Going' to NYC

Well folks, I'll be off the radar for a few days while I head to the big apple to catch up with some old friends and enjoy the bright city lights. It is a kind of pause in my life right now and a chance to let my head clear and my hair down. I've been processing a lot over the last few months and I have a new question that I wonder if anyone can help me with. In my studies of the emerging church, several "names" have been given to group the various kinds of people that might be involved in a non-traditional church. From what I can remember, they are un-churched (never having been part of any Christian community or formation) de-churched (people for whom traditional church structures are no longer working) and then you have your regular church people (ok, ok, there's no such thing as a "regular" church person, I know...). While these are helpful designations, I want to add a third group that I believe I have run into that may or may not stand on its own, or be more of a sub-group of the de-churched population. For now I would call this group the nominally-churched people. People who have grown up with some kind of Christian background, but seem to lack any kind of consistant exposure to the faith. What I hear when I talk to people who fall into this sub-category is a willingness to talk about God, but difficulty in articulating an experiential sense of God, or understanding of where God might be in his or her life.
A pattern that seems to be emerging is that while there is an understanding of the existence God, and a deeply held sense of who God is to the individual, there does not seem to be a relationship there that goes beyond the thinking part (which is probably a hang-over from the modern church). There is also no sense of community either--like a sense that their relationship with God could or should have an affect on all their other relationships. Now, I don't want anyone to think that I am judging these people to be bad or lost or stupid or anything really negative like that. My question is really more along the lines of how one can bring these individuals, who are very sincerely and really quite interested in God, into a conversation where one can begin to sort through perceptions and misconceptions without leaving these individuals feeliing as if something is being taken away from them or that they are being force-fed theology. Because it seems to me to be one thing to share Christianity with someone unfamiliar with it, and quite another to chat with someone who has a little knowledge, but not enough to have, shall we say, a personal faith narrative?

I don't know exactly, but I ask these things because I want to have these important conversations with people, not be threatening, and figure out how to work into a world that, theologically speaking, is very different from the seminary world I have inhabited for the last three (nearly four) years.