An Intuitive Introverts Guide
to Starting a Church : 3
Mark Pierson : Urban Seed: Melbourne, Australia
[07.05]

May 13, 2005
Last Sunday was our first gathering of the clan. Fourteen adults and two children turned up, most of them not people I had expected! It was also twice the number I anticipated. This was an unadvertised (but not closed) night of sitting around talking with a core group about the ethos and values and some of the practices that I want to build Urban Seed:church on. I did most of the talking. We met for less than an hour by the time people had arrived and had tea and coffee. The Mission to Seafarers building worked well and will become a great asset I think. People like it’s ‘olde worlde’ style. Last night I moved from being very nervous to quietly excited. We will continue to talk about values and move increasingly into our order of service over the coming weeks before opening it up to the wider public.

To help people grasp the ethos I want for the church I have tried to write down some of the values and practices that are important to me. These have been an important discussion point for people. They’re not well written, not exhaustive, nor in any order, and there is some overlap, but I’ll list the first third of them below, and the others over the next couple of times I write.

Urban Seed:church will:-
a. Make a deliberate and sustained effort to resource Christian spirituality among people who consider themselves to be post-modern or part of the emerging cultural milieu.

b. Exist only to sustain its community in following Christ in the world and actively decline to institutionalise that.

c. Cease to exist if at any point the gathered community no longer finds Urban Seed:church helpful. Programmes and projects that lack leadership or support will cease immediately no matter how important they are seen to be by others.

d. Shape everything it does according to the goal of ‘sustaining and resourcing Christian spirituality in the world’.

e. Provide a smorgasbord of resourcing events for its community but have low expectations of anyone as to attendance and participation at any event.

f. Create a fluid and liquid form of church and church life that is creative about how it resources Christian spirituality for groups and individuals within and outside its gathered community.

g. See it’s community in the broadest terms ie those connected by geography, interest, world wide web, occasional attendance, attendance at specific resourcing events.

h. Be committed more strongly to encouraging spiritual desire than meeting spiritual needs.

i. Encourage spiritual consumerism and a smorgasbord approach to nurturing Christian formation.

j. Understand that the ‘Sunday Worship’ event is only one element among many resources offered to them and to the wider community.

k. Assume in everything we do and say that someone listening/reading/observing/ participating doesn’t have the background to understand/participate fully without clear explanation and non-jargoned gender sensitive language.

l. Have a raw urban edge and feel to it. Be risk takers and boundary pushers in worship, mission and ministry. Be involved in the market place of work, leisure and the arts in the Melbourne CBD.

continue the journey >

Mark Pierson is Executive Director of Urban Seed. He is also co-author with Mike Riddell and Cathy Kirkpatrick of the SPCK book & CD-Rom, 'The Prodigal Project' and collator of the CDROM project‘Fractals: alternative worship resources for the emerging church’.