When doing church differently means doing it the same

When a friend and I started planting a new church in Chicago about five years ago, we had lots of ideas about how to do church. But one thing was certain: we wanted to do church differently. Lots of church planters have the same mission. We talked (and still talk) about wanting to reach people who were unsure of church, had been burned by church, were bored of church, never wanted to have anything to do with church.

We told existing churches that we weren’t in competition with them—we wanted to attract people who, for whatever reason, would never set foot in a narthex. In other words, we didn’t want our church to be too...churchy.

We followed that pattern for our first worship site for the congregation we started, Urban Village Church. We worshiped in a theater at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies downtown—a location that engendered a fair amount of great conversation. And it wasn’t churchy.