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Spent this past weekend with Charles Park, who is in the process of planting a church in Manhattan, near Wall Street. Charles has a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. He talks about the need for churches to move into what the economists call “blue ocean,” the places where churches don’t thrive because the current approaches to Christianity aren’t working. Like Manhattan, where .05% of residents below, say, 95th Street (below Harlem) attend church. And 99.5% of residents don’t.

Blue ocean, in the world of economics, is where there aren’t any current viable business models. It’s contrasted with “red ocean” where a business model is working, where the sharks are feeding, so to speak, and typically, once a business model begins to work, other businesses flock to the same area to feed.

In a place like Manhattan, most of the churches are competing for the .o5% of people who are already connected to the church enterprise. Charles, being an economist though, knows that it makes more sense to go where the 99.5% are located–the blue ocean. But that means coming up with a new business model.

So his church is working it, and he’s come to many of the same conclusions we have here in Ann Arbor, where the existing business models for church aren’t reaching the people for whom Jesus is still appealing, but the church is irrelevant, or the place they least expect to find him. (One of our board members, Steve Barger, a business man himself, came up with a motto for our church that says it all: working hard not to meet your expectations.)

The church Charles Park is planting has three aims: to be culturally relevant (but by this he means something much more radical and thoughtful than adopting a few forms–he means taking full responsibility for communicating in language that those on the outside of faith can understand, even if that means offending the sacred cows of Christian culture in the pursuit of faithfulness to making the gospel known); to mediate spiritual experience (that is to make a safe place for people to connect with God in a direct, tangible, palpable way); and to do so in a way that is biblically thoughtful.

I was beside myself with joy hearing Charles speak. His understanding of what he calls “center cities” perfectly describes Ann Arbor. The challenges of reaching these places is something he understands in his bones. Chief among these challenges is this: to be truly evangelical in center cities, means a fresh enough approach at so many levels of church life, that those whose view of faith has been shaped by contemporary American evangelical (including charismatic) culture become nervous, often even, offended.

This is a massive, pervasive, multi-textured challenge, the inevitable result of fishing in the blue ocean. I’ve only begun to touch on it in this blog, but it’s an underlying theme of my life as a pastor in a place like Ann Arbor. But I’m more excited than ever about the challenge, because I can feel a breakthrough coming.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 5:14 am and is filed under beyond conservative-liberal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.