Church for a changing culture: an introduction to alternative worship

9: Environment

If Alternative Worship is about making church out of your everyday culture, the form that has developed in most places reflects the importance of dance music, clubs and raves for adults under 40, especially in the UK where club culture has been predominant since the late 1980s.

Clubs and raves demonstrated that a multimedia and multisensory environment can carry tremendous spiritual and emotional impact.

Club culture also has an intense, if often superficial, sense of togetherness and an unfocussed but genuine concern for spirituality. The sense that clubs were a more openly spiritual environment than churches was an important trigger for many in Alternative Worship.

However, contrary to popular misconceptions, few Alternative Worship services involve frenetic music and dancing. The model taken from club culture is the 'chill-out' room - a space with a quiet, soothing ambience for resting in away from the deafening heat of the dancefloor. Chill-out rooms showed what a church in the emerging culture might be like - a reflective, relaxing place to think or talk quietly, visually and sonically rich but gentle, a relief from noise and activity.

Meanwhile the new kinds of coffee shop spreading from the west coast of America have inspired another approach to church.

Unlike older forms of cafe, the new coffee shops emphasise hanging out as much as consuming food and drink. The comfortable couches and easy chairs, the newspapers and internet connections encourage visitors to take their time. There is little pressure to finish and make room for the next customer. 'Cafe churches' aim to replicate that unhurried and friendly atmosphere, where discussions take place over good food and drink in comfort. People come and go as they please, there is no formal beginning or end to proceedings apart from opening and closing times. There can be background music, art on the walls, maybe even a live act - but not one that kills all conversation.

While cafe churches copy the commercial coffee shop on church-owned premises, other groups meet in secular pubs or bars, usually in a private room for [mutual] convenience. If a church actually owns a commercial coffee shop or pub, boundaries can be blurred to good effect. In both cafe and pub meetings the concept of a 'church service' as we have known it is seriously under question.