Conversational Church Style

December 9, 2019 by
The last church I pastored was a small, well-established church at the end of it’s life. We met in a coffeehouse that had previously been the church building and we engaged in what I called a “conversational service style.” Other’s might classify this as a “dialogical” approach to the weekly gathering.

We had transitioned to this style of service because I had become increasingly convinced that the congregation I served knew about Jesus and the Bible, but they did not know how to talk about Jesus  or biblical concepts. They could listen, absorb, and learn, but they struggled in actually talking about what they were learning.

In all fairness, if you were to ask the members of the congregation, I’m sure that they would deny my assertion, but the reality is that as the pastor leading a group made up primarily of heavily-churched individuals, I recognized the pattern of familiarity had created complacency and recognized there was a need for a different approach to learning how to live and think like Jesus.

Here’s the format we followed:

We gathered at an appointed time on Sunday mornings at 10:00 AM. We were pretty loose with when we started, sometimes we started right on time, other days we spent the first 5-10 minutes just catching up with each other.

Next, we entered into a time of worship singing. Typically this was 3-4 songs. Then the scripture passage for the day was read. Then I presented a 5-10 minute brief synopsis of the scripture referencing culture, timeline, various historical references, etc.

The remainder of the service, the congregation talked about the following questions:

 
1. How would you apply this scripture to your life? (15 mins followed by a brief community discussion about how to apply the scripture.)
2. How would you share this scripture with someone else? (10 mins followed by a brief community discussion about how to share the scripture.)
3. What is something that you need prayer for? (5 mins of sharing prayer requests followed by an additional 5-10 minutes of table prayer, followed by a closing prayer)
 
The results of this approach was varied. For those who were not heavily-churched, they began to grow and learn. I could see how talking about Jesus was helping to build their relationship with Jesus. They may not get the biblical concepts exactly right, but they were trying and learning from each other.

For those who were heavily-churched, this was an incredibly uncomfortable environment. A common complaint was that they just wanted a regular sermon, they didn’t want to have to talk with each other. Because of this, I could see how the conversational environment was a constant irritation to them. They didn’t know how to talk about the Bible that they had heard so much about and because of this, they were unable to see any value in what we were doing.

In the end, this format was terrible for individuals who held onto to the belief that the church was supposed to look and feel a certain way and extraordinary at helping individuals who wanted to actually know and have a relationship with Jesus.

Filed Under: Pastor

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