emergence as re:formation

a quick post while i remember... i am slowly coming to the following definition of emerging church:

'the cross-cultural re:formation of christian community in conversation with postmodern culture'

this definition is at least sufficient to imply the following things:

1. emergence is what happens when christian community intentionally engages with contemporary culture
2. engagement with contemporary culture is registered in terms of a theological conversation within an emerging postmodern paradigm
3. theological conversation is properly at the service of cross-cultural mission - existing church culture aiming at a more indigenous, contextual, and enculturated expression of the gospel
4. emerging expressions of the gospel arise from both the RE:formation of existing church communities and the re:FORMATION of new church plants by those communities
5. RE:formation (transitioning to a more missional community) and re:FORMATION (planting fresh expressions of church) are inseparably related aspects of emerging church life

Obviously, a work in progress!...

the future of fresh expressions

the fresh expressions website clearly sets out the goal of 10,000 new fresh expressions of church (fxc) by 2010. see:

http://www.freshexpressions.org.uk/section.asp?id=164

i am tempted to go off on my hobby horse of calling into question the strategic practice of setting measurable goals in church life. in our increasingly technocractic cutlure, it seems self-evident (or at least completely unproblematic) to rethink the church as an organization which, like all other organizations, can be described and evaluated by the tools of manegerial science.

the problem with setting measurable goals, of course, is the temptation to do what it takes to achieve them! i'm not talking about the potential that such goals have for employing the 'fud' factor, i.e. casting fear, uncertainty and doubt about present and future in order to move us into action. i think it should be clear that neither the 'fud' factor nor the drive to see numerical growth can be theologically adequate motives for the emerging church. other temptations include turning fresh expressions into another strategic programme of the existing church; or adjusting our numerical expectations to match the reality as it unfolds; or, lastly, widening our definition of what constitutes a fresh expression of church to make sure the target remains achievable.

indeed, one wonders whether the recurring expression on the website - 'fresh expressions of church life' - is an attempt to widen the terms in just this way. in other words, to include diverse forms of missional initiatives being developed in existing churches rather than church planting as such. if church planting is the defining logic of fxc, however, it would seem that emerging church pioneers are justified in saying that such initiatives are not really fresh expressions, properly speaking. a very large number (if not most) of those fresh expressions registered in the on-line directory seem to be of this kind.

but what if the number of fxc plants proper remain quite small? what if only a few churches endure but many more experiments come and go? what if the ratio of missional initiatives to fresh expressions continues to rise, take root, and substantially renew our existing church communities? if this were the case, would freshexpressions.org.uk have failed? or might fxc be fulfilling its providential role in the church catholic?

in other words, if the emerging church conversation is that which exists at the interface of church planting pioneers, missional leaders in the existing church, and the cultural context of the non-churched, then might we not actually recover the truly dynamic meaning of 'tradition' as faithful improvisation on existing church life into a more missional future? the emerging church is then not reducible to fxc 'plants' as such, but is rightly extended to fxc 'life' writ large. as the fruit of this conversation, the emerging church finds its identity in an emerging narrative tradition as a 'mixed economy' of missional church initiatives and fxc plants, the prose and the poetry, the cantus firmus and polyphonic voices of God's witnessing people in the world.

the essence of church

there is an understandable reluctance in the emerging church conversation to speculate about the future shape of the church. the emphasis on adventure, experiment and journeying into an unknown future is crucial to the logic of being unencumbered by traditional understandings of the church so that something truly new and culturally relevant may emerge. this, however, leads to the question of what actually makes a christian community 'church', or how we are to know 'church' when we see it. in other words, how can we meaningfully speak about the 'essence' of the church?

when considering the nature of church as christian community, however, the emerging conversation also encourages us to think beyond the local gathering (notwithstanding a central meaning of 'ekklesia') to network realities of persons whose common life is not dependent upon geographical (or face to face) proximity. this has led some to even question the usefulness of the word 'church' at all in this conversation, unless it merely designates the church 'universal' - or all those spiritually joined to christ beyond the constraints of time and place - which may take on a diversity of 'expression' from time to time and place to place. insofar as this may even be used to justify the internet church, we are into new realms of thinking about what it could possibly mean to be incarnational.

