To Surf or not to surf...

Okay, so by now you might have figured that I didn’t make it to the shore.  I got up at 3 am on Friday morning, got the tent and camping supplies out of their hiding places (too varied to mention and suffice it to say they were hiding real well.)  I thought, or perhaps was prompted, that I ought to check the websites and see if there are camping spaces at the Maryland State Park only to discover that they were fully booked.  No worries, I thought, I’ll check the Federal National Park and they too were booked fully up.  Decision made, I’m not heading to the shore.  Would it be sour grapes if I said that it was probably going to be ridden with mosquitoes? 

I headed back to bed and when I got up later that morning, I started to feel a little bit like I was behind the curve about looking into the “church beyond the walls.”  So instead of the planned body surfing and staring at the waves, I decided to surf the web and find what google might come up with as far a “the church without wall” and “beyond the walls of the church.” 

What I found was that there are a lot of churches out there that label themselves as a “church without walls” infact they will actually themselves “The Church without Walls” but in actual fact many of them had walls and in some cases their walls were pretty impressive facilities.  One website that I looked into showed a “church without walls” actually had a campus set up, where the pastor was in a video getting in to a helicopter, I think that he was flying to one of the other campus locations’ so that he could preach at the next worship service.   I’m kind of struggling with a church that calls itself the church without walls when the facility that they have is not only huge but spread across different parts of the city.  Another website that I look at was  a church that was a “church without walls” and became a “church with walls” when I finally came up with a location a for Sunday worship and inviting every to come to their church worship service. 

Another church that I look at actually was doing something pretty cool.  It is Calvary Baptist Church in Andrews, Texas (graphic borrowed, okay, I guess it was stolen from their website)  They started a sixteen months program of outreach, four month in each quadrant of the city.  Apparently, the city is conveniently arranged a little like Washington DC into quadrants.  They decided that for four month in each of the quandrants Walking, Working and Witnessing.  The Walking was a form of prayer, where members would walk the community and pray for the people in that quadrant.  In the process they would be gathering data about what needed to be done in each of the quadrant and then they would head into the community and serve.  The final focus was witnessing to their faith in the hopes that people would come to a saving grace in Jesus Christ.  At the end of the sixteen months they would return to the first quadrant and start all over again.  It sure is a pretty cool idea to cover all areas of the community. 

No don’t get me wrong, I believe that a church building is very important.  It is a place where the people can gather for corporate worship, a place to gather to learn and go deep in our understanding of our faith.  But a church with wall … shouldn’t miss represent itself as a church without walls when it actually has some.

I looked into thesimpleway.org website but it was still under construction.  The Simple Way community is a monastic community that serves in urban Philadelphia.  They are transforming the community in which they serve.  This is a good example of church without wall. 

I also found that Facebook had a social group called “Christians without walls” This is a pretty cool but underused social group.  It seems to be people coming together to pray for each other and their ministries. 

I’m kind of looking for what it would look like if Christians connected outside of the walls of the church and lived their faith in real tangible ways, unapologeticly as Christians, and the example of how they lived their faith resulted in others coming to Christ, or in the very least fulfilling Matthew 5, “May others see your good works and give praise to our Father in heaven.” 

Still gathering information, you got some ideas you think I should look into … I’d appreciate the suggestions.