e~mergent kiwi

What a wonderful, everyday idea for church. So simple. Need leaners too. Wide like our benchtop @ home. My favorite place to drink coffee and read the newspaper - a wide enough surface to lay the newspaper out - low enough to comfortably lean on. How about sticking a LARGE sheet of blank newsprint on the wall. At the conclusion people could cut the story / image / dvertisement that most connected with them out of the paper and as the community gathers for say "communion" (eucharist) they could bring their 'cutting' and stick on the newsprint, perhaps writing their name and a brief sentence about why it touched
them or a response they'd like to make. The Spirit blowing through media. Over time fill the blank sheet of newsprint - track the movement and invitations of the Spirit. The Spirit @ work in culture, in history, in the world. In it's own
right it becomes a collective work of art - a montage - a reminder. In big painted letters (watered down colour, so that newspaper text can still be read)the latin "Veni Spiritus Sanctus" (sp?) could be written once the paper is
filled.

Grace
Paul

Interesting - definitely an idea with potential - but I guess I wonder if the newpaper readers would want to be 'disturbed'. As a NP reader in a cafe I actually like to be left alone.

Still it does meet people where they are at - you can only have a go I reckon!

thanks and good comment.
The idea emerged from watching my extended family read the papers. Often an individual will read out something and a bit of a conversation would start. So there is some interaction.

I was thinking of having the "cafe" open for 2 hours, with only about 20 mins public interaction. So lots of time to read and interact with "stations" individually. I would advertise it in this way, so in coming people would expect to have both solo time and communal thinking time.

steve

Snap. We have a similar idea pencilled in as our next gen x congregation - a breakfast church. The differences would be that we were thinking of doing it in a cafe rather than messing about with organising catering and an intentional engaging with others and world issues.

The real advantage for us is that weekend papers tend to have a lot of feature articles, religion articles and similar type stuff, which can really fuel some good discussions.

tell me more. and i couldn't understand your sentence - do you mean you will not be intentionally engaging with the world?

i am still undecided on whether to cater or to use a cafe. the trouble here in chch is that cafes are all doing booming trade on sunday mornings, so there would be no way to guarantee seating.

steve

Re-reading that, I was unclear. The idea for the content would be that the group intentionally engage with each other and the world. And we thought that we could just capitalise on the highly intuitive way that we interact when we do the breakfast thing - someone reading out something that catches their attention and the conversation begins to roll.

As for the cafe thing, we have found that if you find a place that you like and make a permanent booking for a particular time, the cafe is likely to provide you a lot of support, because they have guaranteed people coming and buying stuff. In our experience the cafe people become a part of the congregation almost - although it did take us a few tries to get the right sort of atmosphere.

The weakness I see with the breakfast model is that it doesn't lend itself to reflective, meditative type worship, but you could choose to do that "off campus" on a regular basis by doing a sunrise reflection in a park, or something like that.