Natalie (my Australian friend whom I will be spending next summer with) and I were talking about churches, and she said, "I'm not a part of a 'traditional' church."

I asked her, "What do you mean? Missional/incarnational? Emergent? Something else?"

She said, "Well, I have a home church I go to, but on Sunday mornings I'm part of a gathering at carewerx [where I'll be working next summer]. We open the doors to the community and serve them breakfast, we hang out and talk about life with them, maybe watch a video with some kind of message, and we just love on the community like Jesus would, you know?"

I asked her about her home church.

She said, "I go there to 'fill' my spiritual needs. All my deep friendships are there, we meet in honesty, and we talk with one another and pray with one another, and we worship God together." She mentioned another home church: "I'm also part of a home church called 'home brand.' It's mainly for new Christians or people who aren't Christians. We just get together, play rugby or cards, talk about life, hang out. Some of my friends and I started it."

We started talking about "The Shaping of Things to Come," because she had to read that book for one of her college classes (she is part of a college reaching out to the secular, postmodern Australian world, and their textbooks are the kinds of books Adam, Mike and I read!). She said, "The church with pews, the church as an institution, just isn't reaching people. People don't want it. At carewerx, I work with people who would never go to an institutionalized church, yet they will come to carewerx things."

I said, "The Western world is changing, and the institutionalized church is stagnant. The gospel message is alive, vibrant, and transforming, but people aren't experiencing it because no one's telling them about it. We can't just sit in our pews and wait for them to come to us. We have to be like the early Christians: we've got to go to them, show them Christ's love, show them genuine friendship, and invite them into the journey."