10/29/06 - "I'm Free"

I'm free to do what I want any old time...
The Rolling Stones, "I'm Free" (recently covered by The Soupdragons)

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don't use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows. For everything we know about God's Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That's an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?

Galatians 5:13-15 (The Message)

see you Sunday night at 5:30 pm...

Deep Thought #3

It's hard to believe that a movement born of visionaries and dreamers would become dominantly known for its traditions and rituals.
Erwin McManus

Words: "Innovative"

For a number of years, the church office reached me by calling my pager, putting in the church phone number, then hoping I could find a pay phone to call in. Now, thanks to cell phones, I can be reached almost anywhere (except for a short stretch of Fig Ave. between Jefferson & American). Innovation has changed communication & ministry. And I'm not exactly on the forefront of the technological revolution - no Blackberry, no text messaging, no camera in my cell phone.

When we talk about a worship gathering being innovative, we're talking about more than edgier music and/or changing the look of the worship center. What we pray will happen is that this time each Sunday night will use whatever means & methods that will best communicate the truth of Christ to a postmodern culture, whether those methods are ancient or cutting edge.

New Life @ Night is definitely seeking to be an innovative worship gathering.

Words: "Experiential"

In many churches, you're pretty much a spectator at a worship service with three major exceptions:

• church gymnastics (sit, stand, kneel, walk the aisle, etc.)
• congregational singing (meaning the part where the guy up front urges us to sing as opposed to the music performed by the band or choir)
• giving (putting money in the plate/basket/pouch/bucket/whatever as it goes by)

In experiential worship, the gathering is intentionally designed to involve more movement & participation on the part of the congregation through a variety of methods. These could include prayer stations, small group discussion, contemplative silence, multi-sensory experiences, and much, much more.

New Life @ Night is definitely going to be more experiential.

Words: "Emergent" and "Emerging"

Like I said yesterday, these aren't the same thing in churchspeak. Chances are pretty good you haven't heard of either of these in regards to worship or worship gatherings unless you pretty much live on the Web and/or hang out with church planters. (There's nothing wrong with hanging out with church planters - aka folks who start new churches - it's just that their conversations are seasoned with words unlikely to be used in "normal" conversation - stuff like "emerging" and "missional" and "ethos"... more on the last two of those later.)

The definition of the adjective "emerging" is "newly formed or just coming into prominence" - which refers not only to a more experiential (we'll get to that word next week) style of worship but also to a new postmodern culture & thought that is affecting more & more folks in our community.

OTOH, "emergent" (for the most part) refers to a group of folks known as the Emergent Village who are involved in planting & supporting "emerging" churches. While we can learn a lot from them, they are not all theologically on the same page as NewLife Community Church. (Yes, all of you hardcore nitpickers out there, the whole emerging/emergent thing isn't quite that simple... but this is close enough for what we're doing here in Easton, CA.)

NewLife @ Night is definitely trying to speak the truth of Jesus Christ to the emerging culture.

Words: "Contemporary"

The English language is a crock. Look, I'm not agitating for us to adopt a new language, though it wouldn't hurt for a large chunk of us to learn a bit more Spanish. (I'm pretty much limited to Mexican foods & some curse words my buddies in high school taught me, so I'm not the poster child for bilingual communication.) My problem is with how easy it is for words & terminology to shift in meaning - regardless of your language of origin.

Which makes our job that much harder when we try to come up with ways to quickly describe the upcoming NewLife @ Night worship gathering... and end up fumbling through words like "contemporary", "emergent", "emerging" (yes, there's a difference), "innovative", and "experiential". You see, nearly everyone has their own preconceived notions when they hear those particular words & phrases - notions that can cause you to envision something very different than what we're dreaming of for Sunday nights.

So, in the interests of good communication & actually getting some use out of my B.A. in English, let's take a closer look at this - shall we?

contemporary
In my addled brain, this sounds like a "hip" word from the 60's... I get mental pictures of the Monsanto house at Disneyland & those funky egg-shaped plastic chairs that hang from the ceiling.

In evangelical circles, this became the buzzword of choice when describing new services in the 1980's & '90's - in fact, you still see it today. A church will advertise "traditional" worship at one time and "contemporary" at another time. In general, what they mean is as follows:

• "traditional" - the same thing we've been doing for the last 50 years
• "contemporary" - we changed the music (sold the organ & do more praise choruses), but otherwise the service is pretty much the same

NewLife @ Night is definitely NOT a "contemporary" service.

Deep Thought #2

Words have power. A.W. Tozer makes this provocative statement at the beginning of his classic book The Knowledge of the Holy: "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." I'd like to propose that, in a similar way, what comes into our minds when we think the word church is the most important thing in shaping how we function as a church.

Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church

T-25 Days and Counting...

The first "official" NewLife @ Night worship gathering will be on Sunday night, October 29th.

As a special gift to everyone who attends that first Sunday, we'll give you an extra hour of sleep, courtesy of Daylight Savings Time.

Deep Thought #1

Calling a church service a "time of worship" does not always make it so.
George Barna