From a real email reminder for a real upcoming continuing ed seminar-- names removed to protect the innocent (or perpetrators, depending on your view...)... Comments encouraged..
If your church wishes to reach out to young people under the age of 35, then this seminar will give you practical ideas and strategies for reaching this emerging and spiritually-seeking generation
CATCH THE WAVE -- The Emerging, Organic Church - A Hitchhiker's Guide
February xx-yy, 2007
Place: A retreaty place
Leader: Expert type
Fee: $75 (Appointed ministers, full or part-time $60)
Clergy/Laity welcome
Join writer and researcher Expert Type as s/he describes his/her travels across North America and England to investigate 12 wildly different, but unusually effective young churches that are reaching today's postmodern minds. You will learn how your church can implement strategies created in the improvisational and experimental milieu of youth-orientated churches. These churches, sometimes called "emerging congregations" because of their rapid and organic growth offer dozens of ideas that almost any church can utilize to reach younger generations.
Drumming circles, labyrinths, worship in painting and sculpture, iconography, multi-cultural outreach, ministry to the disenfranchised, internet discipleship, urban extensions of suburban church ministry, clustering small groups, cell churches, and organic leadership are just of few of the unique strategies that Expert Type will explain and draw implications for the local church.
Expert Type is an author, professor, international speaker and researcher on the organic church, non-profit management and church growth. ET is also an Academic Type in an Academic Type Institution, training tomorrow's leaders from dozens of denominations. Expert Type has penned over 140 published articles on church leadership and management, and is the author of four books in six years for A Publishing Concern including: A Whole Bevy of Books about Different Ways to Fix Your Church or Keep from Breaking It or How To Copy What Other People Are Doing in Totally Different Contexts than Yours and Call It Innovative Ministry
1 comment:
Things right:
a) being intentional about reaching people 35 and under and, one hopes, seeking to be a real community with them
b) Expert Type visited 12 different places
Things questionable:
a) The assumption that emerging churches are the "model of choice" for people under 35
b) assuming that postmodernism per se drives these churches or the people in them
c) assuming that taking practices native to other contexts and plugging them into any given local church context will achieve similar results
d) that WORSHIP is the first venue for reaching folks under 35, or that worship in the emerging venues is even ABOUT reaching people
I'll leave the discernment and decision about flat out wrong assumptions to y'all to say... perhaps you'd move one of the above into that category...
Peace in Christ,
Taylor Burton-Edwards
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