I have a bobble head Jesus --the bobble head Jesus on this United Church Observer cover is sitting on the desk in my study. It is a gift from a member of the congregation who came up with it in the midst of the kerfuffle over the Emerging Spirit and Wondercafe programs that United Church launched last year. It's strange but I never look at this Jesus and consider him irreverent, but some people were offended.
The idea was to go outside of the conventional ways of reaching out to the "unchurched" community and to try to appeal to the 30 to 45-year-olds who are missing from many United Churches. We hav a link on our website to Wondercafe and while I don't visit it often, but when I do I see that many people engage in the discussions.
The current issue of the Observer offers a one-year checkup and concludes that it is difficult to measure the impact. While the hope was a five-percent increase in church attendance by 2009, we really don't know whether this will happen. Maybe there won't be more bums in pews. The "church" some of these people will attend is Wondercafe.
I'm of the school that feels it is important to "think outside the box," or bun or whatever the phrase is now. Obviously some of our old ideas about being the church aren't working well. As long as we make Christ the centre, all things are possible. Could it be that the old may need to crumble before the new can arise?
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