DOES YOUR CHURCH NEED A SMOKING SECTION?

Recently I was in Chemnitz, Germany (formerly Karlmarxstadt, East Germany) with United Methodist missionaries who are planting a Fresh Expressions faith community.  The community is called Inspire - same name as a creative new faith community project in my hometown of Washington DC.  The leaders of Inspire are Barry and Jill Sloan, an Irish couple who have been serving in Germany for 17 years.  Barry read my first book (Fling Open the Doors) several years ago.  The book (about church as community center) helped to spark in him the idea to plant a community center in a city where 97 percent of the young adults are atheist or seriously agnostic.  Inspire is that center.  Inspire is located on the Bruhle, a pedestrian mall built by the communists years ago, and which fell into disrepair in recent decades.  But as the economy strengthens, slowly they are renovating abandoned buildings on the Bruhle.   The United Methodists are well positioned at ground zero of this community redevelopment.

Every Monday night Inspire hosts a community music night, Music Mondays - sometimes with a performing artist, sometimes with open mike and whatever instruments appear.  Because this is Germany, they serve coffee, wine and beer from the bar and seek to make a welcome space for building redemptive relationships.  I attended Music Monday on May 18.  About 60 people showed up for the fifth such gathering - a rousing success.  They had hoped for 25.

At first all the people were gathered inside, listening to the musician.  But I decided to take my glass of Reisling and step outside to sit at a cafe table where I could hear the music but watch the people go by.  Once i sat down, people began to take greater notice of the music and the man sitting with a glass of wine at a cafe table.  Others came to sit alongside me at my table and the adjacent tables. Soon there were 15 people gathered outside the music venue on a warm spring evening.  And they were all smoking, but me.  

Amazing conversations began to develop, among friends, and between total strangers.  Some people wanted to know more about Inspire, about what I was doing in Germany.  There was only one church person among the group - a very nice young man with a deep love for Christ and a passion for music.  The rest were just neighbors. 

Barry commented as he looked at those gathered, "This is what we hoped would happen when we opened this space - that people would gather and relationships would form."  I remembered the community center I helped to plant some 16 years ago back in Gulf Breeze, Florida - I recalled that some of our best catches (people wise) were smokers - and folks with some aversion to coming too far in at first.  I recall onetime seeing several of our Florida smokers, sitting at a picnic table behind our building, lost in great conversation.  I looked at the wonderful people smoking and conversing in front of Inspire on Music Monday and gave thanks for a church that put out cafe tables for the people who are not yet sure they wish to walk through the doors.  

I came away thinking that more churches need smoking sections - safe spaces where the neighbors can be themselves and we can get to know them, and they us.  Of course less people smoke in the USA than in Europe at the moment, and it is not that we want to encourage smoking.  My thought about this is somewhat metaphorical, but not entirely.  It is hard to find any place for people who smoke to gather and be community anymore.  Why can't the church follow the example of the United Methodists in Chemnitz and provide such a space?  The Holy Spirit could do some amazing work in such space.  Amazing work.

I invite you to pray for Barry and Jill and the team of 8 persons who are launching Inspire.  Pray for them as they create safe space, as they find ways to invite people to consider Gospel ideas and as they strategize about how to develop a Christian faith community in one the most thoroughly NONE zones on the planet.