If necessity is the mother of invention, what “necessities” are driving today’s proliferating innovations in church life?
“Although the next church’s shape is not yet obvious, the forces that give it shape are,” writes Reggie McNeal in The Present Future. And while the innovations in this issue of Leadership may not suit your church, if McNeal is correct, the forces that have inspired these innovations are already shaping the people in your pews. What are these underlying forces?
We asked four cultural analysts:
Reggie McNeal is director of the Leadership Development Team for the South Carolina Baptist Convention.
Sally Morganthaler is founder of Sacramentis.com and a leader in worship renewal.
Lyle Schaller is a prolific author and church consultant.
Leonard Sweet is a futurist and dean of the Theological School at Drew University.
Gleaning our conversations with these cultural exegetes, four forces were clearly identified.
1. Customization
“The world has moved from industrialized standardization to individualized customization,” Reggie McNeal told us. “People are used to ordering their Dell computer fully customized. Nineteen-year-olds raised in this world don’t want the same worship done the same way every week. The major innovation that is occurring is a move from worship templates to worship expressions that fit people as individuals.”
What might that look like? McNeal envisions churches with different stations for worship, so congregants can customize the Sunday morning emphasis according to their current spiritual state: “No more printed bulletins, no preset three-course meals. Churches will ask, ‘Do you need to rest in the Lord? Here’s a bean bag. Do you need to commune? There’s prayer in this corner.'”
Today’s people hunger not for a Sunday morning spectacle, but for relationships, creating, and connecting.
Sally Morganthaler described a church already doing this in Washington: “The church invited local artists to build in the gym 16 symbols of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Each symbol was described in the three prominent languages spoken in the area. For 36 hours, the community was invited to tour the gym.
“Because the church invited the artistic influence of the community—not just the churched—the stations reflected a cultural integrity, a recontexting of the crucifixion narrative. Instead of purple robes reflecting Christ’s nobility, one artisan had set up a tuxedo with a purple sash. Instead of ‘INRI,’ they had an L.E.D. readout, ‘The King.’ Instead of a picture of a Jerusalem mob crying for Barabbas, they played a looping video of a riot in Seattle. For the people who visited, it was as if Holy Week was brought into their own lives. It was multi-sensory, with no start and finish where you have to be doing what everyone else is doing. You could linger where the presentation was speaking to you.”
This trend affects preaching, too. “The use of metaphor has a ‘multi-valency’ to it [as contrasted to equivalency], an ambiguity, an opportunity for the Spirit to apply it in unique ways,” said Morganthaler. “Too often we take that away, say when we show a film clip and then explain its moral. When you use artwork or drama, don’t tell people what it means. Instead, ask questions and let people wrestle with what it’s saying to them.”
To Lyle Schaller, customizing to individuals reflects society’s need to hear that the church cares. “We must begin being others-oriented, addressing the potential constituents’ agenda, not the messenger’s agenda.”
This clamoring for customization may be only the symptom of a deeper desire—the desire to participate.
2. Participation
The significance of the Washington church’s Holy Week experience lies in its invitation to take part—giving a range of opportunities for diverse individuals to be involved. As McNeal told us, “Participants actually participate in creating worship.”
Schaller drew from his experience to demonstrate how the hunger for participation has already changed churches: “When I was a pastor, I would read passages and a few people listened. But in that same church today, they use praise music and 80 percent of the church participates. When you say ‘contemporary,’ you really mean participatory.
“An essay in Scientific American said we are now convinced the brain is more tuned to music than to language. You often hear people say, ‘I can’t get that tune out of my head.’ You don’t hear them say, ‘I still have last Sunday’s sermon running through my head.’ Therefore, one point of innovation will be better use of music to communicate the gospel instead of seeing it as the backdrop for worship. The difference is, do you present worship so people sit and listen, or so the people actually participate in the communication of the message?”
Leonard Sweet noticed how superstar band U2 (and lead singer Bono) changed their act in response to this. “U2 used to use big screens and technology to create an extravaganza. But they repented. Now Bono’s stage pierces into the middle of the audience, and he draws from a palette of 45 songs by interacting with the crowd. A U2 concert is not about performance any more, but about relationships, about people there helping to shape the event itself.
“For churches, this means no more pew potatoes. It’s not about a Sunday morning spectacular, but about relationships, creating, and connecting.”
The hunger to participate in their own spiritual growth will also lead younger generations to desire some changes in the pulpit.
“Congregations want to be participants in preaching,” said Sweet, “to make it a collaborative art form.”
McNeal agreed: “Preachers will say, ‘Come up here, Lilly, I want to talk with you.’ And preaching will be something the community of faith does, as opposed to one person paid to talk. Someone will still be directing traffic, but the goal of the preacher will be to draw out of the church body what God has been doing.
