The Future is Bright for RM with the Launch of Mobile Church

On April 26th, The Redemption Movement launched Mobile Church at Huntington Park, Oneonta. This is a whole new way to approach church by taking it to the people, instead of expecting people to come to us. In keeping with RM’s value of simplicity, it was a soft launch with a small turnout and not a lot of fanfare, but for the small group of RM faithful that’s been planning and praying about this Mobile Church venture since December, the small outing was filled with hope of much bigger things to come.

How Does Mobile Church Work?

Taking church to the people is a simple idea that’s in keeping with Jesus’ great commission (the basis of RM’s mission), and the format for Mobile Church is meant to make room for relationships (another RM value). This is done by opening the morning with a Bible study and worship, followed by a light lunch and an act of kindness for the neighborhood by a “kindness team.” During the AoK, another team hangs back at the meeting place (like a base camp) for the purpose of meeting and greeting new people that both teams encounter.

How Our First Mobile Church Went

The April launch date was picked with the hope that the weather would be good enough to meet outside. This particular day was a bit cool when the clouds came out and the wind picked up, but after such a long winter, it didn’t feel cold enough to call it off. Moving forward, the weather is sure to be one of the biggest challenges for Mobile Church.

One of our Mobile Church tents.

To help with this we bought some tents and we can always retreat to our River Street storefront if we need to. For our first Mobile Church Sunday, the new 10x10 pop up tent took us awhile to figure out, and there were a few other hang ups which caused us to get started at 11am instead of 10, but our group wasn’t deterred. In fact, we were expecting hang ups like this and made it a point to enjoy every moment of the launch, instead of stressing over the small stuff.

Once we were set up we sang worship songs in the park, led by my wife Laura. At first, it felt a little weird, especially when a group of students walked our direction en route to downtown. As we sang along with the first verse, I halfway expected to be heckled. Although, it didn’t take long for the world to fade away and to get lost in worship. This made for a kind of exhilarating and inspirational worship experience that you just can’t get within the four walls of the church. I look forward to more public displays of worship (PDW) with future Mobile Church outings.

The Bible study was on Luke 15 and likened the big effort of doing Mobile Church to the extra effort that the shepherd went through to find the one lost sheep in Jesus’ parable. We kept the music and the study short and sweet, due to the cool wind picking up. For future outings, we will make use of the tent walls and set these up too.

Lunch for the group consisted of $10 worth of subs from a block away (an easier solution than preparing a meal). We snacked on the subs while setting up for the act of kindness phase of the day, which was passing out free funnel cakes (one of our favorite and most delicious AoKs).

Meeting New People with Mobile Church

Doing the AoK in the same spot where we worshiped just moments before really highlighted the purpose of what we were trying to accomplish with Mobile Church. This was powerfully seen in the first person who approached us for a funnel cake, a middle-aged woman with a 5-year old at home. She was thankful for the gift and we hit it off in conversation.

Yard games are great for building relationships!

It was much easier for us to explain to the woman that we’ll be back at the park next week and she’s welcome to join us, than it used to be to try to explain to people where on River Street we’re located and what our Friday gatherings are like. The lady we gave a funnel cake to told us that her and her son will join us next week for Mobile Church, which I interpreted as a confirmation that we’re doing something right.

In addition to offering free funnel cakes in the park, I went downtown to meet people and offer to deliver fresh funnel cakes to them. I had the most success with this at The RedJug Pub (the bar we’ve been working closely with for our designated driving outreach). I got to deliver funnel cakes to the bartender and the people at the bar, and they all seemed very receptive and grateful for the gift.

Mobile Church Builds Off of Established Relationships Too

This kind of quality interaction is very encouraging and let’s us know that we’re onto something. For me, this was most clearly seen while I was in the park setting up for mobile church. While I was by myself, I was approached by 3 friends (on 2 separate occasions) that weren’t a part of our church. I got to tell them about Mobile Church and they all seemed receptive to it, one even bought me a coffee.

All three of these friends are people that I have personally invited to church events at our River Street location. In the past, even though all three of these friends acted interested in visiting my church, they never did. Now, here they are helping me set up for Mobile Church, just because they happened to be walking by and saw me, their friend, in the park.

The Value of Doing Mobile Church in Public Places

I predict that this kind of random interaction from passerbyers is going to make all the difference when it comes to Mobile Church. We never saw much interaction from passerbyers while on River Street, even if we had a free BBQ happening just a few feet from the sidewalk. This is primarily because the majority of people that walk by our River St. location (which isn’t too many), are often locked into their headphones and they don’t seem to have time to stop and chat, much less join us for a free meal.

I think Mobile Church opens up new doors of opportunity to meet new people by doing church in public places, people that we wouldn’t have otherwise met by limiting ourselves to a church building. We’re excited about doing Mobile Church throughout the month of May at Huntington Park, and as we go into uncharted territory in order to meet new people, who knows where else this mobile church idea will take us?

Truly, at the end of the day, doing church this way felt like we were doing church in the same way that people in the New Testament did church, which we view as our blueprint for church. What a pleasant surprise that doing church like they did in the Bible is actually a lot of fun!