Practical Faith for Practical People

Can transformation truly come about from the mainline?




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Originally uploaded by pastorchrisbishop

So I have been reading a number of texts about the next great stage of the church and what it needs to do to reach the people who have been hurt, alienated or just think that it is irrelevant to their lives.
Throughout the text there are buzz words like relational, organic, small group model…and the list goes on.
A number of the recent reads are all about simplifying Church. While there are a number of great ideas in the text (tough some I don’t agree with on the theological level) I can see how they are moving in powerful ways. But I have yet to come across a text what will look long and hard about transformation in a mainline congregation (Methodist, episcopal, Lutheran…).
All of these ideas are a ground up church plant/start that allow a great deal of identity to be formed from the onset. So what are the churches who desperately want to be welcoming to the lost group to do? Do we just pray about it (seems we are historically good at prayer with little action if we want to deny something with saying “no”)? Do we send $$ to make it happen somewhere else? How do we IMPLEMENT these emergent teaching into our congregation?
Dianna Buttler Bass gets to the a bit in her book “Church for the rest of us,” but i would like to see it one more step to the practical learning.
Truly my thoughts are that we need to bring youth worship to “Big Church.” But how to do that in an established mainline without splitting and fracturing the congregation is my question now?
Perhaps this is more of a rant, but I really think that there has to be some other ways and I have not found them yet. Any help would be great

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Alison Housten

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