Church for a changing culture: an introduction to alternative worship

8: Community

Alternative Worship is deeply concerned for community.

Community is a place of honesty, commitment and support, where people grow through relationship. It is essential to living any kind of authentic Christian life in societies which work against it in fine detail. In the contemporary urbanised world community is not necessarily about geographical proximity. It is about quality of relationships, and these can be sustained over large distances due to our technologies of transport and communication.

But for many Christians community means shared living on the lines of Acts 4 32-35, in order to make visible the countercultural values of Kingdom living, and to support one another in practicing availability to those in need. The pressures and structures of modern life make this hard to achieve.

In the UK, the initial motivation for those joining the movement has generally been dissatisfaction with the culture of worship - hence its name. And then as people work together, creating worship and exploring theology, they draw together as communities. Elsewhere groups have begun as intentional communities, who have then developed their own forms of corporate worship. And those who form incarnational communities to witness into subcultures soon find that their worship needs to be rethought, not only to be accessible to those they wish to reach, but also to the people they have now become.

Worship and community are closely entwined. How you worship expresses who you think you are and who you think God is.

The worship in Alternative Worship is highly participative, so it expresses the community that makes it very directly. The community's identity is made visible in its worship, but at the same time the worship becomes a forum, where the community works out its identity before God.