“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.”

Everything that Ikon, the experimental community in Belfast, does, has an ironic twist to it. While insisting that they are not a church – Pete Rollins calls it a faith collective – they have a full assortment of commitments, values and programs to provide expression to their alternative vision.

For instance, if Ikon is not a church, and not even an organization, how does one identify him/herself as associated with it? At the monthly gathering in May, for instance, about half of the attenders were new. A fair number of these are pilgrims passing through, who come once or twice and move on. Yet some of the regulars, for whom Ikon is their primary faith expression, insist that they would never want to be considered members. Pete has decided to make up Nonmember Cards to distribute so that such people can be officially recognized as nonmembers(!).

Can an anti-institution have programs? Evidently so. There is a Nonmember Class, a course called What Would Jesus Deconstruct, and last spring they offered Atheism for Lent.

One of the more popular offerings is the Omega Course – a tongue in cheek alternative to the widely known course, Alpha. The Omega Course “is designed to invite participants to move beyond their current understanding of Christianity through a lively yet serious interrogation of faith. What we leave behind in the aftermath of this course is anyone’s guess and it may well turn out to be more than we expect or even desire, so please consider carefully whether this course is right for you.”

While there is no structure within this faith collective, the very lack of organization is designed to draw something out of everyone who participates. Pete Rollins challenges those who associate with Ikon to pay (1) a relational tithe – to give a tenth of their time to forming and maintaining friendships, and (2) a financial tithe, not to Ikon, but to others in need.

And even a non-church can foster caring relationships. Rollins explains, “If there is no ‘group’ who cares about the person sitting beside me, then there is more need for me to care about that person. If there is no pastoral support team in place, then I need to be the pastoral support. The refusal to offer pastoral support thus generates a potential place where pastoral care is distributed among everyone. As Dostoevsky once said, ‘We are all responsible for each other, but I am more responsible than all others.’”

We were going around the room introducing ourselves at the monthly meeting of Emerging Phoenix, the emergent cohort in Atlanta. A twenty-something still in business casual dress from a day at work, said, “I’m Dave, and I’m a heretic.” No one batted an eye or registered surprise at his introduction. As a devotee of Pete Rollins, founder of Ikon, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, everyone in the room was familiar with the expression and knew what Dave meant.

Though Belfast could hardly be further removed, culturally, from Atlanta, the influence of the experimental community, Ikon, is palpable. Ikon uses five words to distinguish itself from conventional churches, and many emergent communities are fully on board. These five descriptors, below, are followed in each case with an explanatory sentence from the Ikon web site, http://wiki.ikon.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Iconic

“To treat something as an icon is to see it as that which draws us into a deep contemplation of that which cannot be reduced to words, images or experience.”

Apocalyptic

“The word ‘apocalyptic’ simply refers to the incoming of a singular, unrepeatable event that is absolutely inconceivable, an event that could not have been predicted in advance of its coming and which defies all expectations. At Ikon we wish to reclaim and celebrate the apocalyptic nature of God. . . .”

Heretical

“Each revelation of God requires interpretation and these interpretations are inevitably limited by such things as language, intelligence, cultural context, tradition and psychological makeup. By recognising this we endeavour to hold our current understanding of God lightly, allowing both the Spirit and other people to challenge what we believe.

“In addition to this we acknowledge our heretical stance in relation to the larger Christian community. . . By doing this we also endeavour to be a place of refuge for those on the edges, or outside, the traditional church system, yet who desire God.”

Emerging

“. . . We would prefer to call ourselves a community becoming Christian rather than a community of Christians. . . We embrace the idea that re-reading, critiquing, constructing and deconstructing are all processes which remain vital for our spiritual development.”

Failing

“Finally Ikon acknowledges that it constantly fails in its desire to be an icon of the invisible. . . Our attempts at forming a community of individuals who radiate divine love are, at best, the forging of a poor icon through which people can dimly perceive God and, at worst, an off-putting mirror that simply reflects our own limitations.”

No marketing consultant would ever recommend that a church describe itself to the public as heretical, or failing, and the other three words would only seem abstruse to the outsider. But for the worldwide emergent community, these are attractive and engaging concepts around which to shape the community of Jesus in the post-Christendom era.

In the center of tradition-bound Belfast is a small spiritual community that pushes every boundary and questions every assumption. Calling themselves Ikon, they are a network of young adults drawn together by the engaging, nonconformist leader, Pete Rollins. Their mission is to reach those who can’t fit into the mold of traditional Catholic or Protestant churches and who want a place to explore faith or non-faith without anyone jumping on them. The friends at Ikon love to question everything, to press people to think beyond ordinary categories in search of what is real – something you can build your life on.

