Teaching middle school science has kept me pretty busy for the last three weeks. I’d forgotten over the summer how much work this job really is if you’re doing it well - and I haven’t even graded notebooks yet! 105 of them sit in my car as I type.

Church stuff, to say the least, has been on the back burner for a while. Grad school started last week (2 classes), and I’m stuck in the middle of all this wondering how in the world I’m going to make any kind of difference as a church planter.

Over the past year, I built several websites for our church, including SeattleMetroChurch.com, FilmNite.com, Contxt.us, BecomingLessStupid.com, and a few others that haven’t made it off the ground. I derived a great sense of accomplishment from these creations, yet the only thing that has come of them is the fact that we have to decide when events will be far enough ahead of time to post them on the website. What’s posted on the website is what happens, which keeps us from making last-minute changes as groups of friends are prone to do.

So we have decent websites. That’s one thing off the Build a Megachurch checklist. A lot of my thinking has been in this direction, and probably the first 30 church books I read were of the megachurch stripe. But we are not a megachurch and never will be. We are a small church that would like to become bigger, but doesn’t want any of the things we see associated with megachurches. We want to retain the organic identity we have found.

We’ve also done a small amount of advertising by putting up posters on telephone poles (which is legal here, though not everywhere). So far, we’ve had a few people come to our film & spirituality gatherings, but nothing else. It seems that there is a mismatch between the type of group we are (small, relational) and that form of advertising (mass, impersonal). If you want to get people to come to a concert, you put up posters, but it doesn’t work the same way for inviting people into a community. Does this mean, then, that all advertising is entirely out of the question?

The alternative seems to be operating relationally, but we also don’t want to be a baptized Amway scheme. If the people we know aren’t interested, we want to respect that and respect their right to make their own decisions without feeling pressured and without putting strain on our relationships. Most of my friends from work are not interested in coming to our church events, even the less overtly spiritual ones, and I’m not going to put any pressure on to change that. To do so would make the friendship less than real; it would make it a means to an end, and I wouldn’t want a friend doing that to me.

So, if we’re not the kind of church you can advertise through mass media, and we’re not the kind of church that tries to propagate itself like Amway, how do we grow? More specifically, if there are people out there who are interested in what we are doing, how do we contact them and make them aware of our existence? This could be little more than advertising with a positive spin on it, but I don’t want it to be just that.

One answer we’ve discussed is the current search for spirituality. Non-religious people are very spiritual, and churches are picking up on that. But there is another mismatch here, between the search that many people are on (for a fulfilling spiritual experience and identity), and what churches offer (Christianity based on the things Christianity has always been based on, namely Christ and living life in submission to Him, which doesn’t really sound as cool as having a fulfilling spiritual experience). In other words, as encouraging as the renewed interest in spirituality in western culture may be, it isn’t the same as a renewed interest in what Christianity actually offers. The Christian story relates to the universal human search and story, but also subverts it along the way, denying it full rein in order to bring in something better.

So where does that take us?