i think i could more readily agree, for the sake of mission, that the essence of church cannot be identified with the institutional structures, theological opinions, or modes of worship etc. associated with any inherited/denominational tradition. i can also agree with rowan williams (msc, p.vii) that the church may be defined simply as a community gathered around the risen Jesus; where two or three are gathered... indeed, this kind of simplicity is crucial for the adventure of church planting. yet i think it must also be acknowledged that the life of any church (which actually affirms the gathered christian community and its common life in christ) cannot ultimately escape the formation of 'institutional' structures, theological opinions, and modes of worship suitable to its particular time and place - whether they are inherited or emerging. (i use the idea of 'institution' in the sociological sense of a community that has made any kind of settled choices about its common life).

to simplify the essence of the church in this way, however, still cannot be a means of avoiding the questions of accountability, i.e. how is the claim to be 'church' made intelligible. even rowan williams goes on to say that we must have ways of identifying the 'family likeness' shared between different expressions of church. encouraged by the metaphors of reproduction and family likeness, it has become something of a commonplace to talk about the 'dna' of the church which has the merit of reminding us how our 'offspring' is similar-yet-different from the parent, or how the essence of our ecclesial traditions may be preserved through church planting, but in quite unpredictable ways. although this metaphor may help us understand 'that' there may be such a thing as family likeness, it still doesn't help us understand in 'what' such a likeness consists.

in a bid to speak of essence without resorting to particular issues of structure, substance, system or style etc., the emerging church conversation has tended to recover the classic 'marks' of the church, but reworked and abstracted from any hint of tradition: one becomes 'in'; holy becomes 'up'; catholic becomes 'of'; apostolic becomes 'out'. others prefer to speak of essence in terms of 'values' such as being trinitarian, incarnational, transformational, relational etc. i can't help wondering whether this falls foul of the modern 'fact-value' distinction in which the idea of 'value' can be thought of as entirely indifferent to the 'facts' of its concrete embodiment. can this be true of anything called 'church' if it is to be a sign of the kingdom? can the meaning of the kingdom be reduced to a mere collection of values? or, if we are to talk about values, can we agree that they call forth a more particular and visible likeness as rowan williams suggests?

[ aside: of course, to settle on such a possibility could actually be the kind of discernment that already necessitates a tradition, thus holding us to the kind of accountability that this conversation is trying to avoid. again, it seems inescapable to me that identity must always be found in the context of particular narrative tradition, either inherited or emerging, or both. on these terms, there is something self-defeating about the emerging church if it seeks to find its identity in a conversation that refuses to be a narrative tradition. my hunch is that this conversation will, over time, clearly exhibit the particularity of such positive commitments, even by way of negation.]

i'm not sure i have an answer, but my first response would be to remember that there are ways of speaking about essence that are neither about concrete structures nor abstract values. we might, for example, speak about enduring patterns of practice or consistency of character. we could say that the essence of the church consists in the gathering of a christian community around the risen jesus, who intentionally seek to do the things that he did (which may also be identified as the gifts of his spirit, and perhaps the 'one-anothers' of Paul's epistles etc.) and to be the kind of person that he was (identified by the fruit of his spirit, beatitudes etc.) in an engagement with the culture of our particular time and place. perhaps this is a way of thinking about what it means to be incarnational and to live eschatologically as a sign of the new creation, the now and not-yet kingdom.

and, just in case this is still too abstract, perhaps we need to gather around the risen jesus with the whole communion of saints who have sought to embody this family likeness throughout the history of the church. that is, to study their lives and allow ourselves to be challenged by them, as well as find their weaknesses. just a thought.

on being incarnationAL

i have noticed a certain tendency in the 'emergent conversation' to turn key theological doctrines into generalized models capable of being re-applied in various contexts of practice. one of the most common examples is turning the doctrine of the INCARNATION into the quality of being INCARNATIONAL.

the lesson we learn from the incarnation is the way that God in Jesus 'lay aside' one privileged way of being (divine majesty) in order to 'take up' another lowly way of being (human servility) for the sake of making the gosel known to the world. by a kind of inductive argumentation, the particularity of the incarnation is generalised as a principle of laying aside the cultural forms of existing church and taking up the cultural forms of non-churched people so that the gospel may be rendered intelligible and relevant in any particular time and place. on these terms, it would seem that being incarnational is an obvious necessity for planting truly indigenous churches.

as i attempt to define the 'principle of incarnation', it seems so self-evidently true that it must be deceptively simple! my concern is that the 'logic' of the incarnation should not be reduced to a mere model of cultural relevancy. in our desire for genuinely cross-cultural mission - to be 'the hands and feet of Jesus' in the world - the uniqueness of the incarnation must not be submerged under general principles; since the logic of the incarnation is our relation to the person of Jesus himself: his birth, death, bodily resurrection, bodily ascension, and real presence. in other words, i am concerned that we don't fall foul of modernity's fact-value distinction: that the facts of the incarnation be lost to the mere value of being incarnational. or perhaps it is the sundering of form and content that concerns me: that the content of the incarnation is indifferent to incarnational forms.

