Emerging Church Pattern #8: Transforming Secular Space

Secular space was created when Western theology “reduced God to power and removed the sense that a good and beautiful God participates with humans. Unbelievers successfully created ‘safe zones’ so that God would not interfere with them” (See Emerging Churches, by Bolger & Gibbs, p. 192)

Modern Christians became comfortable in the ‘sacred spaces’ of the Church and their private lives. The witness of the Church was therefore weakened and reduced to a private decision, in a place set apart from the public domain. Emerging churches are countering this weakness by “removing the distinction of church and non church activities.” (Bolger & Gibbs, 107) They are synthesizing evangelism and service, avoiding differentiation between Christians and non-Christians. Emerging Churches are changing the focus from the external boundary of belief to the Person of Jesus at the center. They are more concerned about relating to Jesus in any setting, including night clubs and golf courses, than they are defining who is in and who is out.

Church communities today face a significant challenge, creating “bridges to span the sacred/secular divide.” (Bolger & Gibbs, 67) The way to do that may be for members of your church community to become the good news to their neighbors, encouraging and modeling gospel living to take place in secular spaces. The emphasis among Emerging Churches is to create “innovation” to “ensure authenticity.” (Bolger & Gibbs, 210)

Next week’s Emerging Church Pattern: Leading as the Body

Patterns of Emerging Churches #3: Living as Community

Jacob’s Well, an emerging church community in Kansas City, has a mural with the constant reminder that, “the visible church is not to be the bearer of Christ’s message, but to be the message.” (Tony Jones, The New Christians, 2008: 178) To fully embrace this pattern, local communities must dismantle the idea of church as a place, and reform it with the clear understanding that church is a people with commitment to community. The gospel message is best presented through small groups with genuine friendships, authenticity serving, loving, and giving. “The ideal size for effective fellowship and ministry,” is where “reproduction is easiest and community, accountability, confidentiality, flexibility, communication, direction and leadership are strongest.” (Cole, The Organic Church, 2005: 100-102)

Not all members are typically in one of their church community’s existing small groups. Why? Because it is difficult for people “nurtured in a culture of modernity and the unlimited sovereignty of the individual” to make themselves vulnerable within authentic community. (Bolger & Gibbs, Emerging Churches, 2005: 92) Emerging churches recognize the gospels are stories of “missional formation experiences” within small communities. (2005: 105) For them church is less about meetings and places, than an expression of kingdom values in a witnessing community.

Next week’s Emerging Church Pattern: Serving with Generosity

Patterns of Emerging Churches: Identifying with Jesus

The first of the nine patterns of emerging churches as outlined in the book, Emerging Churches, by Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs, is “Identifying with Jesus.”

Many evangelicals have witnessed the “seeker-sensitive” approach to church. While this approach may have been justified at one time,  many today recognize that it was inadequate. A seeker sensitive approach inadvertently teaches “people to be passive spectators, objects, receivers.” (Bolger & Gibbs 2005: 172)

When he spoke to the Samaritan woman,  Jesus said the “Seeker” is the Father, implying that “we are His heart’s desire.” (Organic Churches, Cole 2005: 39) Jesus is our model for living and worship. He lived the Father’s mission. His supreme purpose was not measured in the number of his followers. He did not write a book. He did not create an organization or build a building. Jesus’ supreme purpose is to bring glory to his Father. In doing so, he lived in intimacy with his Father, seeking to do that which gives his Father pleasure.

Rather than leading seeker-sensitive churches, emerging churches are seeking to identify with Jesus.  This new “seeker-generating” approach is not about a place, but a Person. Rather than ask people to, “Come to us,” emerging church groups emphasize a call to be like Jesus, moving around the neighborhood, engaging the community, and extending his family to the ends of the earth.

A New Kind of Emerging Church

As promised, I will now begin a discussion of the nine patterns of emerging churches, some of which many local churches are already practicing. First, I will propose a dynamic and flexible structure, how a typical evangelical church may re-structure to foster small groups as a new kind of emerging church.
Emerging churches are mostly small, dynamic, and creative communities, where innovation, intimacy, and spiritual growth are intensified. Emerging church leaders have yet to find a sustainable structure with “zero control, high accountability, and low maintenance.”(Bolger & Gibbs 2005: 209)

This is a proposal for a strategy to encourage the formation of new small groups as witnessing communities, which I am calling “Commission Groups.” I will maintain that this re-structuring will help local churches grow members to spiritual maturity, while also growing the community numerically through an outward focused posture.  Servicing Commission Groups will help the members of local churches begin to re-imagine and transform into a people, “a love leaking community.” (Taylor 2005:109)

These new Commission Groups will help local churches embrace patterns of emerging churches, which will serve locally and partner globally. What is unique in this formation is the vital connection of new emerging church groups to a typically larger local church.

That vital connection is enhanced as the leadership team of the local church gives opportunity for these groups to periodically give leadership to segments of the Sunday worship event. This crucial element of this strategy is that Commission Groups will be encouraged to bring testimony to the weekly gathering of how they are doing as representatives of Jesus to their neighbors and the world. As Commission Groups begin to lead various segments of worship, including prayer, testimonies, multi-media presentations, and perhaps inviting a special speaker, the Sunday service will become a celebration of authentic community and witness to the greater glory of God.

Postured for Reform

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.”

Gen X Church to Emerging Church

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.