Many emerging churches have abandoned practices that don't seem to fit culturally. For instance, some churches don't have a sermon because there is nowhere in their culture where someone stands up in front of a group and talks for twenty minutes. Instead, they'll host an art exhibition and stand around with glasses of wine and talk about how the art affects them, how it points them to God.
And that's what works for those people. We shouldn't take their wine glass and canvass approach and force it on our cultures. That would be making the same mistake those people are trying to avoid. Instead, we must do the hard work of discerning how our cultures might best worship. There are times to be counter-cultural (prophetic), but we should be very deliberate about when we perform a very different cultural practice.
A good way to do this, I think, is to allow the worship to come from the people. Don't dictate; enable.
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Place - the physical area in which we are, such as a room
Space - the arena of communication between people
In the past, place and space were the same thing. You could only interact with someone whom you shared place with. Beginning with letter writing in a small way, but exponentially moreso today in our digital Twitter and Facebook-ified world, space is a much more fluid thing. We communicate almost completely divorced from place.
How can we bring Christ to every space? What voice does the Church have in these spaces? What should the Church's interaction be? What might God be speaking to these spaces?
I don't think we should jettison the physical place in preference for the extended spaces, but I do think we should be intentional about our interactions.
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