“Most of the people who come here are church drop-outs,” explained Doug Logan, pastor of Liberti Church in Roxborough. Liberti is the third congregation in a multi-site church in Philadelphia.

“These are present or former college students, mostly from somewhere other than Philadelphia. Their entry into the church is not the worship service but the home meetings. We may never have a really impressive worship service, but that’s not the heart of this church. It’s the home meetings.” To reinforce that point, everyone who joins Liberti must first belong to a home group.

That requirement may turn out to be the key to keeping the people of Liberti together. I asked  a young father what makes Liberti distinctive from other churches. Struggling to find an answer, he acknowledged he hasn’t found any church to be all that acceptable. “Then why do you keep coming to Liberti?” I pressed. “Well, it’s better than the others.” Not a ringing endorsement, but those who insist they are Christians but who have dropped out of church are bound to be a difficult population to satisfy.

In addition to reaching out to the de-churched, Liberti is focusing on a large apartment building near their worship site. A fair number of the apartment residents are young adults, and so folks from Liberti make a point of hanging out in the apartment club, making acquaintances. When the church decided to send a group to Sudan to install a well, they invited residents of the apartment building to accompany them and to share the expense.

It’s a good missional strategy, on two counts. First, apartment dwellers are notoriously hard to connect with, so beginning with entertainment and relaxation is one of the few options. All the writers on missional themes emphasize the need for Christians to allocate far more time to forming relationships with those outside the church. Frost and Hirsch, in The Shaping of Things to Come, urge, “The missional-incarnational church should be living, eating, and working closely with its surrounding community, developing strong links between Christians and not-yet-Christians.”

Second, inviting the apartment residents to participate in the Sudan project illustrates a common feature of missional churches. Frost and Hirsch maintain that “Shared projects allow the Christians to partner with unbelievers in useful, intrinsically valuable activities within the community. In the context of that partnership, significant connections can be established.”