Doug Padgett, who is the pastor for Solomon's Porch, has a wonderful metaphor for this. He says, "Do you work on the metaphor of a tree or the metaphor of a garden?" A tree has one root system and you could see an additional service as a branch coming out of the trunk of that tree. The problem is, whatever grows on that branch has to be the same ultimately -- it is just more of the same. But if you have the metaphor of a garden and you said as a church we used to only grow green beans, but now we are going to plow up a little additional territory and grow some strawberries. We are all one church, we are all one garden plot here, but now we have two crops. Then we may add a third crop. And over time, the balance of those different crops will change. But we are not in the green bean business, we are in the gardening business. I think that is a much better way to see it.

So here right now we have three different types of services. We have our Sunday celebrations on Sunday morning. We have a much more interactive service on Sunday nights that we call "Emerge." We have a Thursday night contemplative service that we call "Intermission." But those three services are intended to be primary worship experiences for different people. So people come Thursday that don't come Sundays and Sunday nights that don't come Sunday mornings.

Preaching: Does your preaching style change between those services?

McClaren: Well, I don't speak in the other services. In one I've never spoken in and in the other, very seldom. My style probably wouldn't change a lot because all three of those in our context are more or less working in a postmodern framework. But, if I were in a more traditional setting, yes, I would have to change. The problem is, I think, when people start crossing over to the other side of this transition they find it harder and harder to go back.

Preaching: Do you see anybody out there that is doing this effectively -- operating effectively on both sides of the divide, whether there are alternate services or something different?

McClaren: In every case I'm aware of, if the senior pastor or dominant leader of the church is strongly modern, he hires someone else to communicate with the postmodern audience. Where the modern senior pastor learns to transition, he finds out there is so much need in a postmodern world that he tends to let somebody else do the modern work and he goes on to do the postmodern work. So I don't see many that remain amphibious very long. I think I was amphibious five or seven years ago. But I have been going in this direction. Interestingly our church leaders eventually said we want to go that way. We feel that this is new territory. It is a little scary but needs to be explored.

Preaching: In your book you talk about the need to design a new apologetic. What role does apologetics play in a postmodern setting? What shape does that take, and what role does preaching play in that?

McClaren: In a modern context, apologetics is about rational evidence and rational proof and rational argument. In a postmodern setting, it is not that we are abandoning rationality but that we are realizing that as soon as we get into argument in any kind of hostile way, we seem to invalidate our message to postmodern hearers. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Some of it is very cultural in America. I think 1968, Kent State, the Vietnam war -- the baby boomer culture reached a point where we thought bitter argument is so dangerous, and people get hurt and people die because of it. I think in our hearts we sort of moved to being somewhat repulsed by that kind of head-to-head argument.