Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada Emerging Spirit @ The United Church of Canada

If you are falling short on ideas to attract new people to the church (during the week) you might want to look to what people are doing online.

• Digital Photography
• Social Networking
• Genealogy

In fact, the main group that is extremely active online and are into social networking today are the retiring Baby Boomers. What a great audience to attract to your church. Many of them missed the computer age, or maybe worked in a place with a computer at a "dumb terminal" and only learned what the specific work programs required and nothing more. What a great target audience to attract. Of course there are the seniors who are the biggest buyers of laptops and want to find their old friends...dead or alive! Hey, I am not joking here.

On the Faith & Leadership website, writer Lynn Gosnell offers a report on The Loft coffeehouse, an innovative missional community near San Antonio, Texas.

The Loft isn't just a coffeehouse, of course. It is also a church. The Loft is a core ministry of Riverside, a church community planted six years ago by San Antonio's Alamo Heights United Methodist Church. The church plant started with the coffeehouse, and eventually grew to include a food bank, thrift store, and a resource centre for the needy - and this was all before it held its first Sunday worship service. Now Riverside holds two services each Sunday with about 500 people, but there is no formal membership, and it owns no buildings, preferring to rent.

"Customers might not know that this is a church," said Tami Piatnik, who works on Saturdays. Indeed, The Loft displays few crosses or other signs of its affiliation with the United Methodist Church.

The Loft officially opened in early 2004, and it wasn't long before it became the meeting place the planters had envisioned, playing host to all sorts of people from the community. It was more than a year after the founding that they began Sunday services. "What we've found is what works best is a more organic way of life, where things are birthed spontaneously within the community," said Linda Marceau, a prayer leader with the church plant. "We're a very close-knit community, very familial."

Rev. David McNitzky, one of the original church planters of Riverside, says this set up "speaks to our point that accountability is through relationship more than rules and policies.... There's a longing here for transition for the church as a whole. From traditional, to contemporary Bible churches, to all these structures that are an organic way of doing church."

Rev. Scott Heare, the leader of the initiative, says the challenge "is how to lead during a dramatic transition in the church's history. How do you lead from the ideas of the traditional church that are so comfortable into an entirely new way of being churched?"

Read the full article on "The Coffeehouse Church" here.

For most churches, it's annual report time.

Ministers spend hours trying to be pithy, reflective and inspirational as they cobble together words that most of their community will not read. Folks want to get on to the meat of the report - the numbers and graphs. Red ink and black. This is the time when find ourselves weighed, measured, and often found wanting.

Did we make money?

Did membership go up? (There was someone I didn't know sitting in my pew last week.)

Is that welcoming and listening to people really worthwhile?

Is this emerging church thing really working? (I think that H1N1 might have put a stop to it.)

We have one particular problem that needs to be addressed. (Actually, I have many, but you probably don't have the medical credentials to deal with them.) In the past decade, 25-45 year olds have not sought out "membership" in religious institutions. This is not only true of The United Church of Canada, but all churches from evangelical through Anglican and Roman Catholic (don't ask for a footnotes, ask around). It is not limited to churches, but also true for fan clubs, consumer clubs (Costco, Sam's Club, etc.) and other identifiable groups. We don't want to be a single thing, we don't want to limit ourselves with labels and darn it, we just don't trust joining stuff!