  Wow! My Rachel is quite the writer, isn't she? If you have not been to her blog you really must visit it at urlLink www.rachelstratford.blogspot.com . Of course, I have always known how awesome of a writer she is (I have hundreds of emails from her that I have saved since we met) but I am glad more people are getting to know this side of her. I read Roger Sellers reports on some emerging churches from&nbsp;around the country urlLink http://www.porticochurch.org/travel.htm &nbsp;thanks to the link from Doug Pagitt's blog, urlLink http://pagitt.typepad.com/ , and I have to tell you-he is&nbsp;right on in his reviews. My family and I have attended regularly two of the churches he reviewed, Pathways church in Denver and Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis, and we have attended The Next Level church in Denver. I found myself nodding while reading his reviews. In my opinion, he perfectly captured the essence of each of these three churches. By the way their websites are: urlLink www.pathwayschurch.org & urlLink www.Solomonsporch.com . I was one of three leaders who took about 23 high school age kids from Greenwood Community Church in the south suburbs of Denver to Juarez, Mexico a few weeks ago.
We went there to finish building a school cafeteria and other various projects. If you have never been on a mission trip, I strongly recommend it. Many of the kids went on this trip to “help others” and “do some good”-what they realized by the end of the trip is that they got out of it just about as much as they put into to it-if not more.
There were many highlights of the trip for me, but the one that stands out is hearing so many of the kids give praise to my 16 year old son Tyler. They referred to him as someone they looked up to as a spiritual leader. I could not help but begin to cry as these praises were all but sung to him during our final meeting.
What a proud moment that was for me. I cannot think of a greater compliment for a young man. Like me, Tyler has only become a Christian recently (for him, a few months ago, for me, 3 and a half years), and it seems that because of this decision being late in life we have both been spared a lot of the baggage that results from growing up in Christian home. Don’t get me wrong, we have our baggage, but we do not struggle against the “spiritual abuse” wounds of our past due to a fundamentalist and/or legalistic environment that seems oblivious to the fact that Grace, love and forgiveness are the foundations of our faith.
While on the one hand I realize that I regrettably wasted a lot of my life not following Christ, the way our parent’s generation tried to instill Christian values in my friends often times did more harm than good. I am often asked by people I meet in the evangelical world if my church (Solomon’s Porch or Pathways) is a “seekers church”. I tell them that “yes” it is seeker friendly, but most of the people tend to be people who grew up as believers and fit into one of two categories: 1) they walked away from the church because they were disgruntled and now they are coming back, or 2) They were looking for something more from Christianity than what they had experienced in there past.
Of course, seekers do often times feel more comfortable at Pathways or The Porch (or many other “emerging churches), but especially in the case of The Porch, they are not in the majority. I have witnessed the struggles due to this spiritual baggage time and time again in my friends and loved ones who grew up as Christians, and I witnessed it every night in my son’s peers during our group discussions in Mexico.
One boy stated (paraphrasing) “I am so frustrated! Who am I to believe? My mom says I need to ‘Just read the bible more’ to get closer to God, my teacher says I need to ‘Just pray everyday’ to feel closer to God. Now you’re telling me I am supposed to experience a relationship with Christ that is much more than all that?” The concept of “experiencing an authentic relationship with Christ and your community” was nearly lost on many of these kids because of what they had been hammered with for so many years by well-intentioned but misguided parents. By the end of the trip, many of them seemed closer to getting it, but I fear that as soon as they got back home they were going to lose some ground here. The kids are used to going on these trips, having an “On the Mountain Top” experience and then getting back to “reality” when they got home.
We tried to instill in them the fact that this experience they were having did not have to end. That they did not have to settle for the superficiality and seemingly meaningless relationships in the experience of their day to day lives. That their walk with Christ and in the body could be authentic and real every day of there lives if they so chose. Not that life had to be spiritually heavy every moment of every day, but that the people they chose to spend time with could be people they knew on a deeper and more authentic level. That this relationship with Christ would be a journey that would have its good and bad days and that it would be through God’s grace they would grow closer to him-not through achievements.
This seems so much easier for me and my son to grasp than those who grew up as Christians. It also seems so unfair to me that the friends I have struggle with this after having dedicated their lives to Christ at such a younger age than I did. Is it merely a coincidence that the pastors of Pathways and Solomon’s Porch did not come to Christ until later in life? The pastor of Pathways, Ron Johnson, did not come to Christ until college, and Doug Pagitt, the pastor at The Porch did not come to Christ until he was 16 if I remember right.
After a few months of attending The Porch I had this conversation Doug Pagitt that I really enjoyed our church and that I simply “got it”. He said-“isn’t that just great feeling?” I felt that way even more so after reading the book the church wrote “Reimagining Spiritual Formation: A Week in Life of an Experimental Church” (you can buy this at Amazon.com). Rachel and I moved south of Denver way out in the suburbs. We want to find a church where we can more easily be a part of the community on a regular basis, without having to drive downtown. Like The Porch, Pathways is near downtown, so we have been visiting churches in the burbs in hopes of finding the community we are in need of. After church on Sunday, as we were leaving a “not bad at all” suburban church she asked me what I thought about it. Unexpectedly I began to cry as I thought of the community experience I longed for and am so far unable to find here in “Highlands Ranch”. &nbsp; 
