Saturday, September 5, 1998

Church planter recruits the cutting-edge nomads and 'cultural creatives'

By Deborah Kovach Caldwell

The Dallas Morning News

Andrew Jones is an evangelical Christian with a quirky mission. He collects hippies and goths, metal heads and technokids and helps them build church homes in the most peculiar places.

The Tenderloin district in San Francisco. Haight-Ashbury, ground zero of the counter-culture. Austin's club scene.

"I have a heart for people who are different, especially people who aren't in the modern church scene," said Jones, 34, who stopped in Dallas recently.

These are the people -- usually young adults, but not always -- who distrust mainstream culture and media, value egalitarianism and art and refuse to conform to society's conventions. They sometimes live on the streets in tribal groups delineated by what they wear and eat and what kind of music they like. They like to gather at secret all-night parties.

"The traditional modern church isn't attractive to them. They don't have the same value system," Jones said. "But if you go back to Jesus' time, he found the same kinds of people -- the tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers and sinners."

When these people want to form spiritual communities, he said, "We shouldn't make them jump through a bunch of cultural hoops. We can worship Jesus with their music and at their hours. God is willing to meet them where they are."

In today's world, Christians have good reason to seek out these people, even if they will never walk into a church: Because the music they listen to, the way they dress, their artistic taste and their world view will someday be part of mainstream culture. And what touches them, strange as it seems to the rest of us now, could well work for mainstream Christians in a decade or so.

Brad Sargent, a project developer at Golden Gate Seminary in Mill Valley, Calif., said Jones is one of the few people able to understand this confusing new culture.

"We have a significant change in the ways that the generations are behaving," said Sargent, who is writing a book about Jones' ministry. "We have a shift in world views from a sequential and logical way of thinking to a woven, interconnected world view. And we have what some people call blur, meaning that the rate of change is accelerating.

"The avant-gardes, the cultural creatives -- they're the harbor lights of what is coming to shore in the future," Sargent said. "Andrew reaches these people."

Jones understands these cutting-edge nomads because in some senses he is one.

In his early teens, he moved from New Zealand to Australia with his three siblings, mother and father, a visionary special education teacher. Before long, he had become an evangelical Christian working with alcoholics and the homeless. At 21, he bought a one-way ticket to Europe and joined a missionary ship, where he met his wife, Debbie, an American.

He and his wife started their mission work in Portland and then moved to Vancouver, where he worked as an outreach pastor. He liked the work, but it wasn't enough. In 1995, they sold most of their possessions and found their way to San Francisco.

There, they moved into an apartment in Haight-Ashbury with their three children (a fourth arrived this year) and proceeded to meet the neighbors: The goths, with their black clothing and death infatuation. Hippies, with their natural clothing and vegetarian foods. The technokids, with bright colors and rave dances. Metal heads, with their Satan fixation. And punks, with spike jewelry and mohawk hairdos.

Early on, they held a party in Golden Gate Park for the punks. Jones bought bread and a big hunk of beef and called the celebration "Kill the Beast." Then they told the gospel story of the prodigal son who comes back to his family after leaving for a long time -- a tale that probably echoed the stories of many of the punks in attendance.

They also held a party for the hippies. That one was called "The Table" and featured a vegetarian meal and a discussion of Jesus' Last Supper.

Over time, Jones said they set up a community center where they held Bible studies and distributed food to poor and homeless people; reinvigorated a storefront church on Haight Street that had dwindled to a handful of members; held Bible studies called "Spirit Candy" in his apartment; and led weekly Christian leadership training sessions in a coffee shop.

Such loose ministry networks are the church's future, he said.

"The postmodern church structure will look more like cyberspace," Jones said. "We had multiple ministries all related to each other through strategic relationships and alliances, as opposed to the modern structure with a centralized headquarters."

Jones also opened a club and produced all-night rave worship parties, complete with smoke machines, special lights and Christian "house" music -- music mixed together by disc jockeys with an intense, pulsating beat.

Many nights, clubgoers slept on their apartment floor, mohawks poking up from the carpet -- which led to some weird morning scenes when the children came out for breakfast.

Jones' son, Samuel, who was 5 then, dyed his hair blue and wore zoot suits. His daughter, Elizabeth, who was 3, dyed her hair pink.

Eric and Linda Bergquist now run the Haight-Ashbury community center and continue feeding several hundred people a day.

The secret to Jones' success is that he "reads the edge before anyone else," said Linda Bergquist. "The people who do an effective job at this kind of ministry are only a step away from the culture they're trying to figure out, and he's really a step away from being a gypsy himself."

Next year the Joneses plan to move to Australia to do similar work. In the meantime, the family is spending a few months in Austin, Texas creating new spiritual communities and helping to start rave worship there.

Jones plans to open a Sixth Street rave club called Ecclesia that will include a quiet haven with ambient music and tranquil slides. It will be open from midnight to 5 a.m. At 3 p.m. Sunday (Sept. 6) he'll hold his first gathering at the club, which will feature music, food, poetry and drama.

"We see an urgent need to reach this culture," said the Rev. Dale Gore, executive director of the Austin Baptist Association, which is financing Jones and his ministry.

He said Austin has scores of such alternative people -- students, drifters and people who hold part-time jobs but spend most of their time at clubs and coffee houses.

"They look like they could be a replica of the sixties, but they're a step above that," he said. "They're not into drugs as much. They're not high into alcohol either. New Age ideas captivate them. And when it comes to religious activity, they seem to like the liturgical approach to worship because they like the symbolism. But they shy away from the buildings because they like to create their own environment."

Somewhere in the midst of this emerging culture is the church of the future, says Jones -- because what conventional Christians consider hip today is passe among the people he meets.

So in the coming years, don't count on those "seeker-sensitive" mega-churches with the low-stress sell and the bopping Christian music, he said. Don't even count on a concert or comedy scene.

Nope, he says. The Christians of the future would never consider any of that.

They'll be club-hopping and partying.

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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