Live from St. Louis!

So a couple weeks ago I was blogging from a worship conference in Seattle, with keynote addresses by Harold Best.

This week I'm back home in St. Louis. Just spoke earlier this morning and it went well. Brad Andrews followed and now Sally Morgenthaler's up.

Sally's asking "What is real in the church? What box do we have worship in?" Generally, in all our worship thinking and tweaking, we are simply rearranging the furniture or the color of the carpet, not changing the location.

She says we are co-creators of reality with God, and we have to start being really creative and think outside the box in terms of how we're doing worship. She takes Labberton's idea and says that biblical worship that finds God will also find our neighbor.

Sally's journey over the last few years has involved an awareness that in some unintended ways she contributed to the disconnect between church and culture in her book Worship Evangelism that she decided to "disappear" from the church subculture. Actually, she said it sort of happened when she saw Worship Evangelism at a garage sale. She began to respond, negatively, to her own book. While she was critiquing seeker sensitive services in that book, somehow the general response by worship leaders was simply to shift around the style of music or the look of the sanctuary. It went from being seeker sensitive to flat out self-centered.

Worship is about realigning use with God so that we can join Him in what He is doing. It is not about us; it's about God. Can worship be saved (from the trappings of worship)?

She goes through lots of stats and numbers that paint the dim picture of the "State of the Church." It doesn't look good, let me tell you, but then that's really no surprise. She seems to be emphasizing not just missional churches, but almost saying missional can't really happen in the "old" models of church. I'm not sure I buy it comprehensively, but I definitely agree with her about our tendencies to develop (perfect them really) ruts.

My questions: So what does this mean for the biblical model of church, with elders/pastors, deacons? The call for house churches (exclusively) seems to swap one system for a different one. And as for missional strategy, aren't house churches just going to freak people who are far from God? Won't the tendency be to go even more inward? And get less diverse? I'm not saying small churches are bad, but not all large churches are either.