keeping the plates spinning

Gary Taitinger is the Senior Pastor at Mill Woods Assembly in Edmonton. In a recent article of Enrich (April 2008) he was talking about the challenge of having an effective church service. He said "the ideal is to achieve optimum fruitfulness in a generation-blended service. To do this means to simultaneously address the spiritual interest spectrum of the curious, the convinced, and the committed while entreating to music taste buds and learning biases intrinsic in five different generations." That's kind of wordy, but he makes the point well.

Then he drops the bomb: "We reluctantly conceded that our staff wasn't smart enough to keep all those plates spinning at the same time. It may still be possible, but a combination of consumerism and individualism has rendered it a formidable puzzle at present. Some would argue that we are only appeasing those factors by doing what we're doing [creating a weekend worship service geared toward the thinking, non church young adult], and they may be right." He then goes on to tell how they found the 'all-star' young adult pastor to come in and how this new service grew from 45 to 1200 in a year. From what I understand it became the hottest thing with YA crowd in Edmonton...and depending who you talked to, was successful in attracting the non-Christian...as well as vacuuming up many of the YA crowd from the other churches in the city. Then, after a couple of years, the key leader left, and from what I hear, the service crashed and burned.

His thoughts and the history of the experiment have given me a lot to chew on. The church I'm in is a true multi-generational church. 5 generations under one roof. Senior seniors, a whole bunch of babies [literal babies; I'm not speaking metaphorically!], and everybody in between. So how do we make that work? If Gary Taitinger and his awesome staff feel like they can't keep the plates spinning, then how can we ever hope to? I must admit that at times it feels like an overwhelming task...and we often wonder if we're really doing the job.

Well, we already have an good YA service - Island Tehillah, a Monday night event for the 18+ crowd. We're working hard on maximizing it's potential, which involved keeping it true to its DNA as a city-wide gathering, not just an ET specific event.

And we want work really hard to honor and respect the Builders of our congregation. These Saints of God have sacrificed a lot to allow our church to become much more contemporary in style than Mill Woods probably is on a Sunday morning...but I don't know that for sure. I do know that ET is more contemporary in it's music and such than I was expecting when I showed up 2 years ago. But we still want to connect with and minister to our seniors - not just on Sunday morning, but in other generation-specific ministries through the week.

But the nagging thought I have is whether we are really asking the right question. Is it really all about the worship gathering? Is that really to be our focus? Is that how we are supposed to measure church and define success?

Our worship services are important, and as the most visible aspect of a local congregation do get the most attention. But is that focus misplaced? And if so, what should be the focus and the measuring stick of a local congregation?

All I know is what we are doing is marginally successful. Are we really making an impact in our community by seeing people come to Jesus? Not nearly as much as we would like. Is our 'Sunday service' approach going to make the difference in the micro-culture we call Nanaimo? Hmmmm.