Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church

A Congregational Study of a Vineyard Church

Cory E. Labanow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754664505
• eBook ISBN: 9781317138600
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

With the Christian church in the west in decline, some churches are undergoing difficult transitions as they seek to become relevant, to both themselves and their surrounding cultures. Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church details an ethnographic study of a Vineyard congregation making sense of their Vineyard roots and their growing relationship with the self-proclaimed "emerging church" network. Through a rich account of congregational life and tensions, universal issues are raised such as relating to religious parentage, creating safe places for spirituality, Christian growth and maturity, communication with contemporary culture, and the challenges of identity reconstruction. This book is the first to conduct an academic study of a Vineyard congregation in the United Kingdom.

Chapter 1
Approaching the Emerging Church

Introduction

“In the UK, [Christianity] is seen as boring,” one congregant explained, “but people at JV have realized that it isn’t and now want to show others it isn’t, so our goal is finding ways to communicate that to people outside church. The evangelism movement emphasized trendy ways of reaching people, but people in our church have realized that those things don’t work.” She went on to say that: “[w]e’re realizing people are into spirituality and we’re all asking the same questions about spirituality and the meaning of life, and we want [our church] to say that you might find them where you don’t expect them (in church).” Another told me plainly, “Here’s my opinion of ‘emerging church’: Basically, what’s happened is that the church has discovered that it’s ten years behind everybody else and now it’s trying to play catch-up in everything, including life skills.”

One declared, “We’re challenging the idea that we’ve got to do something different to reach post-moderns …. Our uniqueness lies in our desire to embody a new story.” Yet another remarked, “An emerging church is one that is trying to figure out how to do and be church in a relevant way without having to be held back by the baggage of evangelicalism … but it gets a bit hyped-up to be honest … It’s basically just a bunch of guys from different churches writing emails to each other.” These are comments taken from interviews of a congregational study I performed of Jacobsfield Vineyard.1 Despite the variegated opinions arising from members of this congregation about their uniqueness and effectiveness (or the lack thereof), there seemed to be a thread, a common identity, which wove throughout all the sentiments of this self-ascribed “emerging church”.

There are numerous statistical records citing the rapid decline of western Christianity.2 Decreasing attendance, closing churches, and inflexible institutional structures have prompted many to wonder what is next for Christianity in the west. Many reflective practitioners have sought to differentiate themselves from twentieth century Christianity in search of different ways of doing and being church in the pluralistic society of the twenty-first century. Among these practitioners is an informal yet significant network of churches referring to themselves as “the emerging church”. Their existence has prompted a number of questions. Why are they discontent? In what ways are they different? In what ways are they the same? Will their experimentations ultimately be effective? By what criteria should they be judged? What message do they have for those in mainstream Christian circles? While it would be pretentious to claim that the emerging church holds the answers to the Church’s challenges, the investigation of churches intentionally exploring these challenges may help other churches as they search for their own answers. As a result, in this book, I will seek to portray and reflect upon a congregational study of one emerging church, Jacobsfield Vineyard (JV). Examining a single congregation will not yield a comprehensive portrait of the emerging church, but it will enable reflections upon evangelicalism against which the emerging church has reacted and the Vineyard movement with whom JV has a direct yet distanced relationship. Before turning to the methodology guiding the study, it is necessary to first consider the background out of which JV was born.

Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church

Very little scholarly attention has been paid to the emerging church. While not a formal piece of research, Robert Webber’s work The Younger Evangelicals (2002) does a sufficient job of introducing the outsider to the forces fueling the rise of the emerging church, or, as he terms them, the “younger evangelicals”.3 It effectively catalogues the historical unfolding of this recent movement in evangelicalism composed of these committed yet discontent Christians whom he calls the younger evangelicals. His book gives a brief history of evangelicalism from the Enlightenment, highlighting the emergence of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century and its later strands. However, he focuses much of his attention on evangelicalism since 1950, utilizing three categories which—though overly simplistic—may be helpful for the aims of this book:

• Traditional Evangelicals (1950–1975)

• Pragmatic Evangelicals (1975–2000)

• Younger Evangelicals (2000–?)

He brings the traditional and pragmatic evangelicals under the rubric of “modern evangelicalism” while the third category he sets apart as not only a different era, but also an intrinsically different brand altogether which he simply labels “twenty-first century evangelicalism”. He (p. 16) explains that though the twentieth century variety “held fast to a biblically informed and historically tested faith, … they saw it, explained it, and presented it in a cultural situation that no longer exists.”

