Hardcore House Church

This is my first post, and I feel like I must leave you with something spectacular and life altering or you won't come back. However, I don;t know if I can produce something like that, so maybe the best thing to do is just update you about what is going in my life at this point. Unfortunately, there is not that much interesting stuff, so again I will be at a loss.

I think the best thing for me to do is tell you about the hardcore church that Nate Davis and myself, along with some others. For about a year now Mercyhouse, the church I work for, has been having hardcore shows in its building. It started out because we thought the building should be for the community, so anyone who wanted to rent it could. Well, it turns out if you open a church for anyone to rent, only hardcore kids want to use it with any regularity. Sure we have had a school choir, a wedding, and a few other events, but for the most part, just punk and hardcore shows.

Anyway, when these shows started off they were terrible. We would be lucky to get 15 kids to show up. Now though, well, now if we have less that 100 we are disappointed. It has been a crazy ride. On any given weekend, we could have 3 shows and have 500 hardcore kids come through our doors. This is more than double the amount of "church kids" we see each Sunday morning.

This has become such an outreach. At first these hardcore show attendees were making fun of and trying to break stuff in our church. Now, they are open with the church volunteers who work the shows, and even fight each other to protect Mercyhouse.

After lots of prayer and discussion, God laid it upon my heart to start a church service for these kids. I just don't see them fitting in with our Sunday morning crowd. I also hope to attract others who are not in the hardcore seen, but wouldn't come to church Sunday mornings at 10:30 am. For this reason we are doing it Saturday night (actually Sunday Morning, very early) at midnight.

NO one knows right now what the whole thing is going to look like or turn into, and the hope is that these kids would make it their own, but we need to start somewhere, so here is where we begin. I am trying to get 8-10 people who are 100 % committed to this thing, at least for the first few months. I don't think people would come if there was me and one other person, and I was teaching the Bible. Not to say that God couldn't use this, I just feel more comfortable with a core group to start.

We will start Saturday night at 11:30 pm. There will be a meal cooked every week by the church kids. Hot pancakes and pizza are hard to resist at 11:30, I figure. I will then give a sermonet or sorts, talking for 15-20 minutes. After that we will open up the floor for discussion, and end with a little rock music.

Over the next few weeks I will be working on my talks and prparing for the teaching time. The hope is to speak on contriversial topics and to draw people in because of that. My first talk will be about how we are all anti-christs, since they think that they are rebelling by saying that they are anti-christs. I am also going to speak about how Jesus disliked religion as much as they did, and hopefully guide them to an understanding of faith, and not religion. If nothing else, it will keep us christians on our toes, because these kids ask the tough questions.

Anyway, I will keep this posted about how this ministry is going. I also plan to actually rant in the future, so please keep reading. I have the feeling that if poeple stick with me until the end, I promise I will offend you and make you think, even though I don't feel like I did that today.