Logos in Atlanta is another such missional/incarnational community. Church planter Danny Presten, on staff at the six-thousand-member First Baptist Church of Atlanta for six years, sensed God was leading him to plant a church in downtown Atlanta among its various subcultures.

 

Presten's initial idea was to rent a storefront property, put together in his words a "cool worship band and cool speaker" (himself), and "people would come. They just weren't going to church because it wasn't cool enough-I thought," Presten said.

 

Presten found out by talking to people in the area that downtown residents weren't interested in going to any church and weren't really all that interested in Christianity, either. They had heard it all before and might have even given the cool versions of church a try. "We figured out that all the attractional stuff might draw transfer Christians and eventually their Christian friends because it was a little cooler than their church. But that's not why we came here.We're here to reach lost people."

 

So Presten shifted his strategy to renting a storefront and staging different events every night that would attract the different subcultures-skateboarding competitions for the skaters, poetry readings and concerts for the artists, etc. Presten's place would be where the various subcultures of people wanted to hang out and a church would eventually result. That, too, ended up to be flawed thinking, according to Presten.

 

"We started looking for storefront property and realized all those things were already going on around us," he said. "There was already a skating place where they had competitions all the time. There already were three concert venues on one block. Did we really need a fourth that was owned by a Christian? It finally hit us that we needed to get involved in those cultures that were already going.

 

Instead of owning our own place and trying to get people to come there, we needed to go to those venues already in place and be Christ there." Incarnational and missional-even though Presten really hadn't heard those words and wouldn't have called it that at the time. "We just saw it as the church going out and living like missionaries," he said.

 

Stetzer, Ed (2006-05-01). Planting Missional Churches (pp. 164-165). B&H Publishing. Kindle Edition.