Monday afternoon at 5:00 we climbed to the second floor of the Methodist community center in Coventry to attend Goth Church. About twenty kids, age 12 to 22, were already hanging out. Here were youth from Coventry’s disadvantaged neighborhoods. One sixteen year old had brought her two month old son with her. Another youth, we were later told, already at age fifteen was an alcoholic. Throughout the gathering there was a steady stream of youth stepping outside for a cigarette break. Not all of the kids were dressed in Goth style, but most had chosen some distinctive form of self-expression.

The topic for the day was for the youth to design together the ideal church. Keith, their leader, flashed on the screen several scriptures referring to church and then invited the youth to work in small groups, including the adult visitors, to describe their own ideas of what church should be like. The answers were fairly predictable: a gathering where every person’s ideas were accepted, with no rules, where people could just have fun with each other. Then Keith turned the topic upside down as he declared, “Just remember, you’re not talking about some other group. You are church, so if you want a certain kind of church, you’re going to have to make it that way.” Keith then closed the more structured part of the gathering with prayer, and the visitors left, while the kids continued to hang out for a couple more hours.

“You are church.” I wasn’t completely surprised by the statement, since I had been reading about “youth church” as one of the forms of the emerging church in England. Still, it was a bit jarring, since this youth gathering had so few characteristics commonly held to be essential to a church.

Later I asked Keith about his assertion that these kids he works with every week constitute a church. “Jesus said where two or three are gathered in his name, he is there among them,” he replied. “That is the primary factor.”

We’re spending this week in England in a course titled, “Encountering New Ways of Being Church.” Goth Church in Coventry certainly qualifies as a new way of being church, though it pushes every button for most Christians. Tomorrow we will spend the morning in the seminar, “Church or Not a Church: That Is the Question. What Must We Have, and What Can We Do Without?” There should be a lively discussion.

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