On the Faith & Leadership website, writer Lynn Gosnell offers a report on The Loft coffeehouse, an innovative missional community near San Antonio, Texas.

The Loft isn't just a coffeehouse, of course. It is also a church. The Loft is a core ministry of Riverside, a church community planted six years ago by San Antonio's Alamo Heights United Methodist Church. The church plant started with the coffeehouse, and eventually grew to include a food bank, thrift store, and a resource centre for the needy - and this was all before it held its first Sunday worship service. Now Riverside holds two services each Sunday with about 500 people, but there is no formal membership, and it owns no buildings, preferring to rent.

"Customers might not know that this is a church," said Tami Piatnik, who works on Saturdays. Indeed, The Loft displays few crosses or other signs of its affiliation with the United Methodist Church.

The Loft officially opened in early 2004, and it wasn't long before it became the meeting place the planters had envisioned, playing host to all sorts of people from the community. It was more than a year after the founding that they began Sunday services. "What we've found is what works best is a more organic way of life, where things are birthed spontaneously within the community," said Linda Marceau, a prayer leader with the church plant. "We're a very close-knit community, very familial."

Rev. David McNitzky, one of the original church planters of Riverside, says this set up "speaks to our point that accountability is through relationship more than rules and policies.... There's a longing here for transition for the church as a whole. From traditional, to contemporary Bible churches, to all these structures that are an organic way of doing church."

Rev. Scott Heare, the leader of the initiative, says the challenge "is how to lead during a dramatic transition in the church's history. How do you lead from the ideas of the traditional church that are so comfortable into an entirely new way of being churched?"

Read the full article on "The Coffeehouse Church" here.

Jesse is a 29-year-old Presbyterian, recently graduated from an Anglican seminary, and now writing for The United Church of Canada. Naturally, he's a little confused, but the Internet is a source of comfort.