The Christian ghetto culture is a well-known phenomena and constant nuisance (or personal struggle) for leaders who want their churches to connect with the big world just outside their front door.

For years I’ve heard leaders moan about the culture of church, that sucks a new follower of Christ into church and leaves them with zero connection to people who don’t know Jesus.

I’ve also heard Christians who want to engage, want to take initiative but have no idea how to connect, how to find people and when they put on an event (invariably in their church building) few to none, show up.

What a joy, then, to discover meetup.com It is a simple idea, it is a directory of events. You have an interest and you create a group and then anyone interested in that same subject can come to your meetup and straight away you have someone new to talk to about something you both have already said you’re interested in. Genius.

It is  an absolute gift for church planters who arrive in a new city and know almost no-one. This makes it so easy to try things out until you have friends.

For example, this week in Stockholm there are 117 meetups happening from sport, coding stuff, just having a coffee somewhere, language learning, book and film clubs and everything else. Everything else that is except for anything about Christianity. Has anyone tried running an Alpha through meetup? If so, get in touch.

Obviously the bigger your town or city, the more likely this is to be useful to you, but it’s just been made so easy to find a group of people with whom you have at least one guaranteed point of connection, and whom you can be among to be friends, meet people and love and serve them, while doing something you enjoy. Evangelism not as an extra but as part of life. All part of trying to live missionally.

Honestly, why has no-one said anything? How did I miss it for so long?