Having grown up in the evangelical church in Belfast, Pete Rollins became restless for a different way of being church. What if churches met in public view instead of sequestered in their own buildings? Deciding to give it a try, Rollins went up to a barkeep and asked if he could have a church meet in his bar, during bar hours, with other patrons present. After a long pause, the barkeep said, “Okay.” That led to the monthly gatherings of Ikon at Menagerie Bar.

They don’t go to the back room of the pub. When it is time for Ikon to begin, those who have gathered for the event are scattered among other patrons at tables. Regular customers can ignore the presentations, music and drama if they want, but because the interactions are so interesting, many are drawn into the event. And these are “events,” not worship services. Each month there is a theme and a carefully planned series of activities and presentations using art, music, movement and personal expression. Here is how Ikon describes what they do:

“Inhabiting a space on the outer edges of religious life, we are a Belfast-based collective who offer anarchic experiments in transformance art. Challenging the distinction between theist and atheist, faith and no faith, our main gathering employs a cocktail of live music, visual imagery, soundscapes, theatre, ritual and reflection in an attempt to open up the possibility of a theodramatic event.”

Don’t miss that last phrase, “theodramatic event.” Pete Rollins is convinced that churches have so badly botched their message that it is hard for anyone actually to meet God in worship. But by guiding people through a sensory, interactive experience, Rollins hopes those who have given up on finding meaning through faith might encounter God in unexpected ways.

There are thousands of emerging churches in the Western world, almost all of them born out of the same restlessness that drove Pete Rollins to seek an alternative to the churches’ standard fare. Most emerging churches, however, have ended up not that different from the traditional churches that were left behind. Ikon is one of the few exceptions.

The thirty year conflict in Northern Ireland known as “the troubles” left a generation of young adults scarred by political and religious animosities. One subset of young adults immersed itself in “club culture,” spending all their disposable time and money at dance centers and pubs. We’re not talking about a night out on the town. This is a group that was drowning itself in drinking and drugs.

A collection of churches in Belfast decided to reach out to these young adults. But how? The cultural disconnect from conservative churches to this young adult population was pronounced. In situations like this it is common for churches to hire someone to cross the cultural bridge on their behalf, and that is what the Belfast clergy did. Creating the organization Echo ( = ECCO – Engagement in Club Culture Outreach), they hired Dave Magee to build relationships with young adults.

I suspect there were two agendas operating. The clergy in Belfast no doubt hoped that these young adults could be reclaimed for faithful participation in church. Dave Magee, on the other hand, was creating a new space for young adults to experience faith apart from the polarized Irish churches. In an internet interview he spoke of these young adults “trying to escape the fallout of generations of manipulative and enslaving religious identities.”

The word echo provided an apt metaphor for this ministry. “An echo is somewhere between a voice and no voice, somewhere between hearing and not hearing, and somewhere between knowing and not knowing. It’s a place of faith and doubt. It’s for all those trying to shed their snake skins of tradition, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and trying to work things out for themselves. It’s for those caught dancing in the dichotomy of clubbing and Christianity, and still trying to follow Christ.”

After five years the Echo ministry ran its course, but Dave Magee is still pursuing the vision of an alternative Christian community in Belfast among young adults who long for something better than the established churches. Who knows? Maybe the churches will hear the echo too.

Every Tuesday night in the summer is Cruise Night at the Evergreen Drive-in. If I can possibly afford the time, I’ll stop on my way home and walk among the cars. People drive their reconditioned classic cars to Evergreen, open the hoods, roll down the windows, and then carry lawn chairs over to the shade of the restaurant to swap stories about the hobby of restoring old cars. People like me will pull into the drive-in, get an ice cream cone and peer into the cars of yesteryear, admiring the handiwork and remembering when these cars were new.

I’m beginning to think of American churches as vintage cars. Last Sunday I visited a ’65 Cadillac DeVille: huge, loaded with every accessory (Think how exciting it was in 1965: Air conditioning! Power windows! Power steering! Power brakes!) and getting about seven miles per gallon.

This morning I spent time in a fully restored ’63 Rambler. It was nicely done, with new paint and upholstery, but with certain restorations you find yourself asking, “Why?” The Rambler was never a very good car to begin with. Why invest so much in bringing back a bad car?

