Being in close proximity to Whistler, and hearing that in that village of 8000 permanent residents there were only 3 struggling churches (and one of them was a weird hybrid of Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans in the ame building), I wanted to study why that was.  What made resort communities so resistant to church planting and growth?

The abstract for the paper is this:

Church planting in the resort communities of Western Canada, with particular respect to the village of Whistler British Columbia and Canmore, Alberta face peculiar challenges. These communities share many characteristics of both typical urban and typical rural communities in their regions, but also share certain characteristics which are common between them. These create a unique planting context that is shared with other communities founded or experiencing growth through the expansion of the local tourism industry. Viewing the reported challenges and successes of local pastors provides some insight into what prospective church planters must prepare to face if they choose to pursue their vocation in such communities.

You can read the whole paper on my other blog, Confessions of a Shiftless Mind. I found the process of writing it to be really useful to my development as a one-day church planter, teaching me much about the realities of church planting, and giving me an opportunity to read a lot of books on church planting.

The paper ran about 40 pages, including title pages, contents, bibliography.  I switched the footnotes to endnotes for ease of use online.

I will make one more excuse: with a federal election in Canada coming up on October 14 and the presiddential election in the USA on November 4, there’s lots of political fodder that drags my attention away too.  But I am sure many of you are experiencing the same thing.

Heh.  I read on an economics blog speculation on how the USA would completely collapse if all the hardworking, independent, responsible, conservative people suddenly vanished.  While I don’t pretend to think that all Christians are that way, I think a larger percentage of them are, at least if they are truly following the Bible.  I half wondered as I read it, is this the reason end-times prophecy doesn’t talk about America?  Because when we’re raptured, there aren’t enough people like this left to support the social systems and the nation becomes a non-factor politically?

Anyway, I have a ton of reading to do to research this paper.  I am probably reading slower than I should.  Normally when I write a paper, I find resources and skim them until I hit upon the areas that I need to include for my paper’s subject.  Instead, I am actually reading the whole book as I know that ultimately, it will serve me better as we think about planting our own church one day.

So, currently I am chewing through the 360 page Ed Stetzer tome, “Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age”.  Although the resort community seems to be a microcosm or an ultradense monoculture of postmodernism, there is no question that the overall societal trend is towards this philosophy or worldview.  It is good stuff.  I am just looking at the “generation” question right now and he made a very good point – with postmodern cultures it is almost irrelevant to speak of ages as having anything to do with their worldview anymore.  A postmodern could be of any age and they will have more in common in that case than with anyone just close in age to them.  Limiting oneself to a “generation” will not serve the cause of Christ when it comes to these people.

I’d write more but a) I have to actually work on the paper, and b) I have to ride my bike over to get the van out of the shop.  Bye for now.