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>> 89 5 Purpose Driven Places Small Performances in Big Churches To be known. To know and be known by the people you’re calling your “church family.” Church family is a very intimate word. But if you’re just talking about the people you’re sitting with in the pew when you’re all dressed up fancy then that’s not a church family in my mind anymore. “Mary,” Saddleback Church Small Group Member To know Saddleback Church is to belong to a Saddleback small group. On a warm early evening in August, I idled my car in front of a well-kept, classical suburban “snout house.” I was parked across the street, directly opposite the house’s three-car garage. The front door was tucked well behind the garage and only slightly behind a modest living room window, curtains drawn. No other cars were parked nearby, but I was sure this was the house where the small group was hosted. It was 7:00 p.m., and the meeting should be starting now.1 A little after seven a large Chevrolet Suburban pulled into the driveway with a young mother and a daughter. They jumped out and headed inside. A minute later a minivan pulled up and dropped off two teenage girls who hurried into the house without a knock. Another minivan pulled into the driveway ; a family poured out and rambled through the front door, again without a knock. This must be the place. I knocked on the front door. I heard several more people talking than I saw come through this door—perhaps they live so close they can walk? Who 90 > 91 at the heart of this model. While the Saddleback church campus is the site of a dizzying array of worship venues, hang-out spots, children’s programs, community education events, and Bible study classes, church life at Saddleback is as geographically decentered and fragmented as its postsuburban environment. One of the first things a new member at Saddleback learns is that “a Christian life is built on relationships” and that these relationships are best built and nurtured in small groups, typically consisting of between six and twelve individuals, that do not meet on the church campus but are dispersed to meet weekly in members’ homes. And the next step for a committed new member at Saddleback after joining a small group (and thus spending more time per week in Saddleback-related activities outside of campus than on campus) is to join a short-term mission trip for lay members to Africa, Latin America, or South Asia. The more committed one is to Saddleback, the more geographically dispersed his or her religious life becomes. From the opposite perspective, Saddleback pastors design services and programs at the central campus explicitly to attract the unchurched “crowd.” The concentric circles of commitment at Saddleback are spatially inverted in much the same way that postsuburban theorists have inverted the concentric ring model of the Chicago School (see chap. 3). As with postsuburbia, the center of Saddleback is no single center at all but rather an array of dispersed nodes, each one located in a member’s heart and home, with its own unique periphery. According to Steve Gladen, Saddleback’s small groups pastor, more people attend Saddleback small groups in an average week than attend the weekend services. It is not hyperbole then when he and other pastors say that small groups are the foundation for everything else Saddleback does. From a sociological perspective, this makes sense. Small social groups can construct and maintain what Peter L. Berger calls “plausibility structures”—tightly bound, locally shared systems of meaning—easier than large groups, and thus the intense, intimate, and personal religious experiences that would tie disparate individuals together into a religious community would be best inculcated in small cell groups.2 But such religious communalism only represents one side of the dynamic tension at the heart of evangelicalism. The other pole is characterized by a longing to reach out, connect with, and transform the outside world. This can be seen in the ideal religious so-called time budgets of many Saddleback members: one’s week would consist of daily personal quiet time, a weekly small group meeting, and finally the weekend service. Sociologically, these can be placed on a spectrum from internal, pietistic, withdrawn religious experience to expressive, outgoing, evangelistic worship . Geographically, however, this evangelistic reaching out is a centripetal, 92 > 93 Several recent studies of evangelical Protestantism have noted...

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