Photo by Jonathan Assink
In light of the revival in emerging church conversation taking place from DJ Chaung, Andrew Jones and Dan Kimball – not to mention Tim Keller comments – see here – I’m taking this as my cue to enter the fray with the series I mentioned back in December.
Some introductory remarks and then my first post…
My interaction with the emerging church conversation began in 2002. After three years living in Nashville, my wife and I decided to move back to Missouri where I would pursue a job in local church ministry. Within a few months, God blessed us with a worship position at a small Evangelical Free church in Columbia, MO. I always tell people that God used this time in a mighty way. I had the opportunity to be a part of a staff that sincerely loved the Lord, His Word, and His people. It was infectious…
The first month of my tenure there, I was scheduled to officiate a wedding for my best friend growing up who was living in southern Illinois at the time. So on a Friday, my wife, my son, and I traversed to SoIl and on the way in, I saw a Christian bookstore. The next morning, I went to this bookstore and was looking for some books to strengthen my worship theology and philosophy but something else caught my eye. It was Dan Kimball’s book The Emerging Church. I picked it up and I’ve never been the same. As a fledgling pastor at the time, it made sense to me to understand what it meant if the church was emerging from something. But I had no idea it would impact me on such a deep level.
As I pored over that book for the next few months – and have ever since – Kimball’s prose put words to thoughts I had possessed for a long time. His vision for a new way of doing church chiseled away at the scar tissue of my traditional church and megachurch experience. I felt a sense of purpose in ministry and sensed a feeling that this book was going to catalyze a new movement within Evangelicalism. It reminded me of the impact Sally Morgenthaler’s Worship Evangelism had for me in college, when my ministry philosophy was just in its infancy stages.
Soon thereafter, I had the opportunity to lead a number of alternative worship gatherings with my buddy B.J. at the church I was at in Columbia, MO, with a large number of their young adults. It was here that I got to see first hand the power and really, the realization of Kimball’s premises.
I’m not sure why, but one of the next books that I read was Leonard Sweet’s SoulTsunami. It still remains in my all-time top 5. If you haven’t read Sweet, you know he is the ultimate ministerial futurist. He put dreams in me at the time, I didn’t even know what the full realization would look like. I’m beginning to…
All this to say, God was birthing something in me and honestly, I feel, providentially through the books I was reading and the alternative worship gatherings I was privileged to be a part of.
Over the next few years I began to expose myself to all things emerging. Books, blogs, websites, conferences. In some ways, the beauty of the emerging conversation is its standing open invitation. If you want to join it, you can. There are no gatekeepers.
What I would consider my official foray into the EC conversation was when I launched relevintage.com back in April 2006. Since that time I have connected personally with folks like Darrin Patrick, Sally Morgenthaler, Ed Stetzer, Bob Roberts, Tim Smith, Bob Hyatt, etc. and joined things like Shapevine.
In July of 2007, I accepted the position of Worship Arts Coordinator at my alma mater, Missouri Baptist University. One of the foremost reasons for taking this new role was the opportunity to be around students, a.k.a. the “emerging” generation. Though the campus and leadership are inherently Christian, most of those on campus are not Christ-followers. I knew this would be fertile ground to understand what makes emerging generations tick and how they view Jesus and the church. Another reason was the opportunity to particularly train students in emerging trends in worship, delving into what engages emerging generations in worship in the local church.
Finally, my family and I have been attending The Journey – a missional, emerging church here in St. Louis led by Darrin Patrick – since August 2007. I have led worship for them a few times. It has been great to catch the DNA of this church on a weekly basis. As far as St. Louis goes, they are a part of a handful of churches that are actually reaching a large group of young people. Pretty amazing…
So today marks the beginning of my series on the emerging church. The series will be derived from a paper I did for a church history class in seminary last semester. The name of the paper is “A Postmodern Reformation: The Moorings and Maxims of the Emerging Church.”
Again, the project was predominately concerned with the historical timeline of the North American emerging church, including the various tenets that have been espoused since its “inception.†The posting of my paper will be followed with a more detailed amalgamation of those tenets, as well as a critique of the movement.
Without any further ado, here is the introduction to my paper:
In their book, Lost in America, Warrren Bird and Tom Clegg claim that the unchurched population of the United States is now the largest mission field in the English-speaking world, and the fifth-largest globally.[1] This coupled with the cultural shift of postmodernism has, as Alan Hirsch and David Frost have said, begun “the shaping of things to come†within Evangelicalism.
This “turning,†as Robert Webber puts it, signals a new form of ecclesiology called the emerging church that is rising to meet the new crisis of culture [2] and in the last ten years, its expression in North America has cemented itself as a thriving and legitimate movement. This brief historical overview will discuss this progression of this movement from its believed inception to today and give an overview of its theological and philosophical tenets.
[1] Warren Bird and Tom Clegg, Lost in America (Loveland, CO: Group, 2001), 25.
[2] Robert Webber, Listening to the Beliefs of the Emerging Church: Five Perspectives (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), 15.
