Eddie Gibbs is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Emerging Churches at the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary and is also Professor of Church Growth there. His book ChurchNext has won a book award from Christianity Today. He has served in ministry in England, Chile and the United States. Ryan Bolger is assistant professor of church in contemporary culture at the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is also the academic director of the Master of Arts in global leadership there. Emerging Churches is the result of Bolger’s PhD research with Gibbs on a distinctively postmodern style of church emerging throughout the United States and United Kingdom.
The main premise of Gibbs’ and Bolger’s book is that this new style of doing and viewing church arises out of their members’ desire to be missional communities while also seeking to be faithful followers of Jesus within their postmodern contexts. They begin by explaining the shift that has been occurring within Western cultures from modernity to “postmodernity” and towards a “network society” as well as the church’s increasing occupation of a place on the margins of society. Reflecting on my experiences as a study abroad student in Scotland, a time in which I had yet to learn the terms “post-Christendom” and “postmodern,” these ideas have actually helped to decipher some of the thoughts expressed to me by my non-Christian friends there about the Church. These experiences also allow me a greater understanding of why emerging churches have responded to the culture and shaped themselves in the ways they have, as Bolger and Gibbs go on to summarize in the next chapter. They briefly follow the gradual development of emerging churches, evaluate three core unifying foci (identifying with the life of Jesus, transforming secular space, and living as a community) as well as six common practices (welcoming the stranger, serving with generosity, participating as producers, creating as created beings, leading as a body, and taking part in spiritual activities).
In their chapter on emerging church’s identification with Jesus, Gibbs and Bolger explain that these churches look to Jesus as the one who initiated the work of the Kingdom of God and view their purpose as pointing to this kingdom in both its “already” and “not yet” state through their communal practices. They are concerned with bringing heaven to earth, which is a trend that I agree with and have seen and helped to implement within my own Nazarene tradition. I find the idea of the gospel as a holistic way of life to be a far more challenging pursuit than that of striving to fill a church’s pews with bodies. This holism is continued within emerging churchs’ endeavour to transform “secular” space. To them, there is no such thing as secular space, but all areas of life are infused with the spiritual. This is something I offhand agree with, but struggle to find the meaning of, especially in regards to the realms of science and politics. Science, which uses methodological materialism within its pursuit of knowledge, is somewhat less hard for me to reconcile because my interactions with my professors as a biology major in undergrad, have allowed me to learn how to draw spiritual implications from discoveries in the natural world (such as drawing the idea of the interconnectedness of all Creation from the idea of common descent). Politics I find to be a confusing realm to begin with and while I agree with the idea of a separation between church and state, I often wonder how involved Christians should be in politics, how a Christian politician could justify their choice in voting according to their personal beliefs or according to the will of their constituency (if the two come in conflict) and to what extent voting according to one’s own personal religious convictions is imposing one’s personal beliefs upon another.
The third focus Bolger and Gibbs describe is living in community, which is something I have felt led to be doing for a while now. Modernity’s focus on the individual created an archipelago society, with each person an island. Humans were created to live in community (another spiritual implication one can draw from the theory of evolution: its occurrence in populations/communities rather than individuals), but I have rarely experienced what that means. Emerging churches practice welcoming the stranger, or as my Mennonite friend Kate has expressed to me about her own tradition: those outside of us are us and we are incomplete without them, therefore we seek them out and welcome them because if we didn’t, we would be incomplete. This is related to the second practice Gibbs and Bolger describe: serving with generosity. Rather than donating money to and developing social programs within their churches, emerging congregations focus on a socially engaged way of life, serving through their vocations and with their time rather than through church-administered programs, seeking to bring wholeness and become “good news people before proclaiming the Good News message (145).” I believe that this shift is a necessary correction to the agenda-minded evangelism of modernity. Rather than valuing a person for the influence we could have over their spiritual life, Christians should value that person for themselves. Our agenda must be lavishing the love of Christ on those around us. If they allow us the privilege and opportunity of speaking truth into their spiritual life, that is wonderful, but that only comes through valuing the person (rather than the body on the pew) and being present with them for their own sake. Otherwise, we are merely selling a product.
Emerging churches practice participation within their churches through production. That is, rather than sitting and consuming the sermon and worship as performed for them by the preacher and worship leader and moving to a different church when they feel that they are no longer personally “getting anything out of” the service, emerging church members take responsibility for the services themselves. The worship becomes an expression of who they are as a people and is their own gift to God. Often, all ages are included (for example, a seven-year-old hosting a dancing circle). I find emerging-style worship particularly attractive as it allows participants to express their full being to God, rather than having the worship dictated to them by a worship leader who strictly worships through music, and their own particular style of music at that. Similarly, emerging churches support creativity and the arts within their services and worship, with members worshipping by giving out of their own creative instincts. I find this idea similar to Catholic theology and its idea of humans as co-creators with God, which has been a particular influence on my own life (another implication from evolution: God created/is creating a world that can create itself and that can partner with Him in creation).
Emerging churches’ leadership structure is generally one of democracy (rather than some form of republican policy as seen in most denominational polities). Consequently they tend to be fewer than 40 people. Although I like small churches, I am not altogether keen on churches that are that small. Thus, I prefer a more republican polity which allows for a slightly larger community to form and can allow for a structured partnership (reflecting the influence modernity has had upon me) with other congregations, because some structure often does need to be in place as extreme democracy tends towards chaos.
Gibbs and Bolger wrap up their study by describing the pull that emerging churches have often found towards ancient spiritual practices, especially those practiced in ancient Celtic churches. They are find these practices (such as candle burning, lectio divina or praying the hours) attractive not because they are ancient or mystical but because they incorporate a spiritual rhythm into daily life. Interestingly, I found these same practices attractive long, long before I had heard of emerging churches or postmodernity, possibly reflecting my own position as a product of my generation (an idea that would take too long to do justice to in this “brief” review).
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