Deep Church

A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional

Jim Belcher

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780830837168
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830878147
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Christianity Today Book Award winner

Golden Canon Leadership Book Award winner

Feeling caught between the traditional church and the emerging church? Discover a third way: deep church.

C. S. Lewis used the phrase "deep church" to describe the body of believers committed to mere Christianity. Unfortunately church in our postmodern era has been marked by a certain shallowness. Emerging authors, fed up with contemporary pragmatism, have offered alternative visions for twenty-first-century Christianity. Traditionalist churches have reacted negatively, at times defensively.

Jim Belcher knows what it's like to be part of both of these worlds. In the 1990s he was amongthe pioneers of what was then called Gen X ministry, hanging out with creative innovators like Rob Bell, Mark Oestreicher and Mark Driscoll. But he also has maintained ties to traditionalist circles, planting a church in the Presbyterian Church of America.

In Deep Church, Belcher brings the best insights of all sides to forge a third way between emerging and traditional. In a fair and evenhanded way, Belcher explores the proposals of such emerging church leaders as Tony Jones, Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt. He offers measured appreciation and affirmation as well as balanced critique. Moving beyond reaction, Belcher provides constructive models from his own church planting experience and paints a picture of what this alternate, deep church looks like--a missional church committed to both tradition and culture, valuing innovation in worship, arts and community but also creeds and confessions.

If you've felt stuck between two extremes, you can find a home here. Plumbthe depths of Christianity in a way that neither rejects our postmodern context nor capitulates to it. Instead of veering to the left or the right, go between the extremes--and go deep.

Part 1

Mapping New Territory

1

There from the Start

How to Be an Insider and an Outsider at the Same Time

In the early 1990s I was working on my Ph.D. in political philosophy at Georgetown University. I lived blocks from the university, in the basement apartment of a wealthy woman who was in her late seventies. I walked her dog twice a day for free rent. Not a bad gig for a poor graduate student. Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, lived two doors down. Senators were denizens of the neighborhood. Tree-lined streets, lampposts, gorgeous homes and townhouses, and picturesque parks describe Georgetown well. It was a coveted place to live. And when the leaves fell it was downright storybook.

I was sitting in the second-story apartment of my good friends Jonathan and Allyson Whittle, just a few blocks from my house. It was Halloween night, and we were observing Tom Cruise and Demi Moore as the filming of the movie A Few Good Men took place on the street below, which was fascinating to watch. Autumn had arrived and there was a crispness in the air. I had never been more content or happy living in a neighborhood. We sat for hours that night, talking as we watched Holly-wood director Rob Reiner direct his stars on the street below. It was a fun time. We laughed a lot: the laughter reflected our deep gratitude for the community we were experiencing. My greatest memories of my two years in Georgetown are not the classes or the long days of study, which were satisfying, but the community, the fellowship we built.

After a lonely first semester, I met Jonathan and Allyson in a class on the politics of Latin America. They were graduates of Westmont College in Santa Barbara and recently married; they were both working on masters’ degrees at Georgetown. We connected right away and began hanging out. They were genuine, authentic and interesting. It was the start of community. Slowly we began to meet other Christians, some grad students like us and others working on Capitol Hill. We were all hungry for a meaningful sense of belonging. The university and the city can be a lonely, overly competitive place. We started meeting together on Friday nights at Jonathan and Allyson’s apartment. Within six months this informal gang had grown to about twelve people. Added to our number was an international couple from Chile. They had this wonderful cultural habit of kissing everyone on both cheeks when they said goodbye. After a while we all picked up this habit, even if the Chileans weren’t there. It seemed so ancient, so biblical. But also very cosmopolitan. Our goodbyes took a lot longer.

Normally, we would gather after dinner, people trickling in throughout the evening, to talk, enjoy one another’s company, discuss what we were learning in class, argue about politics and dream about the future. It was a time filled with hope, with great expectations. Although God was not always on our lips, he was never far from our minds. We were attempting to live boldly, full of conviction, making a difference—all to the glory of God.

I recall the sad June day when I had to say goodbye, my classes done, and drive my car back to California. I knew I would miss my friends; this kind of community is hard to replace. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience where everyone is at the same stage in life, has similar needs and fears, and loves being together. At the time, I thought this is how it would be all the time. I did not realize how exceptionally hard it is to find or build this type of community.

Shortly after I returned to California, I realized something was missing. I was glad to be back in the California sun and to be near the ocean. I had spent two years there, before Georgetown, attending Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. I fell in love with the warm weather, the foothills and the beaches. So I was glad to be back. This New England boy is right at home in California. I love summer twelve months a year, and I was thrilled to be near my girlfriend, Michelle (now my wife). But something was missing. Though we attended a thriving two-hundred-person college-graduate group at our church, it seemed superficial. The teaching was solid, but the community weak. We would come together on Sunday and maybe on Wednesday night, but the conversation never got too deep. It was more about having fun for most people.