There are two approaches to restoring cars. One is to fix it up exactly the way it was: authentic paint, exact replicas of original parts, etc. The other approach is to stylize the old with certain modifications. Installing air conditioning and a digital sound system to a classic car makes it new/old in a satisfying way to some owners.

Similarly, I see some churches adding a sound system and video to a fifty-year old worship style and hoping people will enjoy the result. Some do. If the restoration job is fairly decent, some folks are still willing to spend an hour in these retro churches.

Does anyone notice, however, that those who pull into the Evergreen Drive-in on Cruise Night to enjoy a few minutes of nostalgia do not themselves drive old cars? Almost everyone is desperately trying to find a way to avoid anything requiring a trip to the gas station.

Too many of the churches I have visited on this sabbatical, even the ones overflowing with young adults, are basically refurbished old cars with a few modern touches. It’s pretty risky to invest their future in retro when most of the culture is looking for a whole new concept.

It’s a familiar story: a community goes through slow deterioration, and the church is unable to adjust to the changes. By the time the Gilmerton community, just south of Edinburgh, was experiencing a turn-around it was too late for the parish church; the Church of Scotland closed the church and shuttered the dilapidated building.

But with very few residents involved in church, Gilmerton was now a mission field, and Paul Beautyman was assigned to start fresh. His strategy: create a church for youth (and their families). Placing those words in parentheses is intentional, because this is not an adult church where kids can also feel at home; it’s a church centered on youth, with parents as a second-tier concern.

The work is missional, going where the kids are, and not just inviting them to a church program. As a Church of Scotland minister, Paul has access to youth in schools in ways not possible in America. He teaches religion and directs school programs focused on sports and on drama.

Paul uses an “e-circle” strategy for helping youth to develop a Christian faith.

Step 1: Engage : using primarily sports and drama to begin relationships with youth

Step 2: Experience: inviting youth to identify spiritual experiences they may have had

Step 3: Explore: awakening youth to the possible significance of their spiritual experiences

Step 4: Explain: connecting the gospel with the youth’s spiritual experiences

Step 5: Experiment: providing opportunities for youth to experiment with Christian faith

Step 6: Express: helping youth to express this faith to their peers – which completes the circle, whereby youth begin to engage with others, as in Step 1.

Naturally, parents in Gilmerton are curious about the newly-kindled spiritual interest within their children, and Paul has started a small group for parents to explore Christian faith.

Meanwhile, the old church building at the center of the neighborhood has been refurbished, but Paul is concerned that residents not identify the building as “the church.” The name by the sidewalk expresses the new vision, that this building will be the hub for community events, but more importantly, that the name will subtly convey the message that Christ is the true hub of the community.

Under Paul Beautyman’s leadership, this ministry is being re-centered among people, apart from a building. When I asked him what he hoped would be the result of his ministry in Gilmerton, Paul’s first two answers illustrate the new emphasis: (1) that when someone is going through a time of trial, anyone in the community, rather than suggesting going to church or seeing the pastor, would say, “Go talk to that family; they can help you.” And (2) that the Christians in Gilmerton would gain a reputation for their joy.

In a scenic, coastal fishing village in northern Scotland, Peter and Dorothy Neilson have set up a combination home and retreat center. They call their home Linne Bheag, which is Gaelic for “small patch of water,” referring to the picturesque harbor nearby. From this idyllic setting Peter oversees the revolution. Though recently retired as a Church of Scotland minister, he invites a steady stream of people from across Scotland to Linne Bheag to engage with him on God’s agenda for the transformation of the church.

As a pastor Peter Neilson saw first-hand the limited reach of the typical congregation beyond its own members. Within the confines of his pastoral role, Peter tried everything he could think of to connect with non-churchgoing people: Bible studies for business men and women, personal ministry with those who frequent nightclubs, coming alongside the homeless. On behalf of his congregation he attempted to create “islands of possibility,” communities of people who live on the boundary between church and world and are able to link the two.

It was tough sledding, because so few within his congregation could imagine what he was trying to do, but out of his creative ventures came the concept that is possibly the key to rescuing the Church of Scotland from oblivion: “the church without walls.” With help from a few others, Peter wrote a concept paper by that name, which he was able to shepherd all the way to its adoption in 2001 by the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly. (More about that in a later blog.)

But adopting a mission concept by a church assembly is a far cry from implementing it, and in subsequent years Peter Neilson has dedicated himself to turning idea into reality. He provides a gentle mentoring role toward pastors wanting to make their churches more missional; he works with church planters so that they will embed missional concepts into the very beginnings of their churches; and through his broad network of relationships he coaches and goads the denomination toward its extreme makeover.

