Sitting in the smoking section

Pastors breaking taboos and reaching out to city folk

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070629/28225_Innovative_Church_Leaders_Move_Into_the_Neighborhood.htm

One of them is Senior Pastor Craig Groeschel of www.lifechurch.tv

Here's what he says about reaching out to the unsaved:

"If we're going to reach the world, we're going to have to sit in the smoking section."

"In order to reach those that no one else is reaching, we will have to do things that no one else is doing."

"We need to stop trying so hard to build attendance and we need to think about building the Church. When we redefine it and say 'look at how many people are being lost (rather than counting those being saved),' that's going to change everything."

His website has an Internet church campus - my favourite part of this website: http://www.lifechurch.tv/p/39/Default.aspx?SermonID=109&CategoryID=2

The other church mentioned was Granger Community Church in Indiana (http://www.gccwired.com/)

Granger broke the rules when the church plastered mylamesexlife.com billboards around the local city, which stirred debate among Christians and a media storm.

My favourite part of Granger Community Church: http://readmylifestories.blogspot.com/

Are these innovative churches a flash in the pan? Are they biblical? Well, test them. Check out their websites, go through their church mission statements, listen to the sermons, and understand where their pastoral leadership is coming from.

I think that many churches in Singapore have yet to even fully come to appreciate or even harness the fantastic complementary channel of the Internet that God has placed in our hands in this generation and for the future generations to come.

I pray that Christians can claim and harness the Internet to reach out to people with messages of hope, love, grace, forgiveness and Christ instead of losing this channel to messages that breed sin, hatred, racism and terrorism.