Thanks Gordon, I’ll have to resign myself to being a worthless, bed-ridden critic I guess. Consider the messenger shot. Thanks for the encouragement, as always.

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AAAaanyway, getting back on topic, Craig originally asked:

So, what does “Urban Man Church” look like? Should it look like anything? Or do we just “preach the gospel” and not worry about the cultural stuff? Is it a trap to try and tailor church for urban areas, or for guys?

It is interesting to think about the fact there has been so much talk about the importance of men in church, the feminization of the church, the lack of men in church etc etc, but no one really knows what the antidote looks like (hence the original question obviously!).

The US Evangelical ‘manly men’ movements seem to have this bizarre focus on all the macho ‘warrior’, ‘adventurer’ stuff, but at the same time expect men to be deeply in touch with their feelings and able to cry at the drop of the hat, which I thought was really, really weird. Two very odd extremes. So I don’t know that the answer lies there.

In Syd Ang land, the Sydney Anglican way of doing church is heavily codified, in the sense that apart from some small variables, most services are largely interchangeable.

So the question I guess is do/can we change the systematized syd ang service (assuming of course there’s a need to), and if not, and something separate was created, how different would it be, and how much would it vary from the mean that is the standard syd ang service?

I have a feeling that everything, church service wise, generally reverts back to the mean, no matter how different or original you try to be, you’re usually just tweaking some tiny variables, because the pull towards the mean is so strong. That is unless what you’re doing is entirely natural and you can’t comprehend doing it any other way (which is probably the case for Driscoll, for eg).

But be that as it may, lets take music for example, I recall Mars Hill apparently had this indie rock vibe to their music (I’ve never heard it) - anyone know if that’s true, and does it sound much different to normal church stuff?

If you think about where a lot of young men are on a friday/saturday night or whatever, a lot of them are at rock gigs, usually heavy/punk/loud rock gigs.

If a church imitated that style of music (and one bigger, local church here does to some extent, and it works really well) I’d certainly be more inclined to attend vs somewhere that dished up the please-everyone, middle-of-the-road ‘contemporary’ stuff that you expect your parents to be enjoying.

From a young male point of view, no one wants to show up to enjoy their parents contemporary pop… with their parents. Think about it - where would they ever do that ordinarily?

The real noisy rock gig vibe is the kind of music I personally could relate to, and I’m sure a lot of other guys would to, particularly when you’re looking at the kind of local music young men are buying and making (Gyroscope, Cog, Birds of Tokyo, British India etc etc) and the mainstays of the big festivals - your big day’s out, homebake etc. It’s loud, it’s heavy, it’s noisy and it’s enjoyed mostly by… young men (late teens & twenties).

Culturally, from a music point of view at least, the church generally (I’m sure there’s the odd exception) is a world away from that.

Like I said, no one (from a young male point of view) wants to sing cheesy pop songs with their mum. (No offense mums ;)

Most places though are wedded to the mean - that’s what the people there want, that’s what they know, that’s what they do. Breaking away from that would be half the battle I would think…