In describing the first group, the traditional evangelicals, Webber depicts them as enculturated in modernity. They maintain the distinctives of twentieth century fundamentalists and see Christianity as a rational worldview grounded in propositional truth. However, their approach to church was based on a stable society, and with the radical changes of the sixties and seventies (the advent of post-modernity4), the traditional evangelicals generally opted for the security of the familiar and resisted these changes. As a result, the children of traditional evangelicalism (in both a metaphorical and literal sense) grew up in a world in revolution against the past (especially traditions of all kinds) in which, as the adage says, newer is truer and bigger is better. Paradoxically, this was both the height of modernism and the beginning of its demise, and these pragmatic evangelicals began to reform church practices around such elements as seeker-oriented services, contemporary worship music, and big business/mega-church principles spawned from the church growth movement.

However, according to Webber, even pragmatic evangelicals were still wrapped up in the same theology and entrenched in a modern, scientific worldview. A parallel description offered by James Hopewell (1987, p. 25) notes that they “saw God’s salvation occurring in individual souls and thus sought reliable formulas for gathering large numbers of persons into congregations. For dependable, sophisticated techniques [they] turned to organization science.” For example, one of the pragmatic evangelicals’ leading spokesmen, C. Peter Wagner (1976, p. 41), even likened their approach to a scientific discovery:

Church growth as a science helps us maximize the use of energy and other resources for God’s glory. It enables us to detect errors and correct them before they do too much damage. It would be a mistake to claim too much, but some enthusiasts felt that with church growth insights we may even step as far ahead in God’s task of world evangelism as medicine did when aseptic surgery was introduced [my emphasis].

Pragmatic evangelicals, Webber suggests, distinguish themselves from their parents, the traditional evangelicals, by an ahistorical, innovative approach to ministry which often views Christianity as therapy to answer people’s needs. They specialize in generation-specific ministries and pride themselves on extreme cultural sensitivity, attempting to offer their seeking generation an accessible, experiential, and personal faith. Unfortunately, Webber contends, much of this era simply turned out to be their parents’ progressivist Christianity driven by modern consumerism. When pragmatically-minded evangelicals encounter post-modernism, they have often countered it with sociological adaptation to culture, viewing post-modernism as a necessary medium to master in order to perpetuate their modern, proposition-based version of Christianity. Yet this group, despite its commitment to a modern [and sometimes hyper-modern] worldview, by its very presence is an indicator that a climate of discontent and experimentation has settled onto the Church landscape.

Webber (2002, p. 16) thus defines a younger evangelical as “anyone, older or younger, who deals thoughtfully with the shift from twentieth- to twenty-first-century culture. He or she is committed to construct a biblically rooted, historically informed, and culturally aware new evangelical witness in the twenty-first century.” The difference between Webber’s younger evangelicals and traditional evangelicals is readily apparent, but there is also a significant change from the pragmatic evangelicals because this new wave is not only desirous of updated aesthetical changes, but also posing fundamental questions of identity related to what being Christian entails.

Webber presents his own personal findings from a diverse array of experience and interaction with Christians of all backgrounds. He is very descriptive in his approach to the younger evangelicals and seemingly quite sympathetic toward them. He is careful to suggest that they are a new and rapidly changing group, yet identifiable enough to label and describe. Webber organizes his book around 14 various topics (for example, worship, attitude toward history, education, evangelism, and so on) in which younger evangelicals have undergone significant shifts. For example, they hold a postmodern worldview (though he fails to indicate more specifically what he means by this), believe that the road to the future runs through the past, view Christianity as a community of faith (as opposed to a rational worldview or system of therapy), prefer smaller and intercultural churches, lean toward team ministry and decentralized leadership and are very concerned with the plight of the poor.5

The weakness of Webber’s book is its lack of systematic research. It is more a compilation of observations from a sympathetic observer than the results of an academic analysis. However, the breadth and ambiguity is helpful insofar as it highlights the decentralized and fluid nature of this identifiable, non-institutionalized network of Christians. The force for the younger evangelicals’ churches lies mainly in the innovations and vision of local church leaders and then spreads primarily through relational connections and conversational friendships via email, web sites, or interpersonal contact. It has common themes, but no hierarchical leaders. Yet the unfolding landscape of such churches is scantily explored, let alone studied in depth.

