Matt Cleaver, a seminary student who visited last Sunday, has a good take. Money quote:
I thought this would be a cool opportunity to see in real life all
that I had been reading and hearing about, and it was honestly pretty
much what I expected: quite anticlimactic and ordinary. And I mean
that truly in the best way possible.Obviously when I say ordinary I don’t mean mainstream.
When you walk into the Great Room (think sanctuary) and see it filled
with tons of couches all arranged pointing towards a
couple of stools
sitting in the middle of the room you realize that the environment is
anything but typical church fare.When I say that the Sunday Gathering is ordinary and anticlimactic I
mean that the community and leadership embrace a super-flat
ecclesiology. Lines between staff and laity seem blurred, and there is
no such thing as a celebrity.
Photo courtesy of Nanette Sawyer’s Flickr photostream