Preach Magazine Issue 5 - Preaching to the unconverted | Page 39

FEATURE

St Mark’s in Farnham the style is very
relaxed. Rev’d Crawley encourages
the congregation to interact with
her and they often discuss difficult
Scripture together. ‘The sermon isn’t
a monologue,’ she says. Again, this is
typical of the ‘seeker-sensitive’ model
which is laid-back and relationship
focussed.
‘Everything we do has to be for the
guest,’ says Rev’d Oxley. ‘That means
our language and our practices, our
venues and our locations. So we try
and keep it fun, and we try and keep
it as informal as possible. There’s
always food, there’s always coffee,
there’s always noise and interaction
and conversation, whether you’ve just
walked into the church for the first
time having just considered God five
minutes ago, your voice is valid and
you get to say what you think even if
it’s violently opposed to what I’ve just
said from the front.
‘Look at the early church… Acts says
they met in each other’s homes all
the time with gladness and shared
what they had, they gave to people as
they had need they broke bread and
ate together. If you were to write a
description of most modern churches,
though, it would read “The believers

39

carried on ad hoc throughout the
week, vaguely remembering church
at some point. They met together
occasionally for an hour a week
where they shut up and listened
to one person at the front talk on
their views on a certain passage
of scripture before there was ten
minutes of fairly weak coffee. During
this time you had to keep an eye on
your kids that were running around
while trying to look out for somebody
new and remember the name of the
person you met three weeks ago.”
From the start we wanted to flip
that on its head and spend a lot of
time out and inject into the life of
the church memory-makers and
experiences, fun things, trips and
mission opportunities.’
Perhaps one of the reasons this
model of church has sparked such
suspicion is because it challenges
what, for many, is ‘the norm’. But the
main charges remain. One criticism
levelled at seeker-friendly churches is
that they’re not good at discipleship.
This is something that pioneer
megachurch Willow Creek recognised
and changed seven years ago after
research suggested people wanted
to go deeper in their knowledge of
theology and scripture.