Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Niche churches

I was listening to BOTT radio network this past weekend and heard an interesting story about niche churches. This particular story dealt with a Cowboy Church which was planted in the Denver, Colorado area to reach out to cowboys with a service that was geared toward that demographic.
Now, I have no problems with outreach to any particular group, and I think that there are times when churches need to have specific ways to reach to various groups. This does not mean that we need to "throw out the baby with the bath water".
Why?
I think that it can be dangerous to the Church at large, when we begin to divide ourselves based upon niches. We have cowboy churches, Gen-X churches, biker churches, post-modern churches, spiritual warfare churches, and so on and so on. The reason this can be harmful is that it creates a disconnect to the broader Church because members of niche churches are in a very homogenous group with people they share, possibly, too much in common.
We know from the Bible that Christ's church is made up of people from all different sorts of groups. This is not only racial, but social and other demographic statistics as well. And that is a beautiful thing because we know that the Gospel is so powerful it allows a biker and a cowboy to worship with a CEO, a professor or senior citizen, while in the next pew is a skateboarder.
The Gospel crosses those lines and unfortunately, in "traditional" circles, as well as niche circles, we lose site of that and create unfortunate barriers that really have no business existing anyway.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Ryan DeBarr said...

The irony is that "niche" churches often sell themselves as open-minded, when the are really teaching people to remain narrow-minded and focused only on people just like them.

2:38 PM  

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