church service

My thoughts have been exploring the question, should we even have a church "service" as such? Many people in Gen X -- and, I'll wager in Gen Y and Generation Indigo -- view authority figures with some distrust. My parents are satisfied with an expert's opinion; I'm more inclined to be skeptical and want to know why the expert thinks that way.

Part of me is wondering if it might not be more effective to dispense with the idea of a service as we usually know it, and base the church around the home church model used by the Chinese church. Home studies rely on the Socratic method of teaching rather than the lecture method and, as a result, are likely to be more interesting. Of course, any church needs to have such studies in order to develop the sense of church community, a solid understanding of the Bible, and so on, but I'm wondering in part if that might not be the way to go for the church as a whole.

The model we're looking at embodying turns out to be the home church. A number of reasons for it:

• No overhead. Any money that's donated goes directly to address a need.
• Strong relationships are what Gen X is looking for, not strong teaching. This allows the two to happen in tandem.
• There's a general distrust of organized religion in our generation anyway. I'll avoid the silly remark that anyone who dislikes organized religion should have no problem with any church I've been involved with, and just say that a home church is something that has no trappings of organized religion. No choir, no pastoral robes, no expensive building or anything else like that.
• Everyone should feel welcome in a home church even if they don't feel "worthy" to be in a big service or if they're from another denomination.
• Language and clothing problems automatically resolve.

The idea here is to reach a postmodern generation with little or no experience in church. Committed Christians either have to be willing to put aside their own expectations of what church can be, or need to attend a different church.