When Rae Jackson in Washington DC announced (pre-Covid) that his new planting project (The Well) would be “pop-up,“ moving to different venues in its gathering, I immediately thought of the recent movement among cool bakeries, food trucks, shows and museums, where the fun travels.
However, in another era, long before Disneyworld, the circus and the carnival used to “come to town.” In vast regions of the USA where there were really too few people to form mega churches, tent revivals and evangelistic crusades moved along the same highways as the circus wagons. Pop-up they were.
Go back further, to an arguably stodgy season in Anglican life In England, and we see John Wesley popping up here and there and everywhere, “field preaching.” In a much earlier culture of synagogue and temple, the rabbi Jesus moved from city to city. Everywhere he went he reminded folks that the Kingdom of God “had come near.” Pop-up. It’s older than Christianity itself.
As real estate expense moves many new churches beyond a focus on facility development, more and more folks are thinking pop up again. In my consulting with churches that have solid physical campuses, I encourage them to move beyond a single GPS as their only venue for ministry. They can make it a hub, but still take ministry to all sorts of places beyond the hub. New churches can, in some cases, secure ongoing gathering space - or they can move more nimbly and just consider all the world a potential venue, with the ongoing possibility and opportunity to bring ministry to all sorts of neighborhoods.
The advanced technology that is driving digital ministry heightens the pop-up movement further. By digital means, the gospel crosses borders and oceans in a nanosecond, allowing churches to pop up in homes and other intimate venues, resourced by leaders and artists thousands of miles away.
Pop-up is here. Again.
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