How is the revolution going? Four years after the Church Without Walls concept was adopted, a survey revealed that 71% of Scottish churches had at least experimented with the idea. Neilson has taken lessons from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How to Turn an Idea into a Movement. The view from Linne Bheag looks better all the time.

In the ten weeks since I began posting reflections on my sabbatical, by far the highest number of viewings and the most strenuous response has been to the blog entry, “Time to Stop Preaching?” I could imagine Faith Church members exclaiming, “Three days into his sabbatical, and already Rick wants to quit?” I have refrained from responding to the online comments, in part so that this web log could become a forum for group interaction and not just dialogue.

A short section from the book, Church After Christendom, seems to pick up on several of the comments on my blog post. Stuart Murray writes of the emerging churches that are experimenting with what he calls “multi-voiced worship,” various attempts to avoid the monologue sermon and worship led only by the pastor.

“Some emerging churches are convinced that multi-voiced worship promotes spiritual growth and builds strong communities. But many churches that introduce multi-voiced worship find almost irresistible the gravitational pull of the mono-voiced Christendom legacy. Table churches, household churches, cell churches and other small-scale community-oriented churches know the difficulty of sustaining multi-voiced worship. Many struggle with the low quality and predictability of contributions. Multi-voiced churches do not just happen. But there is an alternative to reverting to mono-voiced worship – training and equipping processes that ‘prepare God’s people for works of service’ (Eph. 4:7). . . Some emerging churches agree with Ephesians 4 that maturity comes not from over-dependence on worship leaders or listening to endless monologues, but ‘as each part does its work’ (v. 16), contributing distinctively to the harmony.”

Faith Church is way ahead of the game on this matter. We have been doing multi-voiced worship since 1990, if not longer, and we have a cadre of above average worship leaders. Our worship is richer because we have developed this congregational expertise.

The next frontier to consider is the sermon. My original blog included a quote from John Drane, whose book I read shortly before taking the course he led in England. Before this sabbatical is over I want to return to his thesis, that people accustomed to postmodern ways of experiencing reality will respond better to a different way of presenting the Word than a monologue sermon.

Stuart Murray is undoubtedly right, that the time and creativity required to produce multi-voiced worship make it hard to sustain week after week, but he also notes that expecting highly creative and engaging worship from the same pastor is also hard to sustain, and from his standpoint that creative effort requires an inordinate amount of the pastor’s time. There are no easy answers on this intriguing matter.

In northeast Scotland, near a small fishing village on the North Sea coast, 500 people have formed a community that attracts 9,000 pilgrims a year. What draws people to this far-off setting provides clues to the spiritual characteristics of our age that Christians must understand in order to connect our world with the life-changing gospel.

When Becky and I entered the visitors center at Findhorn we were met by a gentle sixty year-old with gray hair pulled into a ponytail. Where a person is from can be as significant as where he is now, and his innocent question of where we were from, elicited his story of having grown up in Metuchan, New Jersey. There is no doubt that living in raw, windy, inhospitable, remote Findhorn seemed to him like heaven compared to his memories of north Jersey.

Not only do people happily choose to live in Findhorn, they hold up their community as a model for the world. They call themselves “a unique international spiritual community, educational center and ecovillage.” (www.findhorn.org) They build houses out of materials at hand – giant, discarded whiskey vats, or tightly packed straw bales – or they cover their roofs with grass sod.

Spirituality gets embedded in every aspect of this community’s life. They have developed a state of the art waste disposal system, the Living Machine, that serves the entire community and expresses their sense of – yes – the spirituality of waste disposal. The waste processing vats in the greenhouse are arranged according to the twelve signs of the zodiac.

John Drane, who taught the Emerging Church course in England, used the example of this community in northern Scotland to illustrate what he calls “the new spirituality.” Emerging churches, in UK or in America, appeal to a population that affirms the values found at Findhorn:

– our interdependent connection with nature

– the value of public sacred spaces easily accessible to the whole community

– the sharing of food together as a key to the bonding of people. In Findhorn food is a significant focus of the day.

– hospitality and service integrated into the life of the community

– the importance of pronouncing words of blessing. Prayers of blessing are offered for the cooks, for the ground, on the houses and stores, etc. Though not addressed necessarily to God, they are expressed outwardly nevertheless.

– interactive rituals involving the whole community

Findhorn is a long way from Metuchan, in every way imaginable. But folks in Metuchan, and in Medford, who want to create a spiritual community that is appealing to many of today’s spiritual seekers can discover some important insights from this quirky, creative outpost.