Thank you for your kind offer and for taking the trouble to comment here. God bless you.

I also attend KingsGate Community Church, and have done for several years. The church building is in Peterborough and we have 2 services every sunday (9.15am & 11.30am). We’re really easy to find and I suggest a visit would be an enjoyable experience for anyone reading this. For a little example of community action taking place search on youtube for – KingsGate Hope Garden Project.
If you do choose to visit then ask for me, “tall” James, in our Welcome Area – I’d love to show you around.

Many Blessings.

James.

I’m assuming that by Ichthus Bill is referring to the Ichthus Christian Fellowship group of churches in the UK, many of them in London. The link I just gave you is their own site; this is the Wikipedia article. I hope you find something in one or other of these links. However, the basic theory is that everyone meets weekly in a cell (small group) midweek, and in a congregation on Sunday. At regular intervals, the congregations gather together for a large event called a celebration. Hence cell-congregation-celebration, balancing different group dynamics and strengths and weaknesses.

I guess my main reason for this is simply that it’s a whole lot easier to get lost in such a large group, and that for anyone who is not naturally outgoing, large settings make it a lot harder to find your “small group”. In contrast, when my wife and I first came to our church, (the very first service), we were practically “accosted” with loving and caring people, wanting to meet the “new family”….we had invitations to dinner, playdates for our kids, etc….there was a huge sense of welcome from the entire group.

While I enjoy the atmosphere of the large church in the video, I can’t help feeling that it is more like a great Christian music concert….yes, I realize that’s an oversimplification. While I don’t deny that God can and does use this also, I’m just saying that, while it’s attractive at first, the meat and substance of relationships seems harder to get to than in a smaller setting.

Just my humble opinion.

Thank you for your comment and welcome here. We may be coming from different places and experiences on this. My nervousness about words like ‘wrapper’ and ‘packaging’ is that some churches have explicitly used commercial tactics in attracting people. Some have even taken to referring to people as ‘customers’.

On the other hand, simply couching the Gospel in a way that is understandable within a particular culture is absolutely fine, and there is biblical precedent: ‘kingdom of God’ from Jewish thought, ‘Jesus is Lord’ in contrast to ‘Caesar is Lord’, ‘justification’ (a Roman legal term), and so on. We have the permanent problem that faces the church of – to adapt the words of Jesus – being ‘in the culture but not of the culture’.

Of course, church is about what’s inside. It’s about the love of Jesus Christ, and the salvation he offers us. I’m sure no Christian would dispute this. However, look at the way Jesus taught. He always taught in a way that was relevant to his audience. I would call this “the packaging”. I am of course not wanting church to sound like just another commericial product, but the comparison with the way products are sold is still valid. Very few people continue to buy a product because they liked the packaging but hated what was inside; but it is often the packaging that drew them to the product in the first place. I think this is how church should be; because it doesn’t matter how good what’s inside is if you can’t get people to come in the first place.

Thanks for your comment and welcome here! A couple of quick responses (sorry about that, but I’m typing this in between appointments):

1. It’s just one of those curiosities about the blogosphere that conversations go off in unexpected directions. In literary circles they’d call it reader-response, probably! You had honourable intentions, but it triggered off other thoughts that you couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

2. I’d be intrigued to hear you more on your metaphor of the ‘wrapper’. Is church about the packaging or what’s inside it? But I could have misread you there. You’d be very welcome to say more about what you mean.

This is because of their relevant and contextualised message of Jesus Christ – a person who just will not be stereotyped and who’s teaching still cuts through the rubbish and hopelessness in today’s society. The message is the same but the relevancy of it comes through crystal clear to a new generation searching for hope when the “wrapper” is right.

I was not intending to promote MEGA-Church in the UK but to simply highlight that God is on the move in his country and that this does not have to be viewed as “un-cool” any longer. Mega church or not!

The apostle Paul did this all the time when he went to a new place. He contextualised the message. Our responsibility is to GET THE WRAPPER RIGHT! Both inside the four walls of our buildings in our corporate church lives and in our lives. The result: “joy in the city!!” Acts 8