“Preaching will involve more and more interactivity. I was at a church where 60 percent of the people were seekers—and I thought it would embarrass them to participate—but the pastor said, ‘Talk about that with those around you,’ and the people were enthused.
“When the unchurched come to church, if they don’t get a chance to talk about spiritual stuff, they’re flabbergasted. They think, I could have stayed home and gotten more from Oprah. We need to help people think, give them opportunities to discuss. Life doesn’t fit in boxes and principles of a sermon outline.”
The four analysts pointed to Internet chat rooms and Starbucks clusters as evidence of people’s desire for interactive spiritual growth. People seem to be asking, “Without my direct involvement, how can it be relevant?”
At the same time, our analysts said, our culture is asking of the church, “Without your involvement in the world, how can you be relevant?”
3. Incarnational community
“Churches need to develop incarnational skills, being the body of Christ in the community,” said Sweet. “We need to exegete the culture—whether cowboy, Appalachian, urban—and indigenize the gospel to that context.
“The problem with our old models is demonstrated by Reggie McNeal’s refrigerator door metaphor. If I walk into your kitchen—your holy of holies—and I say your fridge is ugly, I insult your family, because the fridge is where you display your family’s artwork. If you own a Picasso, you hang it on the wall, but the fridge is for the family.”
[McNeal later joked, “Everything Len knows, I told him. I can’t be held responsible, however, for what he does with my stuff.”]
While the professionals’ work has a place in church ministry, a more convincing evidence of a church’s spiritual vitality is the way normal people—the church family—live their faith in the neighborhood.
“Incarnational life is the new standard of excellence—not the quality of performance, but the level of participation in the community,” said Sweet.
This translates into an others-first mindset. “I was working with a church that was planning a new building,” said McNeal. “They started with the facilities, budget, calendars, needs. I broke in and asked, ‘Can we talk about the community around us? About the people who aren’t here? When a missionary moves in, and the town needs a well, we expect the missionary to dig a well. We are sitting in a mission field but thinking like club members. We expect differently of our missionaries, why don’t we expect differently from ourselves?'”
Another church moved onto 30 acres in a new subdivision. As the church talked with the housing developer, they discovered the subdivision would be short on recreational space. So the new church built recreational facilities first, and made them available to the community as a way to say, “We’re here for you.”
“It may be that we’ve reached everyone that wants to be just like us. Innovation,” said McNeal, “must push us to move out of mono-culturalism, back to high-intensity people development.”
Though the four analysts agreed that churches need to be more present in the lives of the community, they didn’t necessarily agree on what defined community.
“The word community was once defined as a geographical area,” Lyle Schaller noted, “but community now means a point of commonality, not of residence. If a church outlines its community by who’s around at 3 a.m., it’s missing the point. People no longer live where they sleep, but form community around hobbies, the workplace, service clubs, and so forth. For churches, the question is, ‘How large do we have to draw a geographic circle to include enough of the people in the niche we’re trying to serve?'”
All four analysts agreed, however, that meaningful community boils down to one key emphasis: meaningful relationships.
4. Relationships
“The key focus of the future is relationships and connections,” said Sweet. “We’ve been about principles and propositions and points, but Christianity is all about relationships—with God, the Scriptures, one another, and the world. The future church will be a place rich in God-life relationships.”
How can churches nurture life-transforming relationships? Our analysts pointed to ministering in people’s homes. Said Sweet, “One of the secrets of Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven work is that it reclaimed the home as a place for discipleship training. His ‘Get out of doors’ (G.O.O.D.) concept is to get church into homes and Starbucks. The future church will be a G.O.O.D. church.”
“Instead of getting my neighbor to church, my goal must be to continue journeying with her to faith,” said Morganthaler. “I would love to introduce her to my fellow Christ-followers, but that doesn’t mean we end up in a (church) building. I want to involve her with my friends there, but we may end up at home, eating, praying, talking, existing together.”
McNeal envisioned more sweeping change: “In the old world, we put everybody in a room together for worship, then split them to do age-segregated religious education. In the new world, maybe we will split up for worship—enabling a diversity of people to worship in their own heart languages. Then we’ll come together for spiritual formation, defined as life-on-life, intergenerational coaching. We’ll see more family mission trips and community projects. We’ll turn homes into spiritual formation centers.
“In the old world, we taught a curriculum, then sent people out to validate it by experience. In the new world, we’ll debrief people’s experiences to see where God is already at work.”
In our conversations with the analysts, we heard a common theme: “God is working in this culture; we just have to join him.” The hungers identified here can help the church capitalize on what God is doing outside our doors.
Reggie McNeal summed it up this way: “In the Book of Acts, the church was trying to catch up to the Spirit. One thing I find hopeful is that we’re back there again. The Spirit is moving; now we need to catch up.”
Drew Zahn is youth pastor at First Baptist Church in Stratford, Iowa, and former assistant editor of Leadership.
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