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Happy Birthday to The Mission – Sunday Morning Culture

This past Sunday we celebrated The Mission’s first birthday of Sunday morning services.  In the next week or so I am going to post a few thoughts about that.  Today I want to expand upon something I said in service about our identity.

In our services we don’t have flags, shofars, praise dancers, painters, ballerinas or rappers, not because we don’t believe in any of these things, it is just not a part of our culture for a few reasons:

1.  We do not have any performers at The Mission. If you are on stage, you better live a life above reproach.  We don’t put people on stage just because they are cute, or are a youth, or can dance, or can sing.  Our worship teams minister in song, they don’t entertain.  Kids doing really bad ballet is not ministry.  Women in tights dancing while every one else watches is not ministry.  It is christian entertainment, and generally it is not very good.

2.  We don’t do anything in church from contemporary culture that is not at least as good as the world does it. I told some folks that if we ever had a dance team they better be good enough to dance in a club and take over the dance floor.  There is nothing more corny then the church trying do do stuff from five years ago and still can’t do it as well as they did it back then.  Rich kids trying to dance hip hop with an attitude only flies in church.  There is a word for it: wack.  And we can be accused of lots of things at The Mission but wack is not one of them.

Look at the average church dance or worship team.  Most of these dancers look like they watched an instructional video made at Woodstock.  And the average “contemporary” worship team is lead by a dude with an acoustic guitar.  Look at the music charts.  See any acoustic guitars?  Where do you find flowery dancers and acoustic guitars?  Church.

3. No shofars, tambourines, flags, or streamers. Nothing wrong with any of these things.  It is just not part of our culture.  I am willing to bet there is a direct inverse proportion of flags to salvations in churches that have them.  If you feel called to start a church where Christians can come and chant for three hours and get deeper then you want to stock up on these items.  Part of the reason we see people get saved every single service is because our folks don’t have to explain extra biblical church culture to their friends and families.

4.  No corporate outreaches. We don’t gather at the church so we can then go back into the world to reach it.  We already live in the world.  While we are there we are reaching out.

5.  Worship is loud and the lights are dim. Most of the folks at The Mission are unchurched.  We make it easy to enter into worship by not being able to hear yourself and feeling relatively secure in the fact that folks can’t see you.  People may be shouting, running, jumping, laying on the floor, screaming at the top of their lungs, or just vibing.  Folks are free to worship God with what He gave them to worship with.  If folks get freaked out we will explain it but we won’t stop it unless it starts to look like a performance.  Then I will shut it down with a quickness.