Google NCC
You never know where Google will take you. Here's a cool post I found recently about National Community Church. I'm always trying to "get out of my box" and see NCC from the third person. I believe in leadership longevity, but leaders who stay in one place often develop blind spots. So I googled National Community Church and found this blog post. I honestly don't think I could have written this myself. It was so refreshing to get an "outsiders" perspective on NCC.
Our daughter started attending the National Community Church in Washington DC during her freshman year of college. We were fairly confident that 13 years of education at a very conservative Christian school and even longer attendance at "Bible teaching" churches would insure that she would not wonder off into some strange cult. Her initial descriptions of the church did raise our curiosity. Worship services are held in movie theaters that are part of a train station. They are building offices near the train station, but they will be over top of a church-run Starbucks-type coffee house. There is no Sunday School, just small groups. The average age of regular participants is so low it looks like a misprint. A much anticipated annual event is the Pastor's sermon series on "God @ the Box Office", which examines how central themes of the Gospel are treated in movies. The content of any upcoming sermon series is announced via a video "trailer". Are you picking up a theme yet?
While we trust our daughter, we had to check this out.
Strip off the technology , the cool music, the unusual location with seats that are actually comfortable and what you have is a Bible-teaching church that a college kid could invite his or her non-Christian friends to without the slightest trepidation. The pastor does not generally hold a Billy Graham limp back preachers edition Bible while he speaks, but I've never heard anything I can imagine Billy Graham disagreeing with. But, like my Mother always told me, "It's not what you said. It's how you said it." Illustrations are not about obscure practices of Himalayan monks or stories about "the good old days", but what is being illustrated are the same truths of the Gospel you hear in very conservative churches that would never think of sitting in comfortable seats for worship. The only difference I can see is that it is presented in a way that non-Christians might actually understand, even if they have hair that isn't gray (or blue).
What really brought this to mind afresh today is that we went to visit our daughter this past weekend. It was their annual "Eggstravaganza", which is a combination Easter Egg hunt and children's fair held in a park. It is a delightful outreach where Christ's love is plainly shown without being "preachy". Another annual event is on Mother's Day, when groups from the church go out and do home repairs and painting for single mothers who are struggling to get by. Activities like these put hands and feet on the Gospel. Overall it is a lot like the approaches taken by missionaries in foreign countries. First, show them what a Christian is. Second, get to know who they are so you really understand them. Then tell them why you care, in a way that will make sense to them, after they have seen that you care.
The spirit I see at National Community Church is very much like what I have seen in missionaries. Perhaps "emerging" is the wrong word for describing such places. It is not totally inapt, as they are emerging from captivity to the forms and trappings of modern Western culture. This sort of captivity has long bothered me when dealing with "we've never done it that way before" churches. I sometimes imagine God looking at tradition-bound with the same bemusement parents have when their child plays with the box it came in instead of the new toy. It might be more apt to call such churches "essentialist" because they are committed to the essentials of the Gospel rather than the cultural package in which they were delivered. That has long been my personal definition of what "Fundamentalism" ought to be.
Our daughter started attending the National Community Church in Washington DC during her freshman year of college. We were fairly confident that 13 years of education at a very conservative Christian school and even longer attendance at "Bible teaching" churches would insure that she would not wonder off into some strange cult. Her initial descriptions of the church did raise our curiosity. Worship services are held in movie theaters that are part of a train station. They are building offices near the train station, but they will be over top of a church-run Starbucks-type coffee house. There is no Sunday School, just small groups. The average age of regular participants is so low it looks like a misprint. A much anticipated annual event is the Pastor's sermon series on "God @ the Box Office", which examines how central themes of the Gospel are treated in movies. The content of any upcoming sermon series is announced via a video "trailer". Are you picking up a theme yet?
While we trust our daughter, we had to check this out.
Strip off the technology , the cool music, the unusual location with seats that are actually comfortable and what you have is a Bible-teaching church that a college kid could invite his or her non-Christian friends to without the slightest trepidation. The pastor does not generally hold a Billy Graham limp back preachers edition Bible while he speaks, but I've never heard anything I can imagine Billy Graham disagreeing with. But, like my Mother always told me, "It's not what you said. It's how you said it." Illustrations are not about obscure practices of Himalayan monks or stories about "the good old days", but what is being illustrated are the same truths of the Gospel you hear in very conservative churches that would never think of sitting in comfortable seats for worship. The only difference I can see is that it is presented in a way that non-Christians might actually understand, even if they have hair that isn't gray (or blue).
What really brought this to mind afresh today is that we went to visit our daughter this past weekend. It was their annual "Eggstravaganza", which is a combination Easter Egg hunt and children's fair held in a park. It is a delightful outreach where Christ's love is plainly shown without being "preachy". Another annual event is on Mother's Day, when groups from the church go out and do home repairs and painting for single mothers who are struggling to get by. Activities like these put hands and feet on the Gospel. Overall it is a lot like the approaches taken by missionaries in foreign countries. First, show them what a Christian is. Second, get to know who they are so you really understand them. Then tell them why you care, in a way that will make sense to them, after they have seen that you care.
The spirit I see at National Community Church is very much like what I have seen in missionaries. Perhaps "emerging" is the wrong word for describing such places. It is not totally inapt, as they are emerging from captivity to the forms and trappings of modern Western culture. This sort of captivity has long bothered me when dealing with "we've never done it that way before" churches. I sometimes imagine God looking at tradition-bound with the same bemusement parents have when their child plays with the box it came in instead of the new toy. It might be more apt to call such churches "essentialist" because they are committed to the essentials of the Gospel rather than the cultural package in which they were delivered. That has long been my personal definition of what "Fundamentalism" ought to be.
3 Comments:
hard not to feel good after reading that!
Wowsers that is a cool description! Yes, I used the word "wowsers" and I am proud of it. What can I say, I was raised on Inspector Gadget!
That is similar to what my parents said about NCC after visiting for the first time when I was in college...
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