The more I related my experiences in D.C., the more Michelle and I despaired of belonging to something as powerful in Pasadena. I remember hearing radio teacher Chuck Swindoll, who pastored in Fullerton, California, describe Southern California people as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Michelle, who was a native, commented, “This is so true.” So one cloudy Sunday night, the fire crackling on the gigantic hearth, we sat together eating dinner alone in my house, nestled in the hills overlooking Pasadena. We began to dream about creating deep fellowship like I had experienced at Georgetown. Or like the kind Francis Schaeffer, the Christian missionary and apologist, developed at L’Abri in Switzerland.[1] We decided we would start by inviting a few friends, mostly leaders in the college group, to my place on Sunday night. We would build a fire and light some candles, and I would explain our goal—to brush aside the superficial and develop genuine family.

So that first Sunday night, a few weeks later, I began the discussion—with trepidation. After a story about a painful incident in my life, I launched the discussion by asking what purpose suffering plays in the Christian life. Not so much why God allows hard times, but how he uses them in our lives to grow us. If God can use these experiences for good in our lives, I asked, why do we get so mad at him for allowing them to happen? Why don’t we rejoice in suffering, as the epistle of James says we should? Honestly, I don’t remember much more about the conversation except that for the next four hours I led a discussion that crackled with enthusiasm, authenticity and depth. My initial anxiety proved ill-founded. It was like offering bread to people who had not eaten in weeks. They devoured everything. They were hungry for meaning and for a sense of belonging. After prayer, we said goodnight, hugged (no kiss on the cheek yet) and could not wait till next Sunday. Something beautiful had been born.

The next week, our four friends brought a few more people. This pattern went on for weeks. Within two months we had close to fifty people, crammed into every available space, sitting around the raging fire, with the valley lights sparkling below. Each Sunday night I picked a topic related to Christian growth and inner change and opened with a fifteen-minute introduction that set up the problem for the night’s discussion. We then spent the next three or four hours in intense conversation, trying to find a solution, attempting to make Christianity relevant to our deepest needs. I would guide the process, asking questions, steering it back when it went on tangents or someone tried to dominate. The atmos-phere was electric, filled with an amazing energy, a desire to be real. It was a rare Sunday when people did not stay past midnight.

Over the next year we discovered how hungry we were for authen-ticity. We were tired of playing church, going through the motions. We wanted something to touch us at our deepest levels, a faith that dealt with our guilt, shame and disappointments. The more these conversations, so raw in their honesty, pointed us to the gospel—to Jesus’ announcement that a new day has dawned and that we could enter his kingdom by trusting in what he had done on our behalf—the more the scales came off our eyes. For the first time we were experiencing grace. So many of us had grown up thinking Christianity was about morality and being good. It was an ideal we could never live up to; many of the group had stopped trying even though they still went to church. Some had dropped out of church, not willing to attempt the impossible anymore. We came to realize that we can live the Christian life only after our hearts have been transformed by Christ. Grace then compels us to obedience. This is grateful living. We saw people move from discouragement, a feeling of deep failure in their Christian walks, to genuine hope.

Hope, so often extinguished by the disappointments and failures of life, began to return, slowly. People were being set free. What we all discovered together was that in his death, Jesus not only destroyed the power and fear of death, but paid the price for our sins. In doing this he set us free from so many of the idols that enslave us, hold us down, keep us from experiencing the life God has for us. The effect was so great on so many people that revival is the only word that captures what was going on. Lives were changed forever. I still hear from some of the participants who say that those Sunday nights were the most meaningful time in their entire life. It was incredible.

A year after we started meeting in our house, the landlord put an end to it. He did not want the foot traffic damaging his carpet. After much agonizing, we decided to move the group onto the church campus. No one had a house big enough to contain the group. I was afraid that the institution would kill the revival. I loved our church, but at an arm’s length. At one hundred years old our church, the largest in Pasadena, stood as a beacon of orthodoxy. It had much to commend and was bursting with activity and growth. But it had adopted some of the worst aspects of the megachurch movement—focusing more on programs than people, stressing morality more than Christ, employing a CEO style of leadership and having no interest in starting new churches. It had planted only one church in one hundred years. Knowing all these problems existed at the church, we reluctantly brought the ministry onto the campus with the full support of the pastoral staff. Within a few years, the group had grown to a couple hundred young adults.

Insider

At the time I was pastoring this vibrant group, I thought what we were doing was completely unique in the larger church world. I believed we were the only ones in the world who recognized the problems in the traditional church and were attempting something new. I did not understand that there were hundreds of young pastors who had grown up in the traditional (and pragmatic) church and were not satisfied. They were eager to try something different. They too were starting to pioneer new models of ministry centered on dialogue, authenticity, community and an outward focus. Many of these young pastors and practitioners were writing in a new journal called re:generation quarterly.[2] It was a clearing house for young evangelical leaders. Drew Ladner, who was part of our Friday night group in Georgetown, helped start the journal. He contacted me at the start of the journal to write something, which I did.[3]

By the mid-1990s young church planters like Dieter Zander and Tim Celek were writing books describing this new style of ministry, which was more contextualized to the culture, focused on building community and characterized by a more informal, honest style of preaching.[4] Even the worship music, influenced by the Seattle grunge scene, was edgier. Originally, this new style of ministry was called “Buster” or “Gen X.” These were sociological terms applied to the generation that followed the post–World War II baby boomers. Eventually, this kind of ministry would be referred to as “emerging.” (I will continue to use Gen X until my narrative reaches the year 2001, when the words emerging and emergent were coined.)

