fishers, surfers and casters

Thu 26 Oct 2006

10 Responses to “Emerging Church on YouTube”

1. philjohnson Says:
   October 26th, 2006 at 17:16

   Paul

   A big bug-bear in the global chatter has been the extent to which the US phenomena is treated as the centre of the universe to the exclusion of all other EC experiments. Thus the critical analysis of D A Carson on EC was confined to the USA (and even then was restricted to a select sample), and he has been criticised by folks in Forge for example for failing to note the nuances globally. In effect the plea “don’t tar us all with the same brush”.

   I think it can be shown that EC experiments have sprung up in each national context between the late 1980s and now in New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, Canada, the USA and in continental Europe and Latin America. Aspects of the UK and USA scene have been phenomenologically accounted for in the Gibbs/Bolger text Emerging Churches. It can be shown that in some contexts EC projects occur under the canopy of a denomination, thus quite a few EC projects in England occur in the context of the Anglican Church. The aborted Nine O’Clock Service at Sheffield (from which a number of EC people have subsequently moved on from to start their own works) began in an Anglican church setting.

   In the Australian scene the Forge network has offered ministry training with candidates attracted in from various denominations but with a strong representation of Baptists and Churches of Christ people (reflecting perhaps the personalities and influence of the key figures — Alan Hirsch (Churches of Christ Victoria), Mike Frost (Morling College, NSW — Baptist churches). However does Forge account for all EC projects in Australia?

   In the USA there are clearly quite a few independent experiments standing beyond the boundaries of specific denominations.

   I think that you could develop a meta-taxonomical approach to EC by exploring it sociologically and theologically.

   Now on a sociological level it is possible to compare the rise of EC with the rise of New Age spirituality. In theological and cosmological terms the two are poles apart. However, New Age arose in the 1980s as an informal, person-centred, de-institutional approach to spirituality, with strong motifs on healing (personal, mental, emotional, spiritual, global), accessing “gnosis” within for transformation, celebrating the self in an esoteric manner that partly critiques modernity through the lens of esotericism but also embraces the material products and technology of modernity.

   New Age surged ahead as a culturally influential form of networking in many western nations, beginning as a subterranean and counter-cultural phenomena until by the mid-1990s entering the consumerist mainstream (e.g. James Redfield’s novel The Celestine Prophecy commodified many basic principles). By the time it hit the mainstream and plateaued from its counter-cultural phase, was about the time that EC started. In effect EC ensued in the wake of the trail blazed in secular society by New Age.

   Now some of those points are briefly discussed in an article I co-wrote and that appeared a few months ago in the NSW Baptist periodical Mosaic. It was later serialised in 4 parts on John Morehead’s blog “Morehead’s musings” — see this link to the 4th installment:
   http://johnwmorehead.blogspot.com/2006/06/emerging-church-and-critic_115100534812281605.html

   I find it interesting that EC, which in its many national settings and discourses insists on being seen as missional, has been very slow to respond to New Age (and indeed does not seem to be engaging in the manifold urban settings they flourish in with new religions or even world religions in their own towns and cities). Indeed in many projects New Age and other alternate forms of spirituality are ignored or overlooked in the missional discourses. My own crowd Community of Hope pioneered booth ministry in Australia in 1991 in New Age festivals in Sydney and then Melbourne. But the response in the UK has only come since the start of the 21st century, and nothing comparable exists in NZ or the USA. The Community of Hope is a para-church ministry and is not/was not conceived as an EC project.

   So to what extent does ecclesiology take pride of place over against dialogue with other religions? To what extent do EC discourses recognise the need for inter-religious dialogue? To what extent are EC discourses on postmodernity confined to “secular postmodernism” and overlooking “postmodern religions/spiritualities”? To what extent do EC writers (some of whom have exited from fundamentalist backgrounds) recognise Zygmunt Bauman’s argument that fundamentalism (Christian, Islamic etc) is a species of “postmodern religion”? So how expansive are the discourses sociologically and missionally? To what extent is EC in actual diaologues with the Christian missional communities (missionaries, missiologists etc)?

   At times some EC bloggers have taken up elements of New Age but on experiential grounds not missional grounds. A curious scooping of selected morsels of “New Age” by individual bloggers who do not seem to recognise that the items they refer to are New Age in origin. For example, you will find bloggers who speak of their “personality type” on the basis of a quiz taken based on The Enneagram. The Enneagram owes its inception to the Russian esotericist G I Gurdjieff and Oscar Ischazo. The Enneagram has been modified by some Roman Catholic practitioners and it is probably from these sources that individual EC bloggers have picked it up. However the bloggers have not noted that it arose outside of Christianity and specifically in “New Age”. There are other examples one could cite.

   Now some comparisons with New Age and EC as social and cultural phenomena can be done (as per the above article). There is a cultural critique in both that is quite similar (critical of modernity, critical of religious institutions, emphasis on individual seeking spiritual experiences rather than defining faith by doctrine, preferences for intuitive and mystical forms of spirituality, neo-romanticism about certain past epochs [e.g. in New Age and Neopaganism romantic views of pre-Christian Celtic culture; in EC romantic views of Celtic Christianity]; and so forth). So perhaps a sociological taxonomy is feasible.

   But if one approaches EC also on theological grounds then what might one find? Aside from the fact that there are prior denominational ties for many EC bloggers (and some that continue), quite a few seem to be people sloughing off the skin of a childhood/hand-me-down Protestant fundamentalism or Evangelical experience. In this respect many discourses are more about ecclesiology than strictly about missiology — or if you wish reconfigure your ecclesiology and you will be engaged in missions.

