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John Morehead of Sacred Tribes and co-author of Encountering New Religious Movements interviewed me on his blog– this is the first of what may be a few…

I went down last week and served as part of a panel on the Emerging Concerns Course before the National Pastor’s Convention in San Diego. There were six of us — three pastors, three professors, and Tony Jones as MC. How it worked — a pastor would present, followed by questions, comments by three professors, and later the audience. Next, a professor would present, followed by three pastors, and later the audience. It was a good format. The pastors, Doug Pagitt, Dan Kimball, and John Burke, all had fairly different churches in different parts of the country. The professors, LeRon Shults (theologian) Scot McKnight (New Testament) and me (missiologist) all had different perspectives as well. So, it was a good mix.
    The audience was not made of Emerging Church people  — ECers were the exception. I would say it was made up primarily of those in traditional churches trying to make sense out of the movement. I would say most came to learn from these emerging church people. The tone was really positive, even though, at times, there may have been real difference of opinion (over terms such as fundamentalism, foundationalism, conversion).

Strengths of a gathering like this include getting a fairly quick onramp to new forms of church perspectives. The weaknesses are the same — too quickly does one get into thick traffic — not able to figure things out one lane at a time –  So many of our responses would have benefited by longer discussions, yet, always we needed to move on…

One thing I observed from our time together —
These conversations consist of traditional church staff, asking questions to former church staff (ECers), how to do what they do without leaving church staff.

The questions to the emerging church people are always about ‘how to do this without leaving my church’. What hit me is that they are asking these questions to those who have left the church. The big challenge, in the next few years, will be to develop the stories of those emerging churches that work within existing churches. In the US, we have very few examples of these…

On a personal note, I really enjoyed meeting the other panelists — never met Scot or LeRon or John before —

I realize I posted about the first few days of the Emerging Churches class and then just stopped. The last six days went well. The class was really engaged with the material and was filled with discussions. We had several who were from Europe and others from Asia, so that added more perspective to our topics.

One of our best conversations was regarding church and consumer culture. Donald McGavran, the founder of our school, wrote that a person should not have to change cultures to find God.  Each and every subculture ought to have a community that bears witness to God, within the world of that same subculture. This witness embraces those things in the culture that bring life and refuses those things that bring death.

This student said, "Fifteen years ago, I took a church growth class, and you said I needed to create a church that looks like the culture, and that culture was the shopping mall. Now you are saying we need to create churches that are unlike the shopping mall, as these are too consumeristic — what gives?"

I don’ t know how our answer came out, but it was something like this (or should have been!):
It was okay that your church looked like the mall in the 1990s — mall-like consumers were the people who were part of your community, and that was their world, and they shouldn’t have to cross cultures to find God.  However (and here is the critique), the gospel is always ‘gift’ and operates in a different sort of economy. While the church ‘mall’ could be built, the ’stores’ could not continue to operate within the producer-consumer dialectic. Unbridled consumerism, where artificial needs are repeatedly created and then satisfied in a process of self-interested exchange, with scant attention to gospel, violates the gift economy of the kingdom.  In contrast to the anonymous meeting of spiritual needs, the benefits of the kingdom are freely given as they are shared in a Christ-following relational community.

The other thing that changed in the last fifteen years has been the growing understanding of the missional church. The church growth movement, as most other movements within Christendom, advocated an attractional (come-to-us) as opposed to a missional engagement with the culture (go-to-them). For that reason, in the 1990s, we said build the best mall you can…

Today, for missional reasons and for the critiques listed above, we no longer advocate mall-building. Unless, of course, it has a cine-plex

Recently I have had requests to help someone in a job search for a youth pastor position in an Emerging Church.  I had to respond, that, as far as I can tell, that position does not translate into the emerging church. Yes, the position exists in the large seeker- oriented church with their various youth and young adult services. However, given the high commitment in emerging churches to training within the family structure, to all-age meetings where possible, to facilitation of participation rather than creating church for ‘them’, and to flat leadership over hierarchy,  the youth pastor position does not continue into emerging churches, in the traditional sense of the term. Just as with the role of senior pastor, the role of youth pastor does not play a role in the churches of postmodernity… 

