inconsequential church, pt 2 [response]

As a follow-up to my post below called "Inconsequential Church," I would add the following (which I posted in the comments at Jan Edmiston's blog).

At my church, we've been wrestling with the [Michael Frost] question, "If your church disappeared tomorrow, would anyone outside the church notice or care?"

In some ways, it's like the question of whether anyone would notice or care if my family and I sold our house and moved out of our neighborhood.

Under what conditions would people notice or care? Well, probably they would if we had friendships and relationships with our neighbors... if we were good neighbors.

Surely the same is true of our churches (and there is some precedent, of course, to think about what it means for the Christian community to be a "good neighbor").

So, that's what we're pursuing as a church. It's awkward; there's no blueprint; we come from traditions of "if you build it they will come" and the only view of our literal church neighbors is the 20 second walk from the parking lot to the church building... and that, only if we look around.

It's strange and hard, but that's what I think it will take to be noticed, missed, relevant, significant, etc... - and those are non-club words for what I believe Christ asks of us in "faithfulness."