In your latest book, Wild Goose Chase, you hold the view that our lives with God should be an adventure. What part does community within the Body play in this adventure?
Well, I think life by yourself isn’t much of an adventure. I’m going to preface this by saying this: I would like to think that when I pronounce the Benediction at the end of our services, I am sending dangerous people back into their natural habitats to wreak havoc on the enemy. That really is the DNA of the book—that we’re about being on mission, and that’s part of the adventure of living for Christ. To me, the greatest adventure is God inviting us into this thing called the Great Commission—how He didn’t call us to do something on our own. God loves the adventure of doing things together, and in the same sense, the greatest joys in life are things that bring us closer together with one another. For example, I’ve got 100 life goals, and a lot of those goals involve other people. I want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, but I don’t want to do it by myself; I want to do it with one of my kids. Or, I want to run a triathlon with one of my kids—there’s something about doing something together that synergizes the entire experience and makes it more adventurous.
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Can you talk a little bit about the idea behind your unconventional church locations?
I went into church planting with a traditional mindset: meet and rent a facility so we can buy or build a church building. And then we started meeting in Union Station and realized that you can’t build a Union Station. I mean, 25 million people pass through Union Station every year; it’s the most visited destination in D.C. We have food-court restaurants, great movie theater screens—and not too many churches have their own subway system. It is the perfect set-up. At some point, doing church in the marketplace became part of our DNA, so movie theaters are not short-term rental options for us. They’re our long-term strategy. Our vision is to meet in movie theaters and Metro stops around the D.C. area. That’s kind of the theater side. We also own and operate the largest coffeehouse in Capitol Hill, and we get asked a lot, “Why would a church build a coffeehouse?” The reason behind it is that Jesus didn’t just hang out at the synagogue; Jesus hung out at wells. Wells were not just a place to draw water; they were natural gathering places in ancient culture. Coffeehouses are our postmodern wells.
We wanted to create a place where church and community could cross paths. If we would have built a church, I don’t know how many people in our neighborhood would have gotten excited. When we said we were going to build a coffeehouse, we became heroes in our neighborhood. We have free Wi-Fi; we have a place where people can hang out, have a conversation and get a great cup of coffee. And, hopefully, they’ll land at one of our Saturday night services or one of our events, and we’re finding that that’s exactly what’s happening. It is really cool being in the marketplace and feeling like the message is getting out because we’re rubbing shoulders with people every day.
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