In our Emerging Church class the last two days, we explored various definitions of Emerging Churches. It has been a lively discussion. We gave a bit of our research story, and how our idea of emerging churches constantly changed as our research proceeded during the years 2000-2005. For the US scene, we continued to use our three-part rubric:

1986 — present: new church plant, single-generation churches (some say Gen-X), often very large

1994 — present: church-within-a-church, single generation church services (or youth service, young adult service) that are funded by large churches as part of their congregation, often very large

2000 — present: Emerging Churches — small, often networked, organic, Jesus-like communities (whose definition will be explored through the rest of the course).

We established this rubric because we found that people discuss these different movements as ‘emerging church’ but they are entirely different animals. As we gathered research data over a few years, these groupings became more obvious. I like to present Dieter Zander’s story as an example of this evolution with his work at New Song in 1986-1993, Axis at Willow Creek 1994-1998, and his ministry beginning in San Francisco in 1999.

So we gave a bit of the story which led to our definition of Emerging Churches. In a sense, we have three sizes to our definition — small, medium, and large, where we continue to flesh out our ideas a bit.

Small:

Emerging Churches are communities who practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures.

Medium:

Emerging Churches are those who take the life of Jesus as a model way to live (one), who transform the secular realm (two), as they live highly communal lives (three). Because of these three activities, they welcome those who are outside (four), they share generously (five), they participate (six), create (seven), they lead without control (eight), and function together in spiritual activities (nine).

Large:

In our book, Emerging Churches, we spend a chapter on each of these patterns, telling lots of stories. Hopefully these narratives will give life to our description of emerging churches…

So, as a class, we spent six hours discussing these ideas — and no one seemed to sleep through it! We will now begin to expand on these definitions through the rest of the course…

Technorati Tags: Emerging_Church, Fuller Theological Seminary

Greg Russinger of the Bridge Communities in Ventura, CA came and visited us on our second day of class. For about an hour, he told stories and fielded questions regarding the Bridge community that began in 1999. He was funny, thought-provoking, and very honest about his journey and that of his faith community. He translated their way of life into traditional church language, and he did it very well. Greg is one of the few, but the number is growing, leaders of emerging churches who did not need to unlearn many practices of church in the process of creating their faith community. More typical are emerging churches that begin with leaders who have seriously begun to question what it is church is about. It might take a few years, but there is a period of disillusionment with church-as-it-is before the creation of a community that is no longer reacting, but creating something fresh and new. With Greg, he intuits emerging church. Hospitality pervades all they do — it is urban, it is artistic, it is communal, it is prayerful, it is everyday, and it is in the world. Greg and his community do not expend energy on how to do things in a way that is different than they knew before — this is their primary understanding of ‘church’. Greg said that those in the community who have the hardest time with how they do life were those who had spent significant time in more traditional churches.

In the 1990s in the US, church leaders and scholars spent a good amount of time pondering what incarnational witness might look like within postmodernity. In many ways it seemed like an impossible dream. In this decade, however, we see indigenous postmodern communities being birthed in places all over the globe, and they look a lot like what is happening in the Bridge…

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It was great to start the class — maybe 35 of us working through the material…

A very rough guesstimate of our students might be:

Pastors, mission leaders, youth pastors, those concerned with church growth and/or connecting to the youth — 40%

Curious, concerned, or those desiring to learn more about the Emerging Church itself — 40%

Those who are disillusioned with church as we know it — 20%

Interspersed among these were artists seeking to connect with culture…(maybe 5 to 10% of the class). And of course, many could put themselves in multiple categories, but this is how they described their primary reason for attending…

I found that these Emerging Church topics, in any venue, invite many questions, and this class is no exception…I feel like Eddie and I talked too much — but hopefully that will change as we move into the rest of the week.

A word to those outside the class who want to visit our class blog and individual blogs — by all means you are welcome!!

Technorati Tags: Emerging_Church, Fuller Theological Seminary