Why emerging?

Lucy posted a comment with quite an interesting question.

Here I blow my entire emerging credibility by trying to answer her.

What are we trying to do with the teenagers?

Having spent some years reading about post-Modernism I was challenged to take the bull by the horns and actually do something about it. I did a presentation to our Church using video clips to demonstrate the different spirituality that is increasingly apparent in those in our society aged 40 and lower (roughly).

I realise that I don't think I have posted about that first presentation, because that was in my pre-blog existence. I will dig out my notes and write it up someday when I have a minute. One of my colleagues did some research of his own about how this spirituality seeks expression and I posted about it here.

Basically then we are providing a worshipful environment once a month called the GATHERING (unoriginal name I now realise, but I paid for a domain name), where I aim to provide an opportunity for Christian worship, but in a creative way that allows space for thinking and unplanned/unrehearsed responses.

Use the category view for the GATHERING to read up some of the things we have been doing.

Why is it emerging?

I am adamant that what we are making is an emerging Church because of several reasons.

Firstly it was my intention right from the start to create a group of teenagers (who live in different towns and go to different schools) who could call themselves a Church in their own right. I was not trying to occupy the teenagers until they were old enough to go to big Church, and I wasn't trying to just teach them (traps that I have fallen into in the past with youth work). I set out to create a space in which they did all the things that a group of people do in order to be Church.

Secondly I set about creating a varied liturgical framework that addressed many of the needs of contemporary spirituality, and I deliberately changed a lot of content from month to month, so that we could explore together what it means to be a Church worshipping.

Thirdly (and this kind of happened without me realising it) I created a Church based around a network of relationships centred primarily on the local comprehensive school, although three other schools in whose catchment areas we fall also provide us with a network of relationships to tap into. This is illustrated in some of the photos where people, without any pressure from the front, split off from the groups that they had come with (geographically based Church youth groups) and got together with other people with whom they went to school, but who lived some distance away. This was fantastic to watch.

There are future issues. It is important to develop a much greater sense of their own leadership and ownership. I created this blog originally to allow feedback and comments from the teenagers, and give them an on-line method of inputting creatively into an act of worship. This is slowly starting to happen.

I hope this answers Lucy's questions.

Comments

[mark]

For those of us who've been reading your blog for a while, thanks for this summary - I'd really like to hear you say more about 'just teaching them' from your past experience.

[Lucy]

Yes it does answer my question, thanks Howard.

You know, I think some adults probably would enjoy youth services too. Even as a thirty something I can relate more to how youth do things then the mainstream adult stuff.

Lucy