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Emerging Churches, the book I wrote with Eddie Gibbs in 2005, was just translated into Korean! Here is an English version of the Korean web page and, here is a blown up picture. How cool is that? I really love the cover.

In talking with young Korean leaders this summer, I found out there may be up to twenty emerging churches in Seoul, all younger than two years old. Very exciting stuff.

I had the opportunity to meet with a delightful group of Fuller grads from the early 1990s. About fifteen in number, these men and women serve as PCUSA pastors and once each year they get back together. I was invited to come and chat with them about my research interests. We had a great back and forth and the two hours went by really quickly — lots of laughter throughout. I spoke on the nine patterns of emerging churches. We talked about how the emerging practices are flowing into the denominational systems as a renewal movement. We talked a bit about the move of the church into new forms of social media. A rich time…

Perhaps the question I receive most from church leaders is how to connect the insights of emerging churches to the challenges facing denominational churches. Most of the US stories in our book Emerging Churches deal with new church plants and so existing denominational leaders desire examples closer to their own tradition. When we had the opportunity to host an issue of Fuller Seminary’s theological journal, Theology News and Notes, we decided to address that very question. We titled the issue “Emerging Churches within Denominational Structures,” and we focused primarily on US churches. Spanning nine articles and twenty-seven pages, the current issue features nine leaders who create alternative expressions of faith within traditional church structures. These change agents embody transformation while working within their particular faith tradition. Here are the titles of the articles:

Eddie Gibbs and I wrote The Morphing of the Church;
Walt Kallestad, Lutheran pastor, Community Church of Joy, wrote Redefining Success, Moving from Entertainment to Worship;
Ryan Bell, pastor, Hollywood Seventh Day Adventist, wrote From the Margins: Engaging Missional LIfe in the Seventh-Day-Adventist Church;
Nadia Bolz-Weber, mission developer of a Lutheran church plant in Denver, “House for all Sinners and Saints”, wrote Confessions of a Sarcastic Lutheran;
Troy Bronsink, PCUSA pastor and community organizer in inner-city Atlanta, wrote Of Dying Breeds and Swelling Hopes: A Mainline Emergent in the Reformed Tradition;
Eugene Cho, pastor of Quest, Seattle, wrote Quest and Its Relationship with the Evangelical Covenant Church;
Phil Jackson, pastor of The House in Chicago, wrote A Reciprocal Connection: The Surprising Convergence of Hip-Hop and the ECC;
David Fitch, pastor of “Life on the Vine”, in outlying Chicago, wrote On Being an Emerging Christian in the Christian and Missionary Alliance;
Liz Rios, founder for Center for Emerging Female Leaership, and Luis Alvarez, pastor in the AG, wrote Will a New Church Emerge? Las Raices in the Assemblies of God.

You can read all the articles online. Or you could email Fuller and they would happy to send you a snail mail version free. We believe these articles demonstrate that great creativity and vitality are possible (but not inevitable) within enduring traditions.

This last spring, I had the opportunity to speak at the Association of Theological Schools “SPAN” conference for administrators. They asked me to speak about the changes in the American/British church scene that I wrote about in the book “Emerging Churches”, a book I co-wrote with Fuller professor Eddie Gibbs.

My talk addressed the need for seminaries to be transformed if they are to continue to serve the needs of churches in the Twenty-first century. As I spoke, I realized that Fuller has already made many of these changes and is well suited to partner with emerging churches in the future.

For me, the conversation on the emerging church and Fuller started in a little conference room located in Glasser Hall, one of the older converted homes on the Fuller campus, back in thee mid-nineties. About five to ten of us would have a “brown-bag” lunch weekly. Some were Masters students, such as myself, and Barry Taylor, some were doctoral students, and some were professors: Wilbert Shenk and Eddie Gibbs. The conversation always strayed to conversations about how the church must adapt in the coming few years.

Wilbert Shenk, the instigator of the meeting, suggested the subversive idea, brought over from England and Lesslie Newbigin in the early nineties, that the West functioned as a mission field: that the church ought to see its surrounding cultures in the same way as good missionaries do. Eddie Gibbs brought his deep understanding of everyday church life to the meetings; Eddie had recently penned “In Name Only”, the classic text on nominality, and was working on a subsequent book, “Churchnext”.

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Allelon just posted a video where Alan Roxburgh interviews me. In this clip, Alan asks me about the missional church, the emerging church, and about the differences between the two. I describe how I teach missional church material, and I also tell a bit of my story as well — how I became involved in the missional conversation.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, alternative worship, Emerging_Church, missional church, video

Technorati Tags: Emerging_Church, video

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of co-teaching Doctor of Ministry class with Doug Pagitt at Fuller Seminary (I’m taking the picture, Doug is in the center). It was a 40-hour one-week course (!) with a late evening thrown in (you have to have a movie night, right?). We had eight pastors for the week and really covered lots of ground together. The great thing about such a small class is you get the time to go on the rabbit-trails, tell all the (back) stories.

The content of the course revolved around three poles — the kingdom of God, the church, and contemporary global culture. Although we taught separately about each of these topics, it seems every conversation included all three, each filled with personal anecdotes from Doug and I and the eight students. Each ‘lecture’ worked out as more of a roundtable discussion than anything else. Of course, Doug’s stories were filled with references to Solomon’s Porch, and mine to my emerging churches research.

Simply what needed to be re-imagined was the church’s role in a changed world. Church, at its best, points to the reign of God. The current challenge for the church is to explore diverse global contexts (from within), look for where the kingdom is (and isn’t), point to it, get behind it, and embody it as the body of Christ. Yes, continue to be a contrast people, but from a place very much within the culture, usually in unexpected ways…

Technorati Tags: Doug Pagitt, Fuller Theological Seminary, kingdom of God

 A few weeks back I participated in an Emerging Church/Urban Church
dialogue. It goes all over the place, but it still might be worth a
listen. I tell my story of how I came to study Emerging Churches. Dan Hodge, missiologist and Tupac Shakur expert, is always
worth spending some time with…You can listen to it
here…

A friend of mine, Lance Ford, asked on his blog whether churches that look like their sending church are a problem.

We definitely have subcultures in the US, so amongst similar strata, we will have churches that look alike – this has happened throughout American history. People need to worship God from where they are, i.e. their own culture, so this is not inherently a problem. However, even with subcultural similarities, no two churches should look the same. Why is that? Any church that looks too much like their parent church runs the risk of violating the priesthood of all believers and 1 Cor.14, where everyone gets to share their gifts with one another. How so?

If churches look like their founders, despite new people joining the church, it is likely that newcomers are not included as full participants in the life of the church. Churches need to reflect those who are there. Worship needs to flow out of the particularisms of the people in the community, not just the founders. Like good missionaries, the founders must create ample space for the contribution of others; the leaders must be strong facilitators as much as they are contributors. If not, it is inevitable that the founders will be the producers, and those that come, the consumers. The result is a franchise or ‘cloned’ church. But much worse than that, the church is robbed of the gifts that are resident in each member, and they miss the chance to see the kingdom of God in their midst.