In an attempt to stay in touch with what was going on in the evangelical world, I continued to read everything that was being written about Gen X ministry. Many of the trends being discussed in these books, we were already doing in our ministry—discussion-based teaching, small groups, engaging the culture, liturgy, a return to singing hymns.

Although a few people, like Dieter Zander, planted Gen X churches from scratch, the trend was to start alternative worship services within larger churches, targeted at the Gen X generation who were unsatisfied with the worship tendencies of the boomer generation. In 1996 I teamed with Mark (“Marko”) Oestreicher, who was then leading the junior high ministry and associate pastor of education at our church (and my immediate boss), to begin an alternative service. The college pastor, Kara Powell, joined the team as well. Prior to launching this new service, Marko had heard about Gen X 2.0, a conference being held at Mount Hermon Christian Conference Center, near Santa Cruz, for large churches who wanted to start a Gen X alternative service.[5]

This conference brought together some of the young Gen X pioneers like Chris Seay, Doug Pagitt, Dan Kimball and Mark Driscoll. For Driscoll, who, in his twenties, had just started a church in Seattle called Mars Hill, this was his first speaking assignment at a large conference. Mars Hill then had less than 150 attendees; today it has over eight thousand. He spoke on cultural changes and how the church needed to respond differently than it had in the past. His main point, if I recall accurately, was that the reigning worldview of the West, Enlightenment scientific rationalism, was crumbling, and a new worldview was emerging from the rubble, something called postmodernism (see chapter four). Modernism, he said, could be characterized by a great building constructed on top of science and rationalism. The modern city demonstrated power, efficiency—the conquering of nature, ignorance and poverty. But after two hundred years modernism was beginning to crumble. It no longer satisfied the deepest longings of the human spirit. In fact, it destroyed the inner life of men and women.

People in the West are now looking for other philosophies and worldviews on which to base their inner lives. For this reason spirituality, world religions and the New Age are growing in popularity. According to Driscoll, postmodernism is the term for life after the failure of the Enlightenment. Postmoderns are not constructing a city but building an underground community, one that undermines the foundation of modernism. It is developing a radically different environment of inclusion instead of exclusion, community in place of individualism, service instead of power. Postmodernism rejects the narrative of universal truth based on reason, proposing instead that truth is local, found in communities of meaning.

Mark called for churches to wake up to these cultural earthquakes and begin changing their ministries to reach people caught in the maelstrom. His lecture was the buzz of the conference. Many pastors had just heard of postmodernism and could not explain it well, but they resonated with Mark’s talk. They may have only grasped this message on an intuitive level, but it was real to them nonetheless. “Finally,” a typical conversation went, “someone is describing the world in which we live and minister.” Interestingly, Mark says in his book the Confessions of a Reformission Rev. that this talk was so well received that it became the conference center’s most requested tape of the year and launched him on a national speaking tour.[6] He joined up with other young leaders in this Gen X movement, speaking at conferences and churches around the county. He was part of a group named Terra Nova, which included Doug Pagitt, Dan Kimball and Brian McLaren, all well-known names in this movement. (The group eventually changed its name to Emergent Village.)

I enjoyed Gen X 2.0. But I felt the conference spent too much time on technique—that is, what kind of ministry would reach this new generation—and not enough time on the core doctrines of Scripture that young people needed to hear to set them free. But I realized that something indeed was afoot. My generation was not satisfied with how church was presently done. I also understood that what we were doing in Twenty-Something Fellowship (the name we used when we moved to the church campus) was being done in churches all around the county. We were not unique!

In 1997, shortly after Gen X 2.0, we launched our new alternative service, The Warehouse. We had figured out the recipe for a Gen X service inside a large church and it was working. Like other similar services, we used interactive teaching, table discussions after the sermon, video clips of music and movies, and the arts. The team of four pastors shared the teaching, avoiding dependence on one personality. The music was loud and energetic, more like a rock concert than anything else.

This was a time of great learning for me. Michelle and I had been married for two years. I was working at the church half-time, running the young adult ministries, and was also teaching as an adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University. I wrestled with whether God wanted me to be a professor or a pastor. It would be another four years before I got clarity on my calling.

As ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1
• 1 There from the Start
• 2 Defining the Emerging Church
• 3 The Quest for Mere Christianity
• Part 2
• 4 Deep Truth
• 5 Deep Evangelism
• 6 Deep Gospel
• 7 Deep Worship
• 8 Deep Preaching
• 9 Deep Ecclesiology
• 10 Deep Culture
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Endorsements