Cul-de-Sac or Intersection?

A few years ago when my brother bought his first house in the Richmond, Virginia area, his family located a property on a cul-de-sac that they wanted. At the time, it was quite in vogue for young families with growing children to desire a cul-de-sac home.

There are many reasons why. There is limited traffic on a road like this. Since it’s a dead end drive, rarely does anyone drive onto a cul-de-sac road that does not intend to go there. Limited traffic means limited noise, too. This inevitably is much more convenient for the neighbors who live on the street. In fact, it tends to improve the quality of life for those who live there. Safety is another contribution that living on a cul-de-sac makes to families that live there. Especially if children are growing up in the home, this is an important value that parents want. Cul-de-sac homes also grow in property value over time, since they afford all of these benefits and more.

Intersections are the mirror reverse in reality. Always busy with lots of traffic and its accompanying noise, intersections are dangerous places to live. They are never as safe. Instead of valuing property, they tend to value people. In fact, people by the thousands are always coming and going, never stopping and staying. They are on a journey somewhere, and the intersection affords them  opportunities to choose. More than that, it offers them a way to discover their destination.

Which is your church more like—a cul-de-sac or an intersection? It has occurred to me that too many churches in the world today are more like a cul-de-sac, seeking to play it safe in an all too dangerous world. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways to get off the cul-de-sac and intersect with people where they are. Consider the following:

Start a different kind of worship experience. A new worship opportunity will attract new people. This is especially true if the service is held on a different day  of the week or in a different part of the church facility. Different styles of music and preaching will also connect with a different crowd. Some churches may go so far as to use this strategy to start what is called a “church within a church.” This idea revolves around the concept of having a new and different congregation forming its own identity (and often leadership from the church staff) in a symbiotic relationship with the main congregation. This can be a daring move, since the new congregation may eventually outgrow the relationship and move on. But it’s a Kingdom move that puts reaching new people above anything else.

Add a multi-site campus. Another way of reaching new people is to go to a new place to begin a worship experience. Placing a worship opportunity in a location near the group of people you are trying to reach makes it easier for them to participate in your church. While this approach is usually more expensive than the first approach listed above, it has the potential to connect with many other people, too. Why? Because you’ve gone to them where they are, instead of expecting them to come to you. While multiple worship experiences as mentioned above will eventually reach a point of saturation on your church campus, multi-site campuses can be added over and over again.

Try a video venue. Another way of adding congregations with lower overhead than a church plant and more “sameness” than a multi-site campus is known as a video venue. This strategy can be done either on the campus of your church facilities or off campus at a new and different location. Either way the venues are intentionally developed to reach different groups of people by the way they “do” church. Music usually varies, the focus is on different age groups or lifestyles, and the atmosphere can be more or less formal. But in a video venue, the  message remains the same. While the speaker is seen live in one setting, he is seen on videotape or a video screen in the others. Surprisingly, this strategy has worked very well with younger adults and with large churches whose membership is scattered over many, many miles.

Plant a church. The ultimate method of living dangerouslyand intersecting with others is to plant a new church. This approach releases and empowers people to serve as local missionaries sent out from your church for the express purpose of finding new people and establishing a church just for them. It is a challenging undertaking, but one filled with excitement and adventure for the entire church. The advantage it has above all the others here is that it brings into being a second autonomous entity, which can in turn do what your congregation has done, and multiply itself. As such, it has global possibilities today, just as it did in the days of the apostles.

Don’t be a dead-end church. Be a church that lives where the people are, multiplies itself time and again, dares to be different and is dangerously on mission for Jesus Christ.

This post was previously published in my book, PlantLIFE: Principles and Practices in Church Planting. You can secure more information about the book or purchase it by going to the publisher site here or to Amazon.com here.