I landed in time for the face-off for the men’s Olympic Gold Medal Hockey Game. Being in the States during the game had its downsides, but it was fun to gloat. That evening, I went to Mosaic (Erwin McManus’s community) and they lamented their USA team’s loss. No sympathy here.

After 9 days without checking e-mail, my inbox was full of stories of God at work across Canada; Vancouver churches using the Olympics to reach their neighbourhoods, Alberta churches wanting to become more missional, Manitoba Christians gearing up for hosting the 2011 National Church Planting Congress, and those in Ontario, excited about developing a Canadian tour on urban community development.

There were questions also. How do we find ways to work together? How do we measure faithfulness? How do we train leaders for missional engagement? But the biggest question, hit me while attending Mosaic. How do we gather in a way to produce missionaries and not consumers? To be clear, I enjoyed myself. Everything was top notch. The crowd was expectant, the band fantastic, the dancers spectacular and the ethos was magnetic. I love listening to Erwin, and his wife Kim was even better. It’s not hard to see why Mosaic is so popular.

But one question plagued me. Can we gather for worship in the same way and hope to produce missionaries instead of consumers?

I used to attend Willow Creek Community Church. Their heart for non-Christians is huge. But the “seeker-targeted” services smelled of performance and eventually their “Reveal” material admitted they had not produced the disciples they had wanted to. At Mosaic, I felt like I’d been to a show. I wondered if the end result would be any different. I walked in, was greeted, sat down and didn’t need to do anything else. Do we produce consumers by the way we gather to worship… no matter how well we do it?

Leviticus 1 is about burnt offerings. God knew that as His people entered the promised-land they would be seduced by the worship of the foreign God’s. God gave clear instructions how to worship so that others would be drawn to Him. He was precise. Thorough. Inclusive, demanding and expectant. But above all, He was missional for He wanted His people to be a blessing to all nations.

The biggest lesson is that worship was about what they brought, and not just about what they received or consumed. It cost them a lot. What would our gatherings look like if we oriented them around bringing and giving, and not around performance and receiving?

In my church, we did not take an offering, thinking it would make for a safe place for unbelievers. When I went to a friend’s church and saw people come down the aisle to place their offering in a basket, I caught a glimpse into what it was to teach people that we come to give. This has led to constantly asking the question…

“What are we doing that is inadvertently producing consumers, instead of producing missionaries?”

Ruthlessly work to sort out the answers to this most important question.

Cam planted a church in the inner city of Burnaby, BC. After seeing its neighbourhood transformed, Southside Community Church has grown to four congregations in four neighbourhoods. Out of this, Cam has developed the Forge Canada Missional Training Network which helps churches and leaders across the country to become missional and see neighbourhood transformation in their neighbourhoods, and multiply into new neighbourhoods. Cam has also serves as the National Director of Church Planting Canada.

Cam has the privilege of speaking internationally at conferences and schools. He has also consulted with a number of churches and denominations, and served on committees for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. His great passion remains for Christ working in a local community of followers of Jesus to see neighbourhood transformation.

Cam has been married to for 21 years. He and his wife have four children and live in Surrey, BC.

Should the church be relevant to the world?

We’ve spilled a lot of ink over that question. We’ve exchanged many words, both exhortatory and accusatory, trying to resolve it. There are those who decry the church’s stodginess, its love of old wine skins, its adherence to outmoded cultural forms. They seek a church that nimbly adapts to the world’s music and dress and causes. And there are those who lament the church’s trendiness, its fetish for new wine skins, its pursuit of faddish cultural novelties. They seek a church gloriously indifferent to the world’s latest fashions.

We tote out Jesus’ warning to be in the world but not of it, but then have endless debates about which constitutes which. We have those who think the Kingdom’s come because we’ve preserved ancient songs and starchy vestments and Latin-strewn liturgies, and we have those who think it’s come because we smoke Cuban cigars and drink Belgium beer and treat Starbucks as sacred space. If I wear torn jeans to church, am I of the world or in it? If our church worships to Hip-Hop music, which preposition are we falling under, in or of? If our liturgy hasn’t changed since 1952, or 1633, or 1979, is that because we refuse to be of this world, or because we’re failing to be in it?

And now I will resolve the matter for all time.

It doesn’t matter. The Kingdom is not about any of this. The Kingdom of God is not about eating or drinking, or music styles, or how up-to-date or out-of-date we are.

The Kingdom of God is a republic of love. Not the syrupy or sensual thing the world calls love, but the 1 Corinthians 13 kind: fierce, wild, huge, feisty, pure. What makes the church both a mystery and magnet to the world is when we love this way. This love makes us relevant. Its absence makes us irrelevant, regardless of whatever else we’re doing.

Question: Is the love in your church such that people in the world and of the world would be willing to forsake all other loves just to know this love? Would they give up their addictions, their diversions, their compromises, their resentments, because the love you have is better and truer and deeper than anything they’ve ever found anywhere else?

Yes? Your church is relevant to the world.

No? It’s irrelevant.

Mark Buchanan is lead pastor at New Life Community Baptist Church in Duncan, BC. In addition to his eleven years as lead pastor, he is also a writer and conference speaker. His books include: Your God is Too Safe; Things Unseen; The Holy Wild; The Rest of God; and Hidden in Plain Sight. He is married and has three children.

We love our free market small group system. But we’ve outgrown some of our structures as our groups have multiplied. So we’re basically blowing up our structure and starting over from scratch. I think it’s important to put everything on the table every once in a while. Make sure you don’t have any sacred cows. Make sure your form follows function. So we’re trying to rethink and reinvent everything from training to caring to recruiting leaders.”

So we’re basically blowing up our structure and starting over from scratch is the most volatile line.

How many of you have done that? How many of you wish you could do that? What does this mean for the big picture of groups and church?

Tell your stories, your hopes and dreams as an encouragement to others.