TheBolgBlog

What is the Difference between Missional and Emerging Churches?

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

Youtube video on Emerging Church

Technorati Tags: Emerging_Church, video

Reimagining Church

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

Urban/Emerging, Oxymoron?

 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...

Church Clones -- A Problem?

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. 

Podcast with Red Herring

As I slowly pick up the pieces from the tornado of craziness I experienced this quarter, I recall some events that I would have wanted to announce but didn't. One was a podcast I did with Red Herring. It has been a little while, but I remember that he asked good questions and I enjoyed our chat. Much of the dialogue surrounded the book and classes I teach at Fuller.

Emerging Worship is about Who Gets to Play

I remarked recently that I had attended a near lifeless traditional church. More recently, I attended a traditional service that was filled with life. What was the difference? It really came down to who got to play and who didn't.

Taking my cues from the Alt Worship network in the UK, new forms of worship do not equate to candles and coffee, videos and tables, stations and art. Rather, it is about access and inclusion. Who was invited and empowered to create and participate in worship? Was worship from the people or from the experts? Was the door open for any to come and share in the worship planning and execution? Did the worship itself invite a bodily encounter between a person and God, thus facilitating an engaged form of worship?  Was there a deep sense that this is the people's worship and represents our collective offering to God? Was worship from us, the average Jane and Joe in the congregation, or was it from the priests performing rites for us, to us, but not with us?

These are the primary contributions of Emerging Church worship, but that is not to say that it hasn't existed in other movements and at other times. But I would say it is more explicit here than I have observed in other movements in the recent past.

I received joy and a deep sense of communal worship at that traditional service, as I witnessed young and old, men and women, representing various cultures and traditions, offering themselves up to God, in ways that made sense in their worlds. For me, it doesn't get much better than this...

Emerging Concerns Course

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 --

Church as Mall: Days 5-10 in Emerging Churches Class

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 :)

Youth Pastors Need Not Apply...

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...