to problems. You can always just lay it at the pastor's feet and walk away. When the congregation is responsible for these things, you have no one to blame when things go awry.

And awry they did go.

That period was characterized by an assumption that real community meant saying whatever was on your mind or vomiting up whatever emotional garbage had been rotting and fermenting in our souls for years without a forum to express that pain. What emerged was a lot of bitterness, resentment, and hurt. Many of the sermons at that point were simply indictments of traditional and boomer church models.

We struggled beneath the freedom we felt, unencumbered by church boards and denominational interference but often reeling out of control into areas beyond the pale of what some could endure in good conscience. Others took the opportunity to turn services into their weekly therapy session, consequently making any "well-adjusted" congregants really uncomfortable.

Relinquishing Control

I don't think there was any one particular point of radical change, but I do remember one sermon very clearly. That night, the speaker announced he'd finally figured out how to transform the Gathering into the perfect church. The residue of our early arrogance lingering, we followed Scott outside to hear his revelation. Once we were assembled, he gestured to the building and said, "There. Now it's perfect; because we're not in it anymore."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that Christian fellowship isn't something we create, but rather a spiritual reality we participate in (Life Together, Harper and Row, 1954). The Gathering had been so busy trying to fabricate a healthy Christian community, we missed out on the possibility that God had already done the work and was waiting for us to realize it and come on board.

Somehow, somewhere between that service and the present, The Gathering did just that. We relinquished the need to control the outcomes, to measure the process, to count congregants, to manufacture conversions, and, above all, to create community. And when we let go of our dream of real community, God made us into one.

Full Participation

I'd love to be able to tell you that our approach has resulted in rampant numerical growth. After all, it's North American Christianity's measuring stick for success. Seven years into our ministry, we're still a good contender for the slowest growing church in North America, and I believe the reason for this is our decision to participate in what God is doing, not manufacture it.

If we manufacture community for people, they're bereft of their own responsibility to engage in it. When we come to church, we're often provided with a plethora of choices to engage in community, from small groups to worship teams to church league competition sports teams. We know who will be there, when to show up, and where to go. If we skip out on an event, it's not a problem because we're paying someone to ensure the community stays together.

If, on the other hand, we are the ones responsible for getting together and making connections, we quickly realize how much work it is. We have to make phone calls to see how people are; we can't rely on the pastor or deacons for that information. We become our brother's and sister's keepers.

Furthermore, "participating in what God is doing" is a tad too mercurial for most. I once heard someone comment that the reason we make so many rules in church is because we're actually afraid the Holy Spirit can't do its job of guiding believers. We say God's Spirit dwells in all believers, but trusting other Christians to listen to that Spirit is another thing entirely. It's difficult to be in community with someone when the Spirit isn't telling them to stop being an annoying jerk, to stop acting spiritually superior, or to stop talking during the service. It'd be easier if you had a pastor around to do that, or perhaps a set of posted rules for conduct. We'd rather Moses go up the mountain for us.

The problem is participation. We're like spectators at a football game screaming at the quarterback to get his act together. We ignore the fact that he's not the only one on the field, and we're actually part of the team. Putting on our uniforms and getting out there requires some effort. It requires responsibility. It requires participation.

I'm convinced that's how God's concept of community works. God is already doing it. Now we need to show up. There's no doubt who won the victory for David in the valley of Elah. But David had to show up. Saul wanted to manufacture the outcome of that situation by clothing David in his armor, but David refused it. No room for God's glory that way. Armor wasn't needed. Better weapons weren't needed. Modern military strategies weren't needed. What was needed was David showing up and participating in the victory God had already won.

You don't have to move to another town, small or large, to find authentic community. There's a good chance you don't even have to switch churches to find it. My guess is we've all been blinking and missing it. Let's open our eyes to what God wants to do in us and through us with the people right in front of us.

Mike Perschon lives in Edmonton, Alberta, and works as part-time associate pastor of Holyrood Mennonite Church and part-time freelance writer and speaker at camps, schools, and conventions.