2) what do you see as the four (because three is too traditional) differences between the community of faith you are serving, and those churches in your area?
Well… we meet in a pub, which at least on the surface would be a huge one. That means we exist in a public space. One effect this has on our community is that we very much feel the “strangers” part of our Christian identity. We are perpetual guests, existing in someone else’s context, attempting always to bless our hosts and yet to be countercultural and proclaim the Gospel clearly. It’s a challenge. I think that churches who exist in their own spaces, particularly the ones who build up their own campuses that act as small towns, often lose this sense of aliens and guests…
We tend mostly to be within the range of 25-35, with the next biggest group being under 25. That’s a pretty big difference from the average evangelical church who’s really struggling to connect with 25-35’s.
Much of Evergreen falls into the category of “formerly churched.” These are people that at one point or another stopped going to church- whether for two years or for twenty.
We have smaller number of people who never really went to church much. Recently, we’ve been seeing more just flat-out churched people coming, whether because they move into the area and look for a church (something we’re happy with) or because they come to us after leaving a church. This is something we used to wring our hands about, not wanting to build a church out of people from other places, but rather of and for the unchurched and the formerly churched. We’re still not completely comfortable with the idea of people coming to us from other places, but…
I guess if people are leaving large churches to come to evergreen in a quest for real community (a story I’ve been hearing a lot lately), I don’t want to deny them that. And since our goal is to grow steadily but to remain small through church planting, I look at it as helping those large churches to plant new communities, even if they don’t quite realize it.
Though there’s not a ton of racial diversity at evergreen, there’s a bit more economic diversity and a ton of political diversity. I think that churches tend to be pretty homogenous politically, and even though I'd love to see us become more diverse in other ways, the fact that so many viewpoints exist side by side at evergreen is something I’m pretty happy with.
Recent Comments