New Adventures in Church Experimentation

In the midst of economic upheaval and difficult times for many people, our church community at CTK Durango is doing some really cool stuff! When our budget tanked in January, we realized there wasn’t going to be an easy solution. Several of the families in our church were/are dealing with extremely challenging financial realities. Recovering financially as a church wasn’t going to be a matter of people digging deeper.

The first question we asked ourselves (it seems like we ask a lot of questions--more than we have answers, usually!) was, What does the church do in a time like this? We decided we could do one of two things: we could disband and have every man fend for himself and come back together when things were better, or we could come together and see if God would be willing to work in and through us as a community to move forward. Naturally, none of us wanted to be sissies, so, scared as we were, we decided to come together and seek God’s direction. In this process over the last couple months, we have seen God really come through for the people in this church. No instant fixes, or outrageous resolutions, but more an experience in life amidst difficulty. We’ve seen great movements in generosity, gratitude, and grace (the g thing was accidental, I promise!). We’ve seen people making room to take care of the people around them and God has used this family of believers to reach out to the people around us--even when circumstances are not ideal! We’ve also had the opportunity to experiment with church.

Our conversations over the past several months have led us in an interesting direction as a church. We started talking about worship. The question was, What if my attitude about worship was more about what I bring to God in community and less about what God and community have for me? Our conclusion was that we each bear the responsibility of worship and the result was a renewed attitude of focusing on God in our worship meetings and taking the focus away from ourselves. We defined worship as acknowledging God for who he is out of our brokenness and gratitude--as a community of Christ-followers.

It wasn’t long before we felt the need to carry this movement of worship to the people around us. We asked, How do we communicate this idea of worshipping God in brokenness and gratitude to the people around us in Durango? We concluded that focusing on authentic relationships was extremely important to moving our life of worship out of the church meeting and into the community. This presented us with somewhat of a dilemma: how do we strike a balance between worshipping God in community and building meaningful relationships with the people God wants to reach without simply trying to get people to attend church. We’ve decided against church attendance as a primary means of evangelism because we’ve noticed that there isn’t really enough opportunity at a worship meeting for us to get to know each other better, let alone new visitors.

We have recently begun to experiment with new ways to accomplish our goal of worship and reaching out. We retrofitted our small groups to become teaching groups. We decided they would meet for six weeks at a time with a focus on different teaching material--theology, Bible study, biblical world-view, etc. By meeting for a limited period of time, we would give people a chance to get to get to know each other as well as the opportunity to meet others as the groups mix and change over time. We are also trying a different way of doing Sunday Worship. Instead of meeting weekly, we are meeting once a month for community worship. This leaves us with the weekends in between Sunday Worship to develop meaningful relationships with the people we work and live with who might never “attend church”. It has been fascinating to see how people are using this free space to develop relationships. Personally, I have already spent time getting to know people from inside and outside our church community that simply wasn’t possible before. We are encouraging people to go camping and have bbqs and invite friends over for dinner or go to shows late on Saturday night!

Time will tell whether or not this works for us. So far, the biggest complaint has been, “I miss meeting regularly” which rarely means they miss preaching and stuff so much as the regular time spent with people--something I think they will value over time when they realize the possibilities for creative time spent together outside of the context of a church service.

So, this is pretty much what we have going on right now at CTK Durango. The last thing I want to talk about now to catch this blog up completely is the idea of calling and what I am discovering as a pastor on the topic, but that’ll be another post.

By the way, thank you to all of you who have been tracking with us and praying for us. I hope to keep better connected to you all now that we’re all caught up!