The story goes that in 1999 or thereabouts Steve Venour, the youth pastor of a Christian City Church Whitehorse, together with a few of the slightly edgy younger people from the congregation went to the elders and told them that they, these younger people, were a bit over standard Evangelical worship, and were thinking that they might like to do something a bit more culturally appropriate for Gen X (it was a little while ago of course.)
The elders said to him: Fantastic! We love that you want to incarnate the gospel for your generation! We want to give you a whole service to do it with! Go for your life! However, there are just a few little things which we'd like you to be mindful of. We obviously can't have you moving the chairs around, given that we meet in a school hall and it would be a nuisance. Or the worship - we are pretty proud of our worship team and it's a key part of our brand. Or the message - obviously you can't go messing around with that. And so on, until it turned out that Steve and his slightly edgy youngish people were allowed to put a candle on the stage, so long as they were careful not to burn the hall down.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Steve and his edgy young people weren't entirely convinced that this represented the fullest possible enculturation of the Gospel to their generation, so they set up a little congregation, still attached to CCCW, but essentially independent, which met in a cafe near Swinburne University. Rolling forward quite a few years, Cafechurch is now an independent congregation with a kind of moderator relationship with Solace EMC.
We have moved a fair way away from the church's pentecostal origins, but I think that we are still have that original desire to "be the sort of church we would like to go to" deep in our DNA, doing our best to see what it might mean to live as Jesus' people in 21st Century, post-modern, post-Christendom, even post-Christian Melbourne.
In our current incarnation, we have become the Northcote Uniting Church - Chalice congregation, as we seek to seed new Christian life in Northcote.
