Emerging Ministries within a New Church Building

Having been working or thinking in the Emergent movement for over 4 years now, I keep coming back to a new idea to get groups into facilities and to keep struggling mainlines alive.

That idea is an ecumenical center.

An ecumenical center can exist in a big building or a small office space. The key thing is that the physical space provide several dedicated worship spaces that are technologically updated and separate space for each group to plan within. A really good space would also provide breakout rooms for meetings.

So what would it look like strategically? It would include 10-20 groups that call the space home. The community could leverage the space to seek out newcomers by offering a "mall" approach to worship.

Although each community is distinct, there is opportunity to leverage resources. For example the group could use a common youth minister or share access to common admin. Another example is rotating executive minister to represent the community at meetings that separately the group could not attend.

From a cost perspective, creating a common space reduces the need for fulltime pastors thus reducing the cost to 'plant' new ministries.

Finally, think of the dialogue or cooperation opportunities!!

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