VANCOUVER, BC-The traditional church needs to get back to basics if it wants to evangelize a post-modern world, participants at a major church planting congress were told.

"To use Jesus' metaphor of the wine and wineskins, people still have a taste for the wine. But we have problems with our containers," said Glenn Gibson, director of church revitalization ministries for Outreach Canada, which hosted the three-day gathering at First Baptist Church.

"We've got to discover new wineskins. Some churches are going to need to undergo a radical change-if that's possible."

Eddie Gibbs, professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, echoed that theme. In a keynote address, he said the church needs to rediscover the simple "reproducible" model of the first and second centuries.

"We need to travel light," he said. "Movements move. We've got to learn to move today."

Gibbs says God is already "doing a new thing" not only within existing church traditions, but outside them as well through the "emerging church."

Evidence of this phenomenon, he says, is to be found in his native England, where the movement "is increasingly mainstream, because the structures are beginning to crumble."

Gibbs gave several examples of small churches that have sprung up in cities in both the United Kingdom and the U.S. where-just as in the early years of the church-worship typically takes place around a table during the course of a meal, often in a restaurant or a pub.

"We are there to share with joy and enthusiasm that which means so much to us. We're always just glancing sideways and making room, because there are lots of lonely people out there," he said.

"And in the context of the meal, the bread is broken and the wine is blessed. It can be powerfully evangelistic."

Gibbs says while these churches will necessarily stay small, there is still a place for the larger churches "to be a powerhouse, a resource centre, a place of celebration, and also to be a place of equipping and sending out."

In an interview with ChristianWeek, Gibbs insisted he was not ruling out an ongoing role for the traditional church.

"Amongst the aging population are many people who experienced as much change as they can emotionally handle," he said. "You can't inflict more change, especially if your spouse has died, the kids have left and your one remaining anchor is the church tradition in which you have grown up."

Whatever forms these emerging churches take, says Gibson, all are characterized by leaders who are willing to take risks.

"There's grace to try and to succeed, but also to fail," he said. "Those kinds of situations, I think, are the places that ultimately thrive. They've muddled their way through to the answers to their community."

Veteran Vancouver-area church planter Tom Tan agrees. "We need to recognize that the emerging church is a very viable model," he said.

But Tan doubts that denominations are willing to encourage emerging churches because it would mean loosening the purse strings and less accountability-while few churches know what to do with people who believe God has called them to plant churches.

"I believe that we must learn to empower, equip and release people for church planting," he said. "We must recognize their gifts and launch them.

"But the sad fact is that normally the local church has no vision for church planting."

What they fail to realize, Tan adds, is that many average-size churches are losing ground to the mega-churches at the one extreme and the much smaller emerging churches at the other.

"The mega-churches are like Wal-Mart. They are doing very, very well. The emerging churches are like Mary Kay or Tupperware-doing well in homes. The mainline churches are like the mom and pop stores. They are in the middle and they are collapsing."