Community Via The Trinity

Please bear with me as I try to figure something out:

Most mainline churches have long considered the most important church event of the week to be Sunday morning worship. That's where "it happens." Most of the staff's energy has gone into this hour. Most of the church funds are directed towards this hour.

"Church growth experts" say that if you want a congregation to grow, you add another worship service that is different from the first. And so we did. But increasingly, our 6 PM worship is not where "it happens" for that group. Worship on Sunday evenings is not inconsequential, but there are other activities that mark that group as a community: Monday night burgers, Wednesday night small group, Friday night movies.

The problem is that this is foreign to most of those who worship on Sunday morning. For most of them, worship is the #1 activity (if they come to worship regularly in the first place.) For at least half of those worshippers - I'm sorry to say - that hour of worship is the one time they gather for any semblance of community. And it's very easy to leave without having experienced even a "Hi, how are you?" much less a deep sense of community.

Yes there are those who gather for occasional small groups or Circle meetings or mission projects. Some spend time caring for each other during the week. But many (most?) of those who gather at 11am on Sunday don't see each other any other time during the week.

It's not easy being a community if this is how people do church.

Another problem: the 11:00 congregation is a little squeamish about conflict. They've heard about other churches who started a second, very different worship service only to experience division. And we are allergic to this kind of conflict so we try to avoid it at all costs - even the cost of making disciples, I fear.

As I've written several times that I'm essentially the pastor of two churches, but this is becoming less and less the case. The evening worship service is filled with people so hungry for spiritual nourishment that they are learning to feed themselves, like older children who are determined to cook their own dinner. They have taken all my Matthew commentaries and found their own for the Wed. night small group, believing that they too can do exegesis. Imagine that.

I'm working myself out of a job with that group and it's a good thing.

The morning worship crowd seems to want me to be the only leader, hanging on to the old model in which the seminary educated clergy is the only one who can do a Hebrew word study. But the problem is that we rarely seem to venture past the basics, especially if those who are well versed in the basics don't seem interested in digging deeper. They are busy with work and families - too busy to delve into a semi-heavy theological book. Too busy to sit and ponder, say, The Trinity.

It's not that the young adults of the evening service are not busy. It's just that most of them see each other as family. They have formed a little church within a church, a la Rahner.*

So here's where my pondering is going:

I'm hearing some interesting ideas from Ian Mobsby, one of the founders and priests of Moot in London who has written The Becoming of G-d: What the Trinitarian nature of God has to do with Church and a Deep Spirituality for the Twenty First Century. Mobsby argues that our community at it's best models the Trinity. That mystic sweet communion that most of us don't understand. God is Three in One. We are separate but we are one.

I'm letting this sit with me a bit. But even my cursory reflections make me realize that we have missed out on something awesome and glorious in the traditional Western church.

How many of you have found anything close to this profound community that - in any way - mimics the mysterious union of the Trinity?

Too heady for a Friday? Nevertheless, I'd love to hear how you experience community in your congregations.

*Karl Rahner, the Roman Catholic theologian, believes that every household is a little church, doing what churches do: studying together, praying together, serving together.