Church at the Pub

CT Studd, a hero of mine, once said:

Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell, I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell

Last year, while watching stand-up comedy at a pub in Glebe, I couldn’t help noticing that stand-up venues would make a great venue for church. They are a comfortable and relaxed, have good facilities (food, drink and amenities) and are natural meeting places for people in our city. They are  setup so that all the chairs, couches, stools and tables face a small stage from which a person speaks for 30 minutes. Perfect!

At the same time as this began to dawn on me, I heard about Guy Mason who planted a church in the James Squire Brewhouse in Docklands, Melbourne. It surprises me that so few churches have used pubs as a venue for church planting. Well not really. A columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote:

A paper prepared by the NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service for the 2003 NSW summit on alcohol abuse outlines the costs: alcohol played a role in 50 per cent of cases of domestic violence and sexual violence, 37 per cent of road injuries, 44 per cent of injuries resulting from fire, 47 per cent of assaults and 16 per cent of child abuse cases. It was a factor in more than one-third of homicides. More than 3600 people were dying each year from alcohol use and about 72,000 were hospitalised. The last time it was calculated at the end of the 1990s, alcohol misuse cost the community $7.5 billion a year.

Christian’s hate the abuse of Alcohol and the harm it inflicts on the innocent, so we reject pubs as a place to be used for by Jesus to build his church.

I am a fan, however, of the three-fold approach to engaging culture: reject what is evil, receive what is good, and redeem what is broken/lost. Though we lament and reject Alcohol abuse, we seek to redeem its use in moderation, receiving it as a good gift from God to his world. Hence, hold church in a pub may be a good way to begin to redeem something which is so often abused.

The last two Sunday nights I visited two pubs between the City and Bondi.

The first was The Light Brigade in Paddington. It  was almost empty at 9pm when we visited one Sunday night. The girl behind the bar said that its quite a slow season for pubs at the moment. She said their upstairs bistro is not open on a sunday night, but is able to be rented during the week. I told her my plans to plant a church in a function room at a pub and she said some pub owners would like it because pubs are fairly empty on a sunday night, and at present the season is fairly slow.

The second was The Local Taphouse in Darlinghurst. This pub surprised me, because despite what the bar lady said at The Light Brigade, this pub was packed on a Sunday night with Stand-Up Comedy downstairs, and a busy upstairs restaurant and bar. This pub defineately wins the points for the best range of Beers on tap, and for being very artistic birdcages hanging from the roof.

Over the next coming months I will be joining a group of young guys who are dreaming to creatively transform the City with the story of Jesus. Please join us or pray for us.

Because the tomb is empty.