namahatta.org - Congregational Development Ministry

The Telegraph reports that the Catholic Church in Italy is planning to follow the summer exodus of it's flock to the country's beaches by setting up a hundred foot long inflatable church at Molise on the Adriatic coast:

The 100-foot-long church will be set up on Saturday and is to be manned by a team of priests waiting to hear confession, give mass and sing holy music.

"There will be four or five people singing, with music about God," said Chiara Facci from the Catholic group Sentinelli del Mattino, which is putting up the blow-up church.

Read a brief article on this.

Keep your finger on the pulse. It's happening everywhere. Hippy was the cultural context of the 60's and 70's. Emergent is part of the contemporary cultural context.

Play to the terrain.

Orthodox at the core. Innovative at the edge

This is the account of an email exchange, starting in 2004, between Kaunteya Prabhu and Dayananda Prabhu about the organized and successful way Jehovah's Witnesses engage their congregation in book distribution and contact preaching. Through the PAMHO conference "Nama Hatta (Congregational Dev.) Forum," Caitanya Mahaprabhu Prabhu from ISKCON Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat, finally picked up the idea and implemented it successfully in his preaching area:

Inspired by this email I started Bhagvad Darshan in Gujarati. I used congregation devotees for all kinds of management, all voluntary service. We started BTG with 2,000 subscriptions; then, the next year 6,000, and now, in 2008, we have 17,000 subscriptions. You mentioned one point, that we were behind because our leaders didn't know the potential power of our congregation.

 

Here's a blog post of a devotee's first-hand experience at one of the new megachurches, Planet Shakers in Melbourne, Australia.

Wikipedia: Planetshakers City Church (formerly Melbourne City Church) is a Pentecostal Christian church affiliated with Australian Christian Churches, the Assemblies of God in Australia. The church started when the Planetshakers band and ministry moved to Melbourne in 2004, and currently meets in hired auditoriums throughout Central Melbourne. The church is pastored by Russell and Sam Evans and has attendance nearing 3000, ...

by phanisvara das

Founded By Andy Stanley and five associates in 1995, North Point Ministries has grown to over 17,000 members who attend worship services at three satellite campuses: North Point Community Church (Alpharetta, GA), Buckhead Church (Atlanta, GA), and Browns Bridge Community Church (Cumming, GA). In addition there are a dozen or so "strategic partners," using North Poing sermons and material in their programs, often started by ex-North Point staff.

According to www.thechurchreport.com, Stanley was voted 13th most influential Christian in America in 2006, and North Point Community Church 3rd most influential church. That's quite a bit of success, and Sitapati Prabhu, who visited Buckhead Church recently, has been impressed, too:

by Manohara Shyam das

I'm using this title because I think it is very meaningful. The web site I visited this week has this name and encourages youth not to be ashamed of spiritual life. This Christian project started in 2002 in Auckland, New Zealand in the Howick Baptist Church, under the care of pastor Andrew Whitehead.

The main communication channel is email; they utilize a very dynamic way of communication that includes devotional thoughts, links to 'cool' web sites, humor, quotes, etc. Just as we do, they have study guides for the bible, specially for young people, and they are planning to write four series of fiction-novels, targeting young teenage girls. (I'm not so sure about this part ...).

On the other hand, Andrew Whitehead tours all the churches under his care twice a month, so he can maintain close relationship with the youth community and get feedback of what's going on.

by Kaunteya Das

I am reading The Rise of Christianity, by Rodney Stark; "How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries" and I am planning to jot down considerations and reflections as they come along. In fact I only just finished the first chapter, but I already found considerable stimuli for further exploration, especially regarding the dynamics of expansion of Lord Caitanya's movement in general and of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in particular.

In his career Rodney Stark, professor of sociology and comparative religion, seems to have always focused on studying religious groups. I wouldn't be surprised if the faithful of any tradition (including Vaisnavism) would raise their eyebrows in suspicion and alarm at hearing that a social scientist (especially a non-practitioner) might attempt to gain insights on the processes of conversion, which they, in unshakable, implicit conviction, might consider as pure and exclusive manifestations of the Divine interlinking on the human plane, processes thus beyond the reach of rational sociological analysis, quantification or intellectual explanation. A more accurate research, though, reveals that great spiritual teachers (and in this writing I will focus on Srila Prabhupada, the Fouder-Acarya of ISKCON), may have closely observed sociological trends in chalking out their strategies for diffusion and in instructing their followers on how to effectively proselytize.

Some time ago Kaunteya prabhu sent me an article from CIO Insight, an online-magazine offering "Strategies for IT Business Leaders". I quickly glanced over the article and wrote back, saying I didn't think it was particularly relevant to our mission.

In the beginning the author elaborates on the use of fancy high-tech gadgets by mega-churches, christian community-churches that attract an audience of more than 2,000 per week, to produce sermons that remind you of the presentation of rap-, pop-, or rock-superstars, depending on your age.

I don't like all that show-biz and think that if you took away the glamour from these mega-churches, there would remain very little of substance. But reading Sita-pati prabhu's article on the subject, and some of his earlier, related writings, I started to think again.

From economist.com I thought of sharing this because it provides insights in a number of fields: how big are the Christian organizations (and, by comparison, how small we still are), how congregations can help in marketing preaching materials, and how, in this world, even the most materialistic corporations can develop a soft corner for spiritual or religious contents if it helps them make money (and our propagation can plug into this tendency). Sharings welcome.

Your servant, Kaunteya Das

Article continues.