Here's a kink

Like I've written previously I've been listening a lot to Mark Driscoll in Seattle. Recently he was speaking on the church in Corinth and relating it to his church in Seattle. His main theme was the city is the center of culture. If you want to affect culture reach the city. Media, business, trends all flow from the city. Paul went to the cities and from there Christianity flowed out. It got me thinking about our future church launch. We had been looking at growing, suburban areas around Charlotte, identifying several possibilities. Then as I listened to this message I began to give it deeper thought. The downtown (Uptown) area of Charlotte is booming. Condominiums are shooting up everywhere, the south end is becoming an incredibly chic area, so many people with so much influence. So my wife and I drove down there today, and there is so much there. There are a few churches down there moving in the same direction so we wouldn't be exactly groundbreaking, but I don't know. It's a scary thought. To be honest, a church in the burbs, while certainly challenging, doesn't scare me like the thought of an uptown church. Where do we start, will we connect, will we succeed? Is that where God is calling us to be? What a radical concept. Aren't all successful megachurches in some upwardly mobile suburb on the outskirts of town safely removed from the unplanned fluidity of a large urban center? I don't know, it's late, I'm tired, but we're definitely going to be praying about this. A church that affects the city from the inside out. Seems like a no-brainer, but all our churches are on the outside looking in, or ignoring the in. hmmmm.