Why we Left the Church Building

I serve as pastor of a small Lutheran Church on Main Street in a little town called Akron, PA not Ohio.  This congregation and its building have occupied this location for over 125 years.  There is a cemetery behind the building in which to bury her saints.  I have been pastor here for 10 years. I consider myself a reformer, an evangelist, and a community organizer.  I love the church.  I have lived in church buildings all my life.  It is where I have been, at least on a Sunday morning, for most of my 41 years.  I love Lutheran worship.  I believe Lutheran Christians have a special calling to feed hungry people that comes right out of our biblical and sacramental theology of the cross.  Jesus becomes our bread, so that we might become bread for the world.  Luther said that by faith Jesus is in, with, and under the bread and the wine.  Like a mystery.  God's Word of life and salvation becomes flesh.  Jesus' forgives sins, so that there might be one heavenly banquet at which all God's children are satisfied.  We read the bible as a container of God's Word to humankind, given to the people of Israel and to followers of Jesus the Christ.  The story in the bible is God's story and we are in it.  
The congregation I serve has experienced a decline in the number of regular Sunday morning worshipers that basically follows broader cultural trends.  But, we serve our neighbors through a monthly outreach ministry we call "peter's porch".  It is meant to be a space for encounter and possible community building.  It is a place where hungry people get food; breakfast, groceries, and other household supplies.  It is basically how this middle class congregation of teachers, small business owners, and white-collar workers met neighbors struggling in, with, and under poverty.  Some people have come to peter's porch and found their way into the worshiping and learning community of the church.  Most have not.  But those who have have broadened the congregation's perspective on what it means to have faith.  It's bolder to have faith when you have a mountain in front of you, preventing you from moving into a better life.  I've met people will strong faith, no money, and poor health. 
Along the way, I realized that many of my friends (Gen Xers and younger) were not connecting to church.  Those who were seemed to gravitate toward larger, programmatic churches that didn't miss them if they didn't show up.  They could plug in if and when they wanted with little impulse for commitment.  Some of our friends just didn't participate in any faith community at all.
So, in 2014 we started a dinner church worship that was meant to be more inclusive, hospitable, and welcoming.  We met in the church basement and not the sanctuary and we worshiped during a meal.  We believed this space was less intimidating.  Peter's Porch took place downstairs in the basement, so it had become community space.  We served a community breakfast in that space for several years.  And no matter how many times I invited people to come back to Sunday morning worship, very few people transtioned from the basement to the sanctuary.  So, we started dinner church to encourage community members to participate in the church's worship.  At least everyone was fed and the company was decent.  For some of us worship was also meaningful.  It seemed to answer a common question.  What would it look like to be church together without congregational interests driving the behavior?  We weren't interested in making new members or acquiring more Lutherans or rebuilding Zion, Akron.  We weren't interested in committee members or giving units to pay the church's bills. We were interested in authenticating Christian community as it was described in the new teatament---Koinonia (communion with one another and with the God who made us and raised Jesus from the dead as a sign of a new order breaking into and subverting the old, broken order).  We were interested in risking vulnerability in a small gathering.  We were interested in paying attention to one another and listening for God's story to intersect ours.  We were interested in food and hunger and sharing until all had enough.  We hoped that people, our friends, who were allergic to church or disappointed in church or frustrated with church might try dinner church.  It was a slow start. Sometimes dinner consisted of two families.  Other times 40 people showed up.  We never knew what we would eat or who would come.  We tried to be hospitable and present.   I hoped it would not fail. 
Last Fall something changed.  We fell into a bi-weekly pattern and certain people connected.  Two or three families started participating with us very regularly and intentionally.  Dinner Church became the expression of Christian community they were looking for.  And our average attendance was about 24 people. 
This summer, we risked leaving the church building and became nomads.  Like exiles or wilderness wanderers, we met in local parks and parking lots.  We invited others.  And other people joined us.  There were 20 kids and 18 adults last week as we gathered for dinner and celtic worship.  Every worship service or liturgy is a Eucharist.  We celebrate the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, the presence of the risen Jesus in bread, cup, and Word.  We pray and sing.  We eat good food.  Leaving the church building was a really good idea.

We left the church building because we want to be a church without a building.  Church buildings can be barriers for communion with God and with one another, especially for people with no experience of church or for people who have experienced church as a place of judgment and exclusion.  Church buildings cost money and are not always designed for the kind of things we intend to do together.  We want to be a church on the way, on a journey, in and for the world.  We want to be in the neighborhood.  And we want to be people first, a koinonia (a fellowship or community of believers struggling with our unbelief, living together with fears and hopes.) People matter to us and to God.  We left the building because some people will never darken a church door, but they will come along to dinner with a friend and listen to songs and prayers and words of wonder and miracle and mystery.  We want to be curious about under-served and ignored people and places.  We want to be present there,where the church has been notoriously absent.  We want to be the church, not go to church. We want to demonstrate accessibility to God, who has come down to us, who dwelt among us in the flesh, who lived and died and defeated death and rose up to show us the way to life.
We left the church building because church buildings have walls and boundaries and limits and capacity.  And the Kingdom of God is transcendent and borderless and transcontinental and international.  We want to reconnect to the earth and its created goodness, too. 
I don't despise church buildings.  I have lived in them most of my life. They have a purpose. And can be repurposed today, too.  We have retrofit our sanctuary to be more user friendly in today's visual world.  But, if we are going to be a church for our neighbors, in this world, we need to consider getting out of church buildings. I think the emerging dinner church community will be nomadic for awhile. It's not easier or more convenient.  I feel like a travelling circus most weeks. But if people connect precisely because we are not church-in-a-box, then the cost to leave.the building is pretty low.