i suppose my real interest is to make sure that the particularity of the incarnation is inseparable from any general claim to be incarnational. so, does our drawing alongside the non-churched embrace the same sort of humility (or even humiliation) of being born in a barn? does our life become a sign, foretaste and herald of the kingdom? does our ministry bear the marks of a cruciform love? does our character bear the fruit and gifts of the Spirit, or the fulness of Jesus' risen presence? surely to be incarnational is more akin to the promise that when two or more are gathered in Jesus' name, he will be present among them, doing the work of new creation. then, of course, the question must be, how is the form of our incarnational life constituted by practices that are the 'means' such grace? is the celebration of baptism and eucharist essential to being incarnational in any time and place, i.e. as we are joined to the body of Christ and continue that participation through sharing in his body and blood?

if this is the truth of what it means for fresh expressions of church (fxc) to be incarnationAL, then they are likely to be as 'counter-cultural' as they are 'culturally relevant' (assuming that the former does not actually constitute the latter). it should be remembered that the incarnate one was actually crucified by the culture(s) in which he 'emerged'. what is more, fxc are equally likely to be as concerned for the cultural traditions of the church from which they emerge as they are about challenging them. let us also not forget that the uniqueness or particularity of the incarnation was the coming of a messiah who would recapitulate the traditions of israel, who would restore them to their true missional vocation in the world. whatever else the emerging church accomplishes, it surely must be bold in its claim not only to represent something 'fresh', but that this 'freshness' is actually a further perfecting of the very traditions that have hitherto been constrained in their 'expression'.

As the perfection of judaism, jesus came to fulfil the law, to reveal its true heart, not to erase it. as the perfection of the church of england, john wesley claimed that early methodism, as a renewal movement, was simply being most faithful to the church's deepest missional commitments. wesley himself claimed that there was no more faithful son of the church than he. could our fxc make the same claims about the traditions from which they emerge? that being incarnational seeks to be shaped by the incarnation while recapitulating their traditions, and to do so by embodying the gospel in the cultural forms of their own time and place?

emergent conversation(s)...

it seems to me that part of the confusion in this 'emergent conversation' is that there are actually multiple conversations occuring simultaneously about what constitutes an 'emerging church', with some overlap but also with their own terms of discourse. one could say that they are all instances of 'missionary ecclesiology'. here is my first attempt to sift through them:

(1) fresh expressions of church (fxc) proper. this refers to church planting initiatives by existing churches as promoted by 'mission-shaped church'. i would define these as forms of christian community which actually emerge around non-churched people being reached by a pioneer seed-team within contemporary culture. here 'mission-shaped' tends to mean that the actual shape of the fxc emerges from, or is constituted by, the particular cultural forms which those non-churched persons inhabit. by this definition, many activities which are claimed to be fxc do not actually fall into this category. examples would be activities that are, strictly speaking, more about transforming the life of an existing church rather than planting a new church or christian community. they might, however, fall into the next category.

(2) missional churches / missionary congregations. this refers to the intentional transitioning of existing churches into more mission-oriented patterns of life. here 'mission-shaped' tends to mean that the emerging shape of the church is fundamentally characterised by missional ways of being, thinking and acting in the world, for the sake of the non-churched. the christian community is renewed and transformed through its actual engagement with the non-churched and the rhythms of their everyday life. this may involve creative practices of outreach and bridge-building with the exitisting church as well as the pioneering of fxc. i am beginning to think of the 'emerging church' as the dynamic interdependence and mutually informing relationship between existing church and fxc.

(3) emergent churches. although this term can be used synonymously with 'emerging churches', it seems to be used more consistently in the US context to denote the planting of christian communities intentionally seeking to engage with what is experienced as an emerging post-modern, post-denominational, and post-Christian culture. in the US, this seems to embody a critique of both conservative-evangelical fundamentalism and liberal-modern institutionalism. in the UK, it seeks to negotiate the emergence of fxc in the fluid context of a consumerist and technocratic culture. in msc terms, these communities are much closer to the ethos of fxc than missionary congregations as such.

