The Watsonian (blog)

This last Sun­day, Katie and I had the priv­e­lage of host­ing a launch team gath­er­ing of Gen­e­sis Church.  Gen­e­sis Church is a church that Katie and I are help­ing get started here in the beau­ti­ful city of Orlando (in Avalon Park).

And before this hap­pened, we did A LOT of things to our home.

We painted (pic­tures com­ing soon)

We bought fur­ni­ture (thank you God for Ikea)

We cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned.

And we tried to fig­ure out how our home could bet­ter fos­ter com­mu­nity.

And it got me think­ing, and then talk­ing, about how we design our church build­ings and if we are specif­i­cally try­ing to design envi­ron­ments that fos­ter community.

Star­bucks used to be known as a place that did this.  And then each indi­vid­ual store began to look the same, and the baris­tas all looked the same, and the fla­vor of the local com­mu­nity began to become bland, and then non-existent in each store.

And in my travel around the coun­try to both visit and see churches, I have noticed that churches are los­ing their local fla­vor.  They no longer look like their com­mu­nity but are begin­ning to look like North­Sad­dleWil­low­Mar­s­PointHill.  The church has taken the “now” model of Star­bucks instead of the entre­prenueral, community-minded model that was intro­duced in the 1980s.

And that brings me to my point, in my opin­ion, to bet­ter fos­ter com­mu­nity the church should look like the com­mu­nity sur­round­ing it.  If the com­mu­nity is a country/rock music style that loves foot­ball and nascar, then it should look like that.  If it’s a indie/folk scene, you should be see­ing a lot of art and man­dolins.  But the main thing to remem­ber is that you are try­ing to present an image of a Res­ur­rected Christ that loves these peo­ple, just where they are, and if we aren’t will­ing to bend our per­sonal prefer­nces to meet them there, then we are in trou­ble and are des­e­crat­ing the image of God we are presenting.