One primary spokesman for the emerging church, though not formally affiliated with the specific network with which JV identify, is Spencer Burke (2003). After spending 18 years in ministry, including a pastoral position in a wealthy mega-church on America’s west coast, he came to grips with what he describes as Spiritual McCarthyism and Spiritual Darwinism. He defines Spiritual McCarthyism as the authoritarian rule by a sole church leader, generally the senior pastor, which results in a deadlock on truth and a near-totalitarian church culture. Spiritual Darwinism, Burke notes, is the idea that bigger is always better, creating a food chain which encourages less successful church leaders to adopt the schemes and ride the victories of the biggest and best experts on church growth. Burke’s distaste finally led to his departure from evangelicalism by resigning his prestigious position in favor of forming The Ooze web site in 1998. He describes the emerging church in this way:

At the dawn of a new millennium, something is oozing just beyond the horizon. The ooze is spreading throughout the world as new churches are burgeoning into existence. These communities of believers are welling up from a new movement of God to reach the postmodern world. We believe that ministry will take on a whole new face as the Church wakes up to the fact that postmodernism has seeped into every facet of our society. And that’s OK. In reality, ooze is not easily controlled, harnessed, or restrained. Yet, as we begin to embrace the reality of our times, we have the potential to be a church in transition from modernism to postmodernism. We see our role as not trying to define or direct but to be a search party and tour guides for postmoderns by postmoderns, as we take the ride of our lives together on this spiritual journey.

Emergent Village

Proactive church responses of this kind are mainly identifiable in three regions at present: Australia and New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each of these carries a unique makeup with differing degrees of experimentation and progression. As a general rule (exceptions apply), the Church in Australia and New Zealand is the most innovative and contains the widest range. The United States, on the other hand, has the narrowest spectrum of these regions. Finally, Britain falls somewhere in between these extremes. It has a significantly diverse array of church experimentation—much of it related to the experimental influence of Australia and New Zealand—yet is also earmarked by some of the same timidity of U.S. churches.

One conversational network of special interest for this study is Emergent Village. Birthed in the late 1990s as a child of another network of young Christian leaders, Leadership Network, Emergent Village was spearheaded by a Maryland pastor named Brian McLaren (1998, 2001) whose books had become and continue to be influential in the emerging church. I do not suggest here that Emergent Village characterizes everyone who would classify themselves as belonging to the emerging church, but since JV’s senior pastor was heavily involved in this network as its UK representative, it was of particular significance for this congregational study.

Change and innovation are at the heart of this network (“conversation” is their preferred term). The Emergent Village web site (2005) speaks of response to the political, philosophical, social, economic, and spiritual transitions taking place in what they call the new post-modern, post-colonial world. Consequently, “we must imagine and pursue the development of new ways of being followers of Jesus …”, their web site says, “new ways of doing theology and living biblically, new understandings of mission, new ways of expressing compassion and seeking justice, new kinds of faith communities, new approaches to worship and service, new integrations and conversations and convergences and dreams.” Emergent Village thus defines itself as:

a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Our dream is to join in the activity of God in the world wherever we are able, so that God’s dreams for our world come true. In the process, the world can be healed and changed, and so can we. In English, the word “emergent” is normally an adjective meaning coming into view, arising from, occurring unexpectedly, requiring immediate action (hence its relation to “emergency”), characterised by evolutionary emergence, or crossing a boundary (as between water and air). All of these meanings resonate with the spirit and vision of emergent.

It was through investigating Emergent Village that I came into contact with Jacobsfield Vineyard. Since Matt Lawton6 was the founder and leader of Emergent Village’s UK chapter, I hoped a congregational study of the church he pastored, Jacobsfield Vineyard, would be effective not only as a fruitful congregational study in and of itself, but also an arena in which to explore the emerging church ideas via a local setting. Though the church was planted with strong organizational, theological, and stylistic connections to the Association of Vineyard Churches, it has moved to the point wherein not one of the congregational study’s 26 semi-structured interview respondents, when asked to classify their church with a group or groups, said that JV was a Vineyard church.

The Vineyard Movement

Though JV have developed a very different identity than most members of the Association of Vineyard Churches, a brief overview of the organization is necessary to understand their roots as a congregation.7 It is impossible to recount the history of the Vineyard movement without beginning with its founder and longtime leader, John Wimber, who, after seasons of pastoring and teaching, planted Calvary Chapel of Yorba (California) in the late 1970s. Due to Wimber’s growing emphasis on miraculous gifts of the Spirit and intimate worship, his church left the Calvary Chapel movement in 1982 to join a handful of churches who labeled themselves “Vineyard”. As this fledging group of pastors began looking to Wimber for leadership, the Vineyard movement was born, and Vineyard has since expanded to over 900 churches worldwide. It is typical of Webber’s pragmatic evangelicals, highlighted by such things as its emphasis on seeker-oriented evangelism, miraculous and intimate ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Approaching the Emerging Church
• 2 Becoming Familiar with Jacobsfield Vineyard
• 3 Hearing the Stories of Jacobsfield Vineyard
• 4 Identifying a Central Theological Question
• 5 Reflections for a Wider Context
• Appendix A: JV Demographic Survey
• Appendix B: Semi-structured Interview Questionnaire
• Works Cited
• Index