What the Vox “Culture Pub”™ process won’t do for you

IMN Global Network
Alex McManus
Founder, IMN and creator of Voxtropolis
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Alex McManus here. I’m writing this post in conjunction with the August 4 Issue of the International Mentoring Network news. We’re calling it the Vox Culture Pub Issue.

This post is designed to neutralize the hype. Anytime people are excited about something there will be an idealization of it. We’re excited. So let’s also be real.

This post outlines a few things the Vox Culture Pub process won’t do for you. Culture Pubs may provide a way of entry into the people group your seeking to reach with the gospel. But it isn’t magic. It only feels like magic. And, like Dr. House says in the episode where they are treating a magician for a mysterious illness and he’s trying to get the performer to reveal how he does a particular trick, “It’s way cooler to know.”

So, here’s to knowing. It is way cooler.

4 things a Culture Pub won’t do for you:

1] Culture Pubs will not build a leadership team for you

That is part of the art of leadership and leaders will do this with or without Culture Pubs. Depending on the structure chosen, leaders discover new leaders and develop them. They sustain the morale of the team. They deploy them on the mission. They numerically grow the leadership team and multiply other leaders. Culture Pubs won’t do that for you.

2] Culture Pubs will not turn people to faith in Christ for you

The art of building relationships with Christ at the center is a genius you’ll still need to cultivate. People will still need guidance and help in coming to faith and Culture Pubs won’t do that for you.

3] Culture Pubs will not meet the needs of people looking for churches

Much church planting today is about competing for Christians. Christians are a huge market and consume much in the way of Christian music, Christian books, Christian schools and Christian churches. The way many church plants are conceived and executed, the economics almost demand that they compete for Christians who may already be disposed to giving money to the church.

That means that you must compete with other churches. That’s why church planters worry so much about the Sunday program. The Christian performances must meet a certain standard if they are to succeed in the Christian market.

4] A corollary to the last point: Culture Pubs won’t build a church budget

It may build a Culture Pub budget but that’s different than a church budget. Having said that, Culture Pubs may fail — depending on how you define failure and success — for the same reasons a church plant fails. The leaders are unable to grow their core leadership teams. The money runs out. People get tired and lose interest. Internal conflicts about the purpose and mission.

So, in other words, culture pubs will not make you a Christian celebrity. Your books will not sell. Your blog will be ignored. You’ll rarely get invited to speak at Christian conferences.

Ok, now that we’ve got you interested, what will the Culture Pub process do for you?

The Culture Pub process is designed to help a motivated Christ following leader start in the world, with the world and for the world

For the Church Planter everything begins in the church. For the Culture Pub promoter everything begins in the world.

The church planting teams begins to recruit Christians and start planning to reach the world by planting a new church in which they can worship. This new church will be more pleasing to them and so, they hope, will be more interesting to their unreached friends. The Culture Pub promoters begin to recruit non Christians to realize a common dream or participate in a common passion. Any Christian who attaches must attach to that mission.

It sounds subtle and it is, but it is of profound importance.


The IMN provides a network for leaders who are stepping out of the ordinary (i.e. cool, innovative church plants, Christian cafes and coffee houses, House or organic churches) into something out of the ordinary

The key difference is that the most innovative church planters today succeed at making church more appealing. They’re still working with and for Christians. Cafes are cafes for Christians. House churches are house churches for Christians. Bible studies are Bible studies for Christians. They hope that since it’s something different, maybe unreached people will come. Sometimes unreached people do come. But all of that has been done. And, it should continue to be done. They are important.

But Culture Pubs are not in the Christian market place competing for Christians. They begin in, with and for the world.

Culture Pubs will allow you to use whatever your passion to reach those who may not yet know Christ

For example, IMN alumni have started

Cigar City, a place where men taste cigars and talk about life
Book clubs at public book stores in which the non-believers choose the books (!)
Strengths Finder events
Tables of twelve — for building relationships through dining experiences
Vox parties and Vox Culture Pubs [Side note: We’ve just started an annual World Music Jam. In 2009 it will take place in Orlando on Feb 6-7.]
Vox Art galleries and displays
House Concerts
Music video productions

[For a more complete list of possibilities]

These activities may or may not be attached to a more typical new church plant.

THE FIRST TWO LETTERS OF “PURE COINCIDENCE” ARE “CP” BACKWARDS!
The fact that “Culture Pub” and “Church Plant” have the same first two letters — CP — is a pure coincidence. It is a pure coincidence.

Coincidence because when I coined the phrase I wasn’t looking for a word that had the same two letters. Pure because my intention was for the Culture Pub process to help church planters. I wanted to help them get normal again.

The one measure, the one outcome that I was looking for this first set of Culture Pubs is, could we create a process that would put the Christ following leader in sustained contact with the very people he was trying to reach? You know, the normal people that live out here outside the church.

The idea — at least parts of it — that was conceived in my mind, was carried first by Niza and our band along with some friends in Europe. It was on that trip that the Culture Pub was born. We called the first iteration of the Culture Pub, the NIZA music strategy. We took what we learned, tweaked it and gave it a name — the Culture Pub — and made additional advances as it was carried in the USA by some of the writers who are featured in the August 4, 2009 Issue of the IMN News, but also by others. In the end the Culture Pubs delivered beyond our expectations.

Sometimes even those of us involved find it hard to believe.

I threw a Vox Party in Orlando and my friend, Dean, who was one of the first guys to get on board in the USA phase of the Culture Pub experiment, turns to me and said, “This really works.”

I found it funny because, at the time he said that, he’d already been successfully growing his Vox Culture Pub for about 18 months!

[Side note: You can find their voices on voxtropolis.com. Search “Culture Pubs.”]

My question was, can we create opportunities for better and sustained relational opportunities with unreached people? We’re approaching a “yes” answer. But there’s so much more than that that we want to accomplish. We have a lot more questions to answer and we’ll tackle them the only way we know how. Create a hypothesis and then test it. That’s what the IMN does.

What do you think?

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