American Adventure (13) "Fish expressions of church"

I like Oak Grove, Missouri. It's pretty much the first place in America that I've been that (a) acknowledges that humans have legs, and (b) that they might want to use them for getting about. It's a suburb with decent pavements (translation: "sidewalks") and having arrived early for my meeting, I wandered around a bit before stopping for an iced lemonade at a Sonic restaurant. Wisely, I sat in the shade in the 94 degree heat.

 

 

I was in Oak Grove to meet Brandon Smith, the energetic and visionary pastor of an unusual type of church, what we in the UK would describe as a "Fresh Expressions" church (now do you get the title?), a whole church called Paradise Outfitters based around reaching, evangelising and discipling the outdoors community. Brandon, a former youth pastor in a number of Southern Baptist churches, started the church with just a handfull of others 5 years ago, and now it has a weekly attendance of 300 and a community of about 400 who meet across three services, two on Sunday and one on a Thursday evening.

 

After a tour of the local Bass Pro shop (an angler's dream- I could walk around it all day, spend nothing and still feel I'd had a great day out .... several floors, brilliantly set out, thousands of rods, loads of terminal tackle, reels, lures etc, bass boats, guns), we settled down for a serious conversation at an ice cream parlour. (we'd eaten steak earlier in the day- it's tough work this sabbatical thing!)

 

 

I've already over-used the word "community" in this post, but advisedly so. The whole concept of "Paradise Outfitters" is based around the idea of creating community. The church building has its own archery range, which is open an hour before the meal which precedes the service. A note on the archery range: I fired three arrows, the first missed the target, the second was a bullseye, the third also hit the target, and then I "retired" from archery at the top of my game. Now for the bad news- Brandon took a photo of me posing with my bullseye shot, but when I got back to the motel to download my photo's the photo hadn't come out .... there's an art to using this camera which involves a slow and sustained finger pressure on the button - "gutted", and then some!

 

Paradise Outfitters is intentionally evangelistic, and is proving very succesfull in reaching people who more conventional American churches struggle to reach. I'm not saying that most of the congregation would think that a "split infinitive" could be fixed with duct tape, but they are, in the main, good, honest, hardworking blue collar workers, many with no church background, who dress for church like they dress for any other day of the week, in contrast to the Sunday-best, "suited and booted" Southern Baptists or Assemblies of God crowd. The church is also deliberately not over driven by its program, keeping things simple and organic, weekly services, once a month youth event, no Sunday School, a yearly kids fishing camp (under the "Hooked for Life"  banner) and occasional mission trips and other ad hoc activities. What they do have is a series of archery leagues in the week, which enable them to create a large fringe of contacts to befriend and invite to services.

 

 

This evening I attended one of their services. (the picture above is of the "Welcome Desk") The worship space has an outdoorsy "feel", lots of taxidermy on the walls, a fantastic log cabin made by a church member and a rustic looking cross, as well as fishing and archery paraphenalia on the walls.

 

 

After the archery (did I tell you earlier that I got a bullseye second shot? ...... oh, sorry, I did...), there was a meal, and then we were into the worship. I did a quick interview with Brandon, and was well received by the congregation (I hope they were laughing with me and not just at my accent!), and then we were into three worship songs that would have been recognised by English churchgoers.

 

 

 

 

After the singing, Nathan, also a former youth pastor, now an intern at the church, preached a hard-hitting, simple to understand evangelistic sermon on John 3:16, which was followed up by a response song, a closing prayer, after which the archery range opened up again, and people stayed for ages to talk and hang out together. Two little boys, both fans of "River Monsters", chatted to me because I talk like Jeremy Wade, and everyone was friendly. It was probably the first church I've ever been in where most of the congregation were more tattoo'd than me and was a fantastic snapshot of a very different expression of church, and a very encouraging and uplifting evening. I'm not sure that it's a directly replicable model of church, because we in the UK don't have the same kind of multi-disciplinary outdoorsman/outdoorsperson identity (these guys fish, hunt with guns, hunt with bows, camp, back-pack- it's a whole way of life), but there was lots to be learnt from spending time with them. They were also very supportive of the plan to create an angling ministry in the UK, and wanted to keep in touch and do anything they can, in the future, to help.

 

Original and unique, and a good place to end my American outdoors Christian adventure. A congregation dressed in camouflage, vest tops and baseball caps with dead animals on the walls may not be everyone's "cup of tea", but they certainly blessed me tonight, and I'll be praying for them as they seek to make Christ known in an exciting and different way.

 

Posing for the camera with some of the leaders of Paradise Outfitters.