   Some of the reactions expressed in blogs do reflect the blogger’s autobiography. Thus some bloggers have suddenly discovered a big wide world of theology they never knew of, and many are attracted to selected aspects of monasticism, Orthodox Eastern apophatic theology (again in selected and sometimes reinterpreted ways), an emphasis on “alternative worship” (which is sometimes about candles, labyrinths, meditation). Some clearly react against programmtic and formulaic approaches to evangelism, often with apologetics dumped as being “rationalism”.

   Some of these reactions erupt from a personal revulsion at having been trained in forms of evangelism that were non-relational, and perhaps highly judgmental. Some reactions seem to involve a repudiation of the “older” generation of churches (translate: the “Baby Boomers” and mtheir mega-churches). Some of these reactions tend to be generalised without adequate nuances to the period/generation being rejected.

   The other challenge is that while many are becoming “post-evangelical”, there are others out there who appropriate the word “emerging”. Thus there are some bloggers who are “unitarian-universalists”. Some bloggers hold to a panentheist view of God which is often unorthodox in its conclusions. The panentheist debate reflects a lot on the lack of discourses in recent evangelical circles on God’s immanence and a creation theology. Some have gravitated to panentheism due to reading Moltmann but without perhaps sufficient reflection on Moltmann’s universalist soteriology (one at odds with traditional evangelicalism).

   So if you explore the “post-evangelical” phenomena you may arrive at a nuanced taxonomy as different standpoints can be detected among bloggers.

2. paul Says:
   October 26th, 2006 at 17:35

   Heya Phil,

   Few people, including Forge istelf, would think that Forge is representative of all EC. My apologies if you’ve read that I implied that.

   In my interviews with bloggers I ask them of their church participation history, and current involvement in a community with denominational ties. One of the reasons I ask this is to test if there may be differences in how bloggers perceive the EC according to their denominational invovlement. Already I’ve seen some signs that there are differences, but these signs are too small to tell. The most I can right now that some may see the EC as post-evangelical or postmodern evangelical, while others would not see it that way.

   I’ve also noted in my blog reading that the focus of EC conversations shifts to and fro between alt.worship and alt.civic engagement (??? I know I haven’t said that right, I guess I mean between what the EC does “at the table” and what the EC does “outside its doors” – there, that’s better). I need to study that more closely before its a helpful comment.

   I remember in Eclectic Itchings there was much discussion about who first used of the term “emerging” – the trinitarians or the unitarians. Matt facilitated a great discussion about that.

   I would like to propose at some stage in my writing that the EC is an endeavour to minimise all these distinctions (while being true to trinitarianism of course) and challenge the modern divisions that have been made between left-right, liberal-conservative, sacred-secular. To do this, though, means that people enter the EC conversation from all points of view.

   It’s the nature of the debate (open, honest, welcoming, equalising) that characterises the EC, not the platform from which we enter it.

3. Stephen Says:
   October 26th, 2006 at 19:37

   Paul,

   You might be interested in the couple of video clips here – UK slant rather than US.

   http://markjberry.blogs.com/way_out_west/2006/09/video_monologue.html

4. paul Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 07:12

   Thanks Stephen,

   I’m downloading them now.

5. philjohnson Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 08:34

   Paul

   Yes you are right that Forge does not necessarily see itself as EC, and there has been some concern that the critical baggage of American reactions to EC are not attached to the projects of Forge. Forge has been a facilitator of training and encouragement in new forms of urban missions; but it is also true that some who have affinities with EC have also connected with other training programmes like Arrow Leadership; and others who have simply had local leadership in a church further augmented by Bible college study.

   It is also worth noting that Steve Taylor (Emergent Kiwi) and author of Out of Bounds Church (Zondervan) now questions the very term EC. Instead he holds that there are simply missional congregations/individuals holding informal discourses and exchanges about how to be missional in today’s urban settings. I guess this is where the question of EC being “reified” as a concept comes into the picture.

6. paul Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 09:15

   I met Steve at a Virtual Theology colloquium last year. A real down-to-earh friendly guy who was so humble about his stuff that he managed to hide the fact he had a whole book published really well. I didn’t find out about the book until I found talk about it in the blogosphere.

   I reckon, though, that questioning these labels is one of the important developmental aspects of being in the EC. Once the EC establishes itself in any way, including establishing itself by name, it stops being emerging. The discourses can be seen as informal, yet the blogosphere is making them more formal just by the fact that it’s being seen as a “single” space (many sites for discussion, but wth so much interaction that it’s become “one” multi-site forum).

   Geez, I really have to learn how to use words to capture what I’m thinking if I have to write 100,000 words about it.

7. Stephen Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 14:16

   Steve published PhD thesis “A New Way of Being Church” in A5 format a while back and was selling copies cheaply. It’s been reprinted since, I think.

   http://www.emergentkiwi.org.nz/archives/graduation_special.php

   Also, I think Ian Mobsby (of Moot in Britain) had a PDF of his MA thesis floating around on the net too a while back.

   Alan Jamieson of “A Churchless Faith” and other related books, also had some online articles that may be relevant too. Go to the link below and scroll down to his name:

   http://www.reality.org.nz/articleindex.php

8. Stephen Says:
   October 27th, 2006 at 14:26

   Had a quick look for the Mobsby link and could only find this. Maybe I imagined it?

   http://benedson.blogs.com/benedson/2006/03/ians_ma_thesis.html

9. paul Says:
   October 30th, 2006 at 22:33

   Hey Stephen,

   I had a chat with Mark Berry and he allowed me to upload his videos onto YouTube. They’re on the playlist.

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