In our house church gathering yesterday, we borrowed a page or two out of Michael Frost’s book Exiles and talked about “third places”.

We began by discussing four Scripture passages, incidents in the life of Jesus: The wedding at Cana, the Samaritan woman at the well, the healing of the blind man Bartimaeus, and the time when Jesus taught the crowds by the sea by getting into a boat. By talking over these Scriptures together, we extracted a lot of insight, and we could definitely see the incarnational nature of Jesus’ ministry–that He was truly dwelling among us as He lived, taught, and healed people.

We noted that all of these incidents took place not as staged meetings or “crusades”, but they happened as Jesus just walked through life. We noted also that these all took place in public gathering places–a well, the beach, along the road, and even at a party. These places are what we call “third places”.

The “first place” for us is our home; the “second place” is our workplace. In our culture, these places are on the decline as far as having meaningful conversations with other people. With the exception of things like house church, most people, even believers, only tend to have people over to the house that they already know and like; and most people restrict the content of their workplace conversations to preserve proper decorum. But our “third places” are the places we gather to socialize, to interact, to relax, to let down our guard. Third places can take a variety of forms–a local restaurant or coffee shop, the gym, the bowling alley, a special interest club like scrapbooking–any place people get together casually outside of work or home. Third places are the most likely places to meet new people and form new, meaningful relationships.

We noted how much of Jesus’ recorded ministry took place outside of the temple and synagogues, out among the people, in third places. We talked about how third places are great places to walk out Jesus’ love among people. And we talked about how so many Christians today simply “don’t have time” to hang out in third places because the institutional church has become their third place, keeping people so busy with ongoing church-related activities that they become isolated from the very people Jesus wants us to bless.

As we talked about this, several people began to get stirred in their hearts and started brainstorming about how we could even create meaningful third places, places for meaningful interaction with people other than just ourselves. We ended by challenging one another to find ways to be present now in the existing third places around us. This is what Jesus modeled for us, and this is what He wants for us.

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Musician. Composer. Recovering perfectionist. Minister-in-transition. Lover of puns. Hijacker of rock song references. Questioner of the status quo. I'm not really a rebel. Just a sincere Christ-follower with a thirst for significance that gets me into trouble. My quest has taken me over the fence of institutional Christianity. Here are some of my random thoughts along the way. Read along, join in the conversation. Just be nice.