(4) new paradigm churches. some would include seeker-sensitive and purpose-driven churches (etc) as emerging churches. others, however, actually define the emerging church over against the seeker-sensitive model but, because of this, tend to be really an extension of that project. so-called post-seeker-sensitive churches seem to continue the ethos of attracting seekers to meaningful and relevant worship, but redefine what constitutes a seeker (and cultural relevancy) in terms of the same cultural 'posties' addressed by the 'emergent conversation'. some existing mega-churches are doing new church plants along these lines. (1)-(3) have much more in common with respect to the idea of 'emergence' than this last category.

i am sure there are probably other ways to negotiate these differences and the various ways that one might overlap with the other(s).

i would, of course, be glad for any comments or suggestions.

emerging church and theological education

just finished up a conference at princeton on emerging church and theological education. emerging church leaders from within and outside mainline denominations met with seminary professors to try and find a place for theological education in the 'emergent conversation'. these are my initial reflections on the conference, so it will be a bit of a long post. sorry!

the conference was kicked off with some challenges from brian mclaren for the seminaries, weaving in many of the emergent themes for which he has become well known. although much of what he said related specifically to the US situation, i was struck by three things in particular. first, he thought that the future of the church lay in church planting. second, that this was likely to involve a dying to cherished institutional commitments for new ways of being church to emerge. third, that denominations and seminaries should be extravagent in pouring out its resources to support such pioneering initiatives.

that dying to live through planting fresh expressions of church (fxc) is, of course, precisely what 'mission-shaped church' (msc) is calling for within our historic church traditions. there is some irony, however, that it is rather the reality of diminishing resources that has given impetus and direction to fresh expressions of church in the UK. could we have something to offer our US brothers and sisters here? i think the answer is almost certainly yes. indeed, this is why jonny baker and i were drafted to make presentations on msc at this conference. i had prepared an analysis of the msc initiative (for what it was worth), including some critical missiological reflections, with the understanding that it was going to prime the pump for further discussion. i was most frustrated, therefore, when there was no formal opportunity for substantive conversation or plenary Q&A on the things we had to say or the implications for the US scene. that aspect of the conference seemed to get derailed for other concerns closer to home.

perhaps it was because we neither began with a common frame of reference nor really sought to find one. it was quite disorienting. but maybe that is precisely what this chaotic 'emergent conversation' really is... a certain endless postmodern play with the use of language and our structures of thought without ever wanting to be located anywhere in particular. it would seem that an 'emergent conversation' means having the freedom to criticize traditions and institutions while adopting a 'view from nowhere'; which is, ironically, a deeply modernist project.

it is sometimes a bit frustrating to discover that the emergent community is willing to have figure heads, network directors and even spokespersons - all of whom refuse to speak for anyone else because that would start to constitute a tradition or, worse, an institution. it seems to be engaged in a struggle for identity (with some clear views about what it is not) while refusing to accept the conditions under which identity become intelligible (which entails adopting clear views about what it actually is). this, of course, privileges a position from which critiques can be made of others (who identify themselves within some narrative tradition) but not of itself (as self-consciously refusing such an identification). i could, of course, simply be missing the point, or misunderstanding the US context in which this particular conversation is taking place.

so, what we ended up doing mostly was talking about the conditions for the possibility of having a conversation. in other words, we spent a lot of time talking about talking, and not much time actually wrestling with the really substantive issues that 'emerged' from time to time. somehow i can't think that the desired openness of an 'emergent coversation' means our speech is condemned to be an endless chain of signifiers in which we can only hope to catch traces of essential or substantial significance. and i'm pretty sure that's not because i am some sort of modernist. either way, its hard to know what to make of the conversation at this point in terms of its contribution to theological education.

i can't help wondering whether it would have been much better to deal directly with brian's challenges, or take some specific themes which we address in theological education (like the atonement or the practice of the sacraments or the meaning of community or church planting) in order to explore what a concrete 'emerging conversation' actually looks like around them, and what difference it means for ecclesiology and christian mission in the world. another possibility would have been to actually share a variety of particular emerging church stories, exploring their theological commitments and practices of church planting, to see what points of common ground and future possibilities actually emerge in conversation with our traditions of theological education.

of course, its easy to muse such things in retrospect, and i may well be guilty of not seeing this for what it is... a start to a conversation which has a long way to go. and i will no doubt have more reflections to add as i think further about it.

as with most conferences, the real conversations occured on the margins (where all emerging truth seems to arise), in the pub, over meals, and during coffee breaks. these were absolutely invaluable helps to my own work as a theological educator and sense of vocation as a whole. i have made some new friends that i truly believe are companions in a common adventure as disciples of Jesus and his kingdom. for that, i thank God.