Church is a party

Had a great small group this evening. We focused on why we find church important? What's the point? What are the signs you look for in a healthy, growing missional church?
We looked at Jesus' parable of the Great Feast found in Luke 14. If you break it down, Jesus is basically saying the Church should be like a party. That ran along this quote I came across a while back:

"The Church has nothing to say to the world, until it can throw better parties."

This German student that has recently been attending Eikon comes from a Catholic background, so when she got our flyer during student week that said "no perfect people allowed", she thought she'd try it out. The way we DO church is so different from what she's grown accustomed to. It was a joy to listen to her impressions and what it is about church that is important to her.

It really is an important question. I threw out a hypothetical to the group: if someone you meet around town asks why you go to church, can you give a thoughtful response? If we're going, we need to know why we're going.

If you had a clean slate, what kind of church would you create? I had a brief recollection of a year ago, when our small team was sitting in a room, actually living that out: having been called to start a church with a blank canvas. What were we going to do?