Thanks to Hamo for pointing me to Steve’s interesting idea on a newspaper/cafe way of doing church:

A lot of Kiwis [Steve is writing from Christchurch, New Zealand] like to spend Sunday morning over the newspaper, with good coffee in their hands. (Is this just Kiwis, or are there similar patterns elsewhere?).

So, church=
->lots of newspapers, muffins, coffee, cafe tables
->open for about 2 hours on a Sunday am
->a number of stations set up that relate to sections of the newspaper. As people read a section, then they have the opportunity to go to the relevant station, where various responses - confession, intercession, praise - are offered.
->a regular liturgy of coffee, in which God is thanked for her gifts
->followed by a 20 minute interview with 2 people, in which the weeks events are reflected on from a Kingdom perspective. So various articulate, witty people get to help all us poor newspaper readers make sense of the news. They would have to be both well read, yet quick on their feet, because the newspaper is setting the agenda.
->a small, regular, set liturgy ends this.

Hamo asked “Could that be church?“, and my response grew beyond normal comment length. Plus I’m a bit behind in posting. So here goes.

I don’t think any gathering is really church. The people are the church. So, if you’re asking whether this could be a workable way to connect with people on the basis of their interests and their approach to spirituality, I would say yes. I think it’s an excellent idea. My friend Jesse and I spent the morning in a cafe in north Seattle. There were probably 100 people in there over the course of an hour and a half. Certainly a hopping place. Many of them were reading papers; others, like us, were visiting with friends. It would be a great place to give them a chance to explore their relationships with God.

When it comes to inviting non-Christians to some church event, I think Pete Ward is right that we have to expect them to view it as they would view any product or service available in our society - as consumers.

Most people have an instant revulsion to any connection between church and consumerism, because a lot of us grew up in (or are still in) churches that were run as businesses and catered to Christians on the basis of felt needs, which sometimes resulted in a very me-centered way of doing church, complete with factions and money talking and all that mess. But I think Pete Ward and Steve are talking about something different here.

First, it’s important to consider the missional context. Steve isn’t talking about going to an established congregation and setting up coffee tables instead of pews and expecting the member to totally change the way they do things. If I understand him correctly, he’s talking about working with the totally unchurched, a population that is increasingly big and concentrated in urban centers and increasingly interested in spirituality - and that approaches spirituality, as everything else, consumeristically.

Second, I think that part of the revulsion against a consumer approach is that we have the idea that God has a certain set of specific things that he wants the church to do every time it meets, and that any deviation from or tweaking of this is pure selfishness and idolatry. This “pick and choose” approach (see Leighton’s recent post) is not a matter of selfishness but of realizing that what we have received from previous generations is not God’s will written in stone. Rather, it is the way of following God faithfully that was embodied in some previous Christian community, and since it worked so well, it was preserved for some time. There is nothing wrong with attempting to freshly re-contextualize our application of God’s will for us as we understand it. We need to make responsible choices for ourselves and our context, just as teens need to be able to pick out their own clothes, even if their parents would make more conservative decisions.

This is even more the case when we’re doing things missionally that aren’t really church. I think we need to be bold enough to say that it’s OK for the church to do things that are not “church.” And even if they are church, we don’t have to cover all the bases with every gathering. Sometimes it’s OK just to watch a movie and talk about movies. Sometimes it’s OK to read a newspaper and share how what you read reminded you of God. And sometimes it’s OK to do things that are not anything like a church service for the purpose of connecting with people who don’t know Jesus. Isn’t that what’s behind all the “moving ministry beyond the four walls of the church” talk?

UPDATE: Darren mentions that there is a church actually called Cafe Church in Melbourne.