The UFO Model

Does your church follow the UFO model? That's right, UFO as in "Unidentified Flying Object". You may not have heard of it, but it's more common than you might think.

Is your church building a strange object which apparently landed in the middle of the community from another planet or time - perhaps from "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."?

Is it filled with aliens? Christians are often perceived as weird, otherworldly creatures, with little or no grasp of the actual realities of planet earth here and now...
And, of course, many of the people in the church are aliens to the community in which the UFO finds itself, as they don't live anywhere near...

And perhaps most sinister of all, the mission of many churches appears to be "The Fourth Kind" of encounter: Abduction. They seek to pluck innocent bystanders from the surrounding community and bring them back to the mothership for experimentation and preparation for departure to the far off alien land known as "Heaven"...

Shouldn't we change this model? Church should be organic. It should grow from among the local community. Church should be about people planting paradise where they live, part of God's "invasion" of the here and now, working towards His perfect forever.