Maggi Dawn, draws attention to an interesting set of posts from Church Mouse, highlighting some interesting figures from a survey done of 1000 or so men here in the UK asking about their comfort level in church. Apparently men are more comfortable in a lingerie department than they are in church. Fascinating.
But this got me thinking about comfort zones in an Indie (OC/IC) context. There is a general tendancy in indie communities towards stepping outside of the box of the pre-programmed idea of what “church” is or should be. Does this negatively affect how interested new-comers perceive the nature of an indie community? First impressions and all that. . .
Indie communities are often small – very small. This can be a real challenge to someone coming from the “Big Tent” church realm. Accustomed to a standard congregation size of between 50-75, coming into an indie community of between 5 and 20 can be a shock to the system – an impediment to seeing the rest of the experience of that community.
OC/IC communities often meet in unusual environments – unusual for sacramental Christians at least. Homes, rented church basements, public meeting halls, hotels, and out-doors. So once again in our context we find a possible barrier in a new person’s comfort zone. Sacramental liturgy is intimately linked to a building, a fixed consecrated altar, an iconographic plan, etc. Meeting, celebrating, in an unusual environment is occasionally nice but every meeting?
For some indie communities the answer to these questions of comfort zone is to look and feel as much as possible like a big-tent community. Unconsciously believing that to look, feel, and sound like tradition X or Y will overshadow the awkwardness of being indie, of not having those things one has been programmed to expect in a liturgical community. I’ve always thought we loose something in the mix when we do this. Other indie communities swing to the exact opposite extreme, re-shaping, re-designing the liturgy (for example) such that it is un-recognisable as Christian worship.
I wonder though are there not better ways to explore and address the issues of “comfort zone”? For those of us who have spent most of their life in the indie environment we don’t honestly “see” the problems others experience unless something like this survey draws our attention to it. But we do know its there because we’ve seen it in action, we’ve witnessed how individuals who are quite keen to join in, come for a while, but find those un-expected barriers of “comfort zone” overwhelming, and they turn away dejected.
Maybe we should experiment with celebrating vespers in a lingerie department? What do you think?
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