I just finished an article for Relevant Magazine that I thought I’d post. It’s sort of a ministry manifesto or philsophy of ministry. By the way, one value of writing is that it forces you to think about why you’re doing what you’re doing. I think this article is a good reminder of why we’re doing church in a theater and why we put so much time and energy into communicating the gospel in culturally relevant ways.

A Church on the Periphery

A few years ago I was studying at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill. I usually tune out the mood music, but one line of lyrics caught my attention. I’d never heard the song before and I had no idea who the artist was. But that line of lyrics is forever etched on my cerebral cortex: There’s a church on the periphery, Lady of our Epiphany.

Maybe I had too much caffeine. Maybe it was too late at night. But that juxtaposition of words struck me:

Epiphany (n): a revelation or manifestation of God
Periphery (n): distant or irrelevant

I had a thought as I sipped my chai latte. As long as the church stays on the periphery, our culture won’t experience an epiphany. Periphery = No Epiphany.

The church can sit on the sidelines. We can play dead like a possum or bury our heads in the sand like an ostrich. We can backpedal into our comfortable Christian subculture and never venture outside the ghetto we’ve manufactured. Or we can compete. We can stop conforming and start creating culture. We can stop retreating and start redeeming culture. So which is it? Conform or create? Retreat or redeem?

I’m driven by three core convictions:

C1: The church ought to be the most creative place on the planet
C2: The greatest message deserves the greatest marketing
C3: The church belongs in the middle of the marketplace

Competitive Streak

I have a confession to make: I hate losing Candyland to my kids! To say that I have an over-developed competitive streak is like saying skunks stink or baboons have ugly butts (sorry about the mental picture). I turned everything into a competition as a kid. I turned bike rides into pop-a-wheelie contests. I turned dinner into eating and drinking contests. And I turned cross-country road trips in the station wagon into how-long-can-you-hold-your-breath contests. In high school and college, that competitive streak found expression in the classroom and on the basketball court. It was all about GPA (grade point average) and PPG (points per game).

Then I became a pastor.

My natural instinct was to compete. It was hard not to compare myself with other pastors. It was hard not to compare church statistics. But the problem with competition in the kingdom of God is that it only leads one of two places: pride or jealously. In my case, it was jealousy more than pride because I pastored all of twenty people (and that included the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who I think attended some of our early services).

Then I had one of those “get knocked off your horse on the road to Damascus” experiences. It’s a little embarrassing that I didn’t get this right out of the gate, but sometimes it takes God a while to penetrate my denseness. One day it dawned on me that all the churches in Washington DC played different roles on the same team. We weren’t in competition with each other. Our competition was the Sunday edition of the Washington Post and all the political talk shows that consume Washingtonians. Our competition was Hollywood, CA and Madison Avenue. Our competition was MTV and CNN.

So I tried crucifying my competitive streak. But the darn thing kept resurrecting! Then I realized that God didn’t want to kill my competitive streak. He wanted to intensify it. He wanted to purify it. He wanted to sanctify my competitive streak just like He wanted to sanctify my imagination and my hormones and my medial ventral prefrontal cortex (the seat of humor in case you care).

I realized that I was involved in the quintessential competition and eternal souls were at stake. I realized that I was called to “contend for the faith” (Jude 3). I realized that we were called to go into the highways and byways to “compel them to come in” (Luke 14:23).

I know the word “marketing” is taboo in some circles, but let’s not squabble over semantics! The word “compel” means “to urge irresistibly” or “to demand attention.” Translation: we’re called to compete for our culture!

Hollywood

Does it bother anyone else that Madison Avenue does a better job advertising bad products than the church does marketing the good news? Does it bother anyone else that Hollywood does a better job portraying fiction than the church does communicating fact?

A few years ago, National Community Church was cited in an online article titled Cinema: The New Cathedral of Hollywood. The article compared churches and theaters. The author said, “What we want from church is actually precisely what we get from film.” It’s a “two-hour reprieve from the burden of self-consciousness.” Movies are “an alternate form of transcendence.” Then the author crossed a line: “Awe in the presence of a great film is something that very few people are even capable of feeling in church these days.” When I read what she wrote it riled something so deep within me that I can’t even put it into words. Unfortunately, it’s true. Fredrick Buechner said, “Hollywood consistently beats the church at its own game.” That shouldn’t be!

So what do we do?

I think we follow the example that Paul set in Acts 17. He walked into the Aeropagus and competed in the marketplace of ideas. He didn’t criticize them for worshipping idols. He didn’t boycott the Aeropagus. He offered them a better alternative!

Maybe we need to stop criticizing our culture and start creating it. Maybe we need to stop retreating from our culture and start redeeming it. Maybe we need to stop cursing the darkness and start lighting candles.

In the words of George McLeod:

The cross must be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am claiming that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. At the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble, because that is where He died and that is what he died about and that is where churchmen ought to be and what churchmen should be about.

What do the largest nightclub in Washington DC, a coffeehouse on Capitol Hill, and the movie theaters @ Union Station have in common? They make great sanctuaries! All three of those spaces are being redeemed by National Community Church (www.theaterchurch.com). We’re practicing orthodox Christianity in some unorthodox places. In fact, our vision is to meet in movie theaters @ metro stops throughout the DC area. I’m cursed. I can’t walk into a movie theater anymore without instinctually assessing it’s viability as a future church location!

I have nothing against church buildings, but the church isn’t a building. I went into church planting with the traditional mindset: meet in rented facilities until you can buy or build a building. Then I realized that we could never build a church building that would rival Union Station. God strategically positioned us right in the middle of the marketplace. We’ve got our own metro stop, bus stop, train stop and parking garage. Union Station is the most visited destination in the Nation’s capitol. Twenty-five million people pass through the Station every year. We’ve got forty food court restaurants right outside our theater. And, of course, we’ve got comfortable seats and big screens. For what it’s worth, stained glass was the way medieval churches used pictures to tell the gospel story. Movie screens are postmodern stained glass. The screen enables us to tell the story with moving pictures in multi-sensory ways.

Cultural Exegesis

One key to reaching emerging generations (NCC is 80% single and 80% twenty-somethings) is meeting them on their turf. Instead of requiring people to learn our language and our culture, we’ve tried to incarnate the gospel. That’s why we do an annual series called God @ the Billboards and God @ the Box Office. Stop and think about it. Where do the 60% of Americans who don’t go to church get their theology? Most of them get it from movies and music. Movie directors and music producers are cultural prophets. Instead of criticizing or ignoring their voices, we need to exegete our culture the way we exegete Scripture. The tribe of Issachar set the standard in I Chronicles 12:32: “they understood the times.” Exegeting Scripture isn’t enough. If it was, then the incarnation would have been an unnecessary hassle.

Too many churches are answering questions that people aren’t asking. I’m not suggesting that we dumb-down or water-down the gospel. But God isn’t just omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. He’s also omni-relevant. He knows everything about everyone. The Holy Spirit speaks more than six billion dialects. No one is more relevant than God. I know there are some Christians who get all bent out of shape over a church meeting in a movie theater or showing movie clips or redeeming “secular” music. And I know there are churches that cross the line and go too far. But you know what gets me all bent out of shape? Irrelevance! NCC has a core value: irrelevance is irreverence. In other words, anything less than relevance is irreverence!

Let’s not conform. Let’s create.

Let’s not retreat. Let’s redeem.

If our culture is going to experience an epiphany, the church can’t stay on periphery! Let’s stop boycotting the Aeropagus! Let’s walk into the marketplace of ideas and compete for our culture!