The sanctuary at Christ Lutheran Church in Lancaster is all pulpit and pews, dark wood and stained glass.
Shawn Anthony is pastor of Inner Metro Green.
Inner Metro Green holds services at Christ Lutheran Church.
Shawn Anthony said the young adults who will worship there later this month are enchanted by the look and feel and smell of the place.
"Their parents took them to these square buildings," multipurpose rooms that looked more like auditoriums or gymnasiums than churches, Anthony, the pastor, said. So those children love sacred space.
Welcome to Inner Metro Green, an innovative church plant that is breaking ground by not breaking ground.
The Brethren in Christ congregation, with about 45 in weekly worship, doesn't want to be caught up in the institutional trappings of church. No bulletins. No newsletters. No hierarchy.
Instead, Inner Metro Green has a vision of a worshiping community that pours its resources into the community beyond its doors. Leaders of IMG and of the Christ Lutheran congregation are in the early stages of discussing a possible partnership in the old red-brick church.
And Inner Metro Green, while evangelical, wants to avoid falling into culture-war traps like abortion and same-sex marriage.
Some might call Inner Metro Green "emerging." Anthony doesn't.
"It's become such a loaded term that I refuse to use it anymore," he said.
Whatever the new church calls itself, Inner Metro Green is reaching the 20- and 30-somethings whom most other churches don't.
"They don't want to be religious anymore," Jess Garland, one of the core group at Inner Metro Green, said.
"It's not about how you look, or keeping the rules. It's about a serious following."
Incarnational faithFollowing Jesus, that is.
And since Christians believe Jesus was the incarnate son of God, Inner Metro Green is striving to be "incarnational." They don't want to talk about faith so much as live it.
"We have a lot of young adults, young families, young kids," Anthony said. "A lot of [church] dropouts."
Until recently, the average age of the congregation was 27. That's the age group missing from other churches.
Bruce Epperly, professor of practical theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary, said some studies indicate only 40 percent of young people who have been baptized or confirmed remain active in church, and only 20 percent of college students "have any familiarity with church life."
"You're really dealing with the fact that churchgoing and participation in churches as we knew it is not part of the DNA of today's 20- and 30-somethings," he said.
What is part of their DNA, though, is a broader agenda than the one generally held by older evangelicals.
"They take kingdom values seriously," Anthony said of the young adults at Inner Metro Green. "Jesus is so much more to them, if we can get beyond the whole deal — I almost want to call it bipolar — of left and right."
Epperly said young evangelicals "don't get hung up as much on doctrine and, to some degree, don't get hung up as much on the culture wars."
"They aren't too excited about homosexuality; they don't want to go to the wall about abortion; they're attuned to global warming."
But, Epperly said, young evangelicals are not necessarily less conservative — simply more nuanced.
"They really do want to claim an emerging center," he said.
"Emerging" is a loaded term in evangelical circles. The word applies to a broad stream of new churches attracting the same demographic than Inner Metro Green is drawing.
Evangelical scholar D.A. Carson writes that the emerging church "arose as a protest against the institutional church, modernism and seeker-sensitive churches. ... It has encouraged evangelicals to take note of cultural trends and has emphasized authenticity among believers."
Epperly, who co-pastors a church, Disciples United Community Church, that cultivates emerging worship, describes it as "an affirmation of the past in rituals of the church with a recognition of the contemporary gifts of music and technology and the arts."
"It's not that doctrine is unimportant. But I think that many emerging traditions … who come out of an evangelical background really have seen their evangelical faith as openness to the world rather than closed to the world."
Anthony said most people who find Inner Metro Green have done so by Googling "emerging."
But some evangelicals associate "emerging" with postmodernism and mushy theology, lumping all emerging churches with the kind represented by Brian McLaren's Emergent movement.
"We find that it is too difficult," Anthony said. "Why not just live it and not use any labels?"
Anthony himself is a young-adult born-again, who fled his home in western Pennsylvania after his parents' divorce and ended up homeless and addicted to drugs in Los Angeles.
Finally, when he was down to about 100 pounds, he called his father and said, "Get me the heck out of here, Dad, because I'm dying."
Staying at a Bible school where his father was enrolled, "I had this Damascus Road sort of reconversion." He met a BIC bishop, John Hawbaker, now pastor of Manor Church, who mentored him.
"I knew I wanted to plant churches," he said, and after he graduated from Lancaster Theological Seminary last year, Manor Church helped get Inner Metro Green off the ground.
At first IMG met on the fourth floor of the Prince Street Café downtown. When the congregation outgrew that room, IMG started e-mailing city churches in search of space to share.
Christ Lutheran Church responded. For the last two months, IMG has worshiped in a basement fellowship hall, on old wooden chairs, with a tripod screen set up at the front of the room.
The church's unusual name reflects its city mission. "Green" not only stands for an environmental focus but for all the symbolism associated with the color — including being inexperienced.
"We didn't want to use just another old Greek word, or Crossroads or Community," Anthony said. "I wanted a concept name."
By Sept. 21, its official launch date, IMG will move upstairs into the Christ Lutheran sanctuary.
The Rev. John Emerick, interim pastor at Christ Lutheran, noted that his congregation, which had 600 people in worship in the 1940s and '50s, now has about 70 on Sundays.
"The reality is that our facility is considerably larger than we need," he said. "We have plenty of space for another group to come in and be there."
He and Inner Metro Green members have met with leaders of another city church partnership, between In the Light Ministries and Grace Evangelical Congregational Church, for insights on how older congregations and energetic younger ones can work together.
"If things would work out," Emerick said, "we could develop a further partnership that would be, I think, hopefully beneficial to both groups."
Simple churchInner Metro Green doesn't want to put up more bricks and mortar. Instead, the church wants to transform the neighborhood around Christ Lutheran, at the triangle of Manor, Strawberry and West King streets.
Anthony said most churches that focus on missions put about 20 percent of their budgets into mission work.
"We want to flip that," he said, and invest 80 percent into missions.
Some churches build parks on their properties, Anthony said; IMG wants to improve existing city parks. Some churches start homeless shelters; IMG wants to invest in existing shelters.
One member is a microfinancier who lends money to entrepreneurs in developing nations; Anthony would like to do the same in Lancaster, "changing our whole city in the process."
To put its money where its dreams are, Inner Metro Green avoids typical church expenses. It eschews printed bulletins and newsletters, relying on its Web site and worship presentation software to guide the service.
IMG also is trying to stay away from formal church structures like committees. It relies on strong couples "who can help steer this," Anthony said.
"We're not a full-service Christianity," he added. While junior church and a nursery are offered for young children, older kids are encouraged to be in the service with their parents. The idea, Anthony said, is to teach parents how to spiritually nurture their children, and then give those parents that responsibility.
"It's not like a show, like some churches are," Jess Garland added. Worship is informal, with Scripture readings, songs and communal prayer. There are "no smoke machines" or concert-quality worship bands.
"We want it to be simple," she said.
"The goal," Anthony noted, "is not to put down a big program that requires all our time, talent and treasure to keep it running. We want 8,000 people," like other big churches.
"We don't want to just have to keep that machine running. We want to invest back into the city."
Inner Metro Green's launch date is Sunday, Sept. 21. Worship will be at 11 a.m. Christ Lutheran Church is at 407 Lafayette St. For information, see www.innermetrogreen.com.
Helen Colwell Adams is a Sunday News staff writer. E-mail her at hcolwell@lnpnews.com.
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