Slow Church

Chapter 2 Terroir. Taste and See

Taste of the place

 You can't franchise the kingdom of God

 Do not reduce Christianity to a commodity that can be marketed and sold
 McDonaldization vs God redeeming the world place by place
 Slow church is rooted in the culture of a particular place
 Preferring quality over quantity
 Seek the well-being of our congregation and neighborhood (of the city)
 Cultivate goodness through practices of nearness and stability

Church growth movement/Church Technocracy

 Homogeneity, static vision of church and focus on quantifiable results

 They are Christian colonies, safe havens in an otherwise hostile and foreign world

 Against “come and see” mentality

 Did Paul and Jesus care about numbers? Well the book of acts talks about numbers

 The church growth movement does not seem to be working. Most churches are
growing from Christians from other churches

The McDonaldization of the church. Four key characteristics:

 Efficiency: the promise of results in a few easy steps. But the narrow way of Jesus is
not efficient, it is a conversation

 Calculability: one size fits-all success models against the particularity of each
community. Slow church is purposeful unhurried “plan sequoias” – take the time

 Predictability: we can learn from others but we should not copy.

 Control: be open to creativity. Cookie-cutter approaches to discipleship making

Taste and see/the gospel of the coffee bean

 Tasting God’s goodness and costly discipleship

 The world tastes God through the church, the body of Christ
  The saltiness of the church draws out the flavor of every context while still
remaining uniquely itself

 The gospel is like coffee bean you cannot experience its pleasure directly from the
bean but through a process, of giving ourselves up

Mobility is just a reality in our world. That is a given. How can the church adapt to this
reality?

Do numbers matter? Are mega-churches condemned to be McDonaldized?

Ch. 3 Stability. Fidelity to people and place

God’s Mission of Reconciliation vs Hypermobility and Individualism

 McDonaldization prefers generic one-size solutions

 The diversity of God’s creation vs universal solutions

 The church continues the incarnation, embodying Christ in particular cultures

 Stability: commitment to a local community. Essential to our incarnational mission

of reconciliation

 Community and place are integral to God’s reconciliation of creation through the
continues incarnation of Christ in the world

Displaced, disembodied Christianity

 Mobility: shift in the organization of churches. Proximity is no longer, now it is a

matter of choice organized to social and economic similarity

 Church shopping

 The slow church focuses on God’s story rather than our own individual story

The mobility of churches

 Churches disentangled from their places

 The parish, churches rooted in their place

 The slow church needs to be rooted in their place in order to propagate an

embodied Christianity
Cultivating knowledge of a place

 A knowing that is loving

 Learn the rhythms over time

 Be attentive to all facets of human and natural life in the neighborhood

 Spend time both relaxing and working with the community

 Practices that reorient or desires for our community (history, care, etc.)

 Seek the flourishing of our place (people and land)

Hospitality and generosity

 Welcome strangers

 Stability is oriented to the flourishing of our place, it is not an end in itself

 Churches as the means through which God heals our land

 There are times for sending, but those are the exception not the norm

 Communities and places are not irrelevant