Tuesday, October 24, 2006

European Reflections (Part 2)

The second stop over on my European tour was in Copenhagen, Denmark. I met with two brothers, Thomas and Simon Willer who are starting a church in the center of the city called Re:Gen. I picked the Willer brothers as conversation partners because I felt that their ministry to the de-churched in Copenhagen would form a close parallel with the type of ministry I envision in the Little Five Points area of Atlanta.

Thomas and Simon are sons of a Baptist minister—a rarity in Denmark, which hosts only 5000 Baptists and around 35 members per church. After assessing the sociological situation carefully (Thomas is a sociologist by training), they desired to create a missional space that could facilitate Christian community in a manner that was relevant to the culture. They are trying to create a church that emerges into culture in an authentic way (i.e. in a way that is not contrived or coerced). This means that the church really listens to the hopes, dreams and ideas of those in the culture and reciprocates with a voice of its own back into the culture.

Re:gen gathers weekly in a hip, trendy bar that also hosts a nightclub on Friday and Saturday nights. When they arrive on Sunday afternoons to set up for their Sunday PM gathering, others will be there just to hang out or grab a beer. They are transforming secular space into holy space by their presence in that bar. The conviction of the Willer brothers is that they are merely furthering the work that God is already doing in culture. God has already been at work among the people of Copenhagen and they are facilitating a space where those God-seeds can grow.

In his master’s thesis, Thomas conducted research about the longevity of church attendance from youth who are brought up in church. He discovered that less than 50% of those who are actual church goers (b/w 2-6% of the Danish population!) will still attend church when they are 25. This is largely due, by Thomas’ estimation, to an inability for churchgoers to bridge the realties of church with that which they experience outside of church. The church environment that they experience constitutes such a radical disconnect from their ‘secular’ culture that they eventually stop attending church altogether. As an ancillary result, many who remain within church culture tend to batten down the hatches as a defense against culture and the chasm continues to widen. The church that Simon and Thomas are planting seeks to narrow the gulf between church culture and ‘secular’ culture.

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