Unconventional Worship?

Over the summer, I've thought a lot about a congregation as a community.  What does that mean for us?  What should it mean for us?  In particular, I've been thinking these past several months about a general hunger in our culture for community, which I've noticed as a prominent theme in popular television shows and movies over the past couple of years.

Imagine my surprise when I read about "Worship at the Water," a Sunday morning church service held at an ocean-front bar on the Alabama/Florida state line.  While it sounds like a typical honky tonk bar, in a very untypical and beautiful setting, on Sunday mornings an average of 450 people gather to worship God.

Perhaps it was the informal dress that caught my eye -- I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Rick Warren, who preaches in comfortable (and usually loud) Hawaiian shirts.  At Worship at the Water there is a pastor who wears shorts, a t-shirt, sandals, and Mardi Gras beads to lead the service, which sounds like an even better Sunday morning dress code.

But beyond that -- though we should not discount the real appeal of being able to go to a worship service wearing laidback clothes -- I wonder what we can learn about this approach to worship.  Perhaps it is a flash in the pan, but any new congregation that attracts 1100 people for Easter is probably doing some things right.  More than a few people probably attend the service on a lark -- church in a bar? -- but most of these people come back because they want to -- not because their parents or their spouse drags them, not to look good, not because they always have.

The first Christians to gather in churches came together on Sundays, which was a challenge.  They had to get up even earlier for morning prayers and then they gathered after a long work day for a communal meal.  They made the effort because they wanted to.  They wanted to be with each other, and they wanted to worship God together.  Sometimes I feel like congregations live up to this, but more often it seems that we gather because we think we're supposed to meet on Sunday mornings, not because we really want to.  And, even if we really do want to go to church, we usually apologize to others about our participation, so that they don't think we're one of those wacko religious zealots.

What if we were proud of our religious communities?  What if we didn't apologize?  What if we really wanted to be there on Sunday mornings?  Maybe the unconventional setting has allowed Worship on the Water at the Flora-Bama bar to answer those questions so strongly, but I think that we can too, in our own place and in our own way.