Filed under: Church | Tags: Bolgers, Bonhoeffer, Cole, Commission Groups, Emerging Church, Gibbs, Jacob's Well, Keel
Members of church communities may gather regularly to pray. They may hope for a more authentic community and witnessing church. Tim Keel, author of Intuitive Leadership and pastor of Jabob’s Well, writes: “Discernment, accountability, and wisdom are integral aspects of listening personally and collectively for the voice of God revealed in the Scriptures, through history, and within ourselves.” Rather than merely dream of an ideal community, Bonhoeffer charges us to “be that community.” Emerging churches understand the gospel primarily as something to be embodied and proclaimed, rather than a set of beliefs that people assent to intellectually.
To foster a new kind of emerging church, a new leadership posture is required. The emergence of new leadership gifts within community will require a more adaptive leadership approach. If “ecclesiological structures always manifest our theological imaginations,” it is clear that new church leaders will need to do some deep theological reflection. Neil Cole writes, “Emerging church leaders understand the very nature of the church is organic and must therefore contain within the smallest grouping the complete DNA for reproduction.” To adopt emerging church patterns, Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs say church communities will need “to dismantle all systems of control and to reconstruct a corporate culture according to the patterns of the kingdom.” What I have been saying is this: A mid-sized evangelical church can take steps to reform into a new kind of emerging church by fostering several smaller “churches” or Commission Groups.
Filed under: Church | Tags: Biblical, Bolger, Christian, Church, Communities, Emerging Church, Faithful, Gibbs, Hope, Humble, Keel, McLaren, Posture, Practice, Reenergize, Reforming, Religion, Spiritual, Virtue
Some Christians may move from one church to another seeking to meet spiritual needs, however others remain faithful in their church communities with hope. Some Christians have abandoned the modern church form, seeking a more biblical form, a purer formation of Christian community. I want to suggest that the way forward is not to abandon the existing church formation entirely. In this time of radical cultural shift, perhaps the way forward is to seek ways to re-form church by taking a humble posture to re-imagine, to re-new, and to re-create. Reenergizing this church will be closely linked to hope. “Embracing change is dangerous,” Tim Keel of Jacob’s Well writes, “but so is inaction.” Rather than completely abandon church and “organized religion,” as some have done, I propose a reforming posture of “organizing religion,” as Brian McLaren writes, by encouraging the formation of small communities “celebrating virtue and training people to practice it.”
In my next post, I will begin to outline those “postures” that Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger have identified in their book “Emerging Churches.”
Filed under: Church | Tags: Bolger, Christendom, Church, emerging, Gen-X, Gibbs, Keel, postmodern, reformation, theology
Gen-X churches are not Emerging Churches, but rather failed attempts to emerge from the Western church form. The Emerging Church is not trying to rebuild Christendom, as some might hear in the larger Gen-X churches. Gen-X gatherings began in the early 1990’s. Within a few years, large churches began to sponsor churches within churches for Gen-X youth as if they were not ready for adult church. By the mid-1990’s, Gen-X church leaders, committed to the rigorous study of theology and postmodernity, began to focus on a postmodern reformation. These emerging church leaders such as Tim Keel, Jacob’s Well, understand that theology is “local, conversational, and temporary.” Many have concluded that if God would not dwell in a temple, neither will He dwell in our theology. Meanwhile, Ryan Bolgers and Eddie Gibbs point out in their book “Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures,” that some are questioning “whether postmodern Christians could still be considered evangelicals.”
According to Bolgers and Gibbs, emerging church leaders are more apt to speak of “what they are emerging from more than …what they are emerging into.” Facing centuries of institutional and cultural strongholds, emerging church leaders are accepting the challenge to counter modernity and its controls through hierarchy, doctrine, or consumerism. These are major challenges that require humility and discernment. In their book, Bolger and Gibbs outline nine patterns, identified by their field research with stories collected from fifty emerging church leaders. Those nine patterns are: identifying with Jesus, transforming secular space, living as community, welcoming strangers, serving with generosity, participating as producers, creating as created beings, leading as a body, and merging ancient and contemporary spiritualities. In the following posts, I will examine these emerging church patterns and propose ways to adopt them for your fellowship.
Another question:
Tim Keel, Jacob’s Well Church, Kansas City, writes: “At the heart of the Protestant Reformation are Latin phrases like ‘reformata semper reformanda est’ and ‘Ecclesia semper reformanda est.’ They can be translated, respectively, ‘reformed and always being re-formed,’ and similarly, ‘the church always needs to be reformed.’”
Doug Pagitt, Solomon’s Porch, Minneapolis, MN adds: “We honor the reformers not by saying what they said, but by doing what they did.”
How should the church be reformed in today’s pluralistic world and why?
