Crossing Boundaries, Redefining Faith

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Emerging Church Movement

Clawson, Stace

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498219693
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Emerging Church Movement, an eclectic conversation about how Christianity needs to evolve for our postmodern world, has been breaking traditional bounds and stirring up controversy for more than two decades. This volume is the first academic work to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to understanding this complex and boundary-crossing phenomenon. Containing contributions by researchers from a diverse set of disciplines, this book brings together historical, sociological, ethnographic, anthropological, and theological approaches to offer the most thorough and multifaceted description of the Emerging Church Movement to date.Contributors:Juan Jose Barreda ToscanoDee YaccinoGerardo MartiLloyd ChiaJason WollschlegerJames S. BieloJon BialeckiHeather Josselyn-CransonXochitl AlvisoChris JamesTim Snyder

Part 1: Defining Boundaries

1

A Brief History of the Emerging Church Movement in the United States

Michael Clawson

Brian McLaren’s first published work began with this provocative statement: “If you have a new world, you need a new church. You have a new world.”26 The new world McLaren referred to was that of postmodernity, which he identified as a historical shift away from the worldview and culture of modernity.27 From the beginning, a motivating assumption of the ECM has been that changing historical circumstances demand new responses from the church. For a movement so dependent on historical claims for its very raison d’être, it is odd then that so little scholarly work has yet been done on the history of this movement itself. While some brief overviews of the ECM’s immediate origins in the 1980s and 90s and subsequent development over the past several decades do exist,28 deeper historical questions—e.g., What are the ideological and institutional roots of this movement and from where, exactly, has it emerged?—remain largely untouched.29

If the ECM does indeed reflect a common desire to deconstruct and reimagine various aspects of contemporary Christianity for a postmodern world, it is important to recognize that this critical-yet-creative stance did not arise in a historical vacuum. Since at least the middle of the last century, various movements within evangelicalism, both in the United States and globally, have critiqued the dominant practices, theology, and politics of that tradition, providing new perspectives and practical alternatives. It is from this soil that the ECM has emerged. In particular I will focus on three currents among evangelicals during the second half of the twentieth century that helped produce and give shape to the ECM: 1) the methodologically experimental “new paradigm” churches of the late-twentieth century emerging out of the evangelical youth sub-culture, the Jesus People Movement, and Church-Growth methodologies during the 1960s and 70s; 2) the missional theology developing out of the works of Leslie Newbigin and David Bosch; and 3) the movement of socially and politically progressive evangelicals produced by the political upheavals of the 1960s and informed by integral mission theology coming out of Latin America. The ECM in the United Sates has largely arisen from the confluence of these earlier trends.30 It brings together, both through selective appropriation and constructive critique, ideas and practices from movements that were previously discrete. Going further however, ECM participants reshape these preceding influences through their own postmodern tendencies toward eclecticism and epistemic humility, producing a new movement greater than the sum of its parts.

The Evangelical Youth Subculture and New Paradigm Churches

The Emerging Church Movement in the United States was born in the mid-1990s as young, innovative, evangelical pastors (and especially youth pastors) gathered to discuss how their churches, primarily large, “seeker-sensitive” megachurches, could attract more Gen Xers, people in the eighteen to thirty-five age range who seemed increasingly disinterested in the church. This concern for adopting new methods to evangelize younger generations was already well established among evangelicals by the end of the twentieth century, having begun with an explosion of church-based and parachurch youth ministries in the immediate post-war era.31 Already these World War II-generation evangelical innovators showed their willingness to adapt the methods of popular culture to their purposes. As historian Joel Carpenter notes, evangelistic rallies held by these ministries were “wrapped in a contemporary idiom borrowed from radio variety shows and patriotic musical revues.”32 Youth groups utilized parties, games, and popular music to inculcate evangelical beliefs and habits of regular bible study.33 Such youth ministries proved over the subsequent decades to be an ideal setting for inventive practitioners to experiment with new and more culturally attuned methods. Change could be tested and potentially “dangerous” cultural accommodations quarantined, while also allowing successful innovations an eventual route into the wider church.34 Furthermore, by creating a parallel Christian subculture alongside the mainstream youth culture, post-war evangelicals effectively protected their young people from corruption by “the world,” while still offering them some of its enjoyments.

No evangelical youth movement had more success with this adopt-and-adapt strategy than the Jesus People of the late-1960s and early 1970s. What the youth ministers of the 1940s and 50s did tentatively and apologetically, the Jesus Kids did with enormous gusto and creativity, freely adapting the styles, music, lingo, and methods of the hippie counterculture to communicate their message that Jesus was the “One Way” through the bewildering morass of spiritual values and lifestyle options offered by the era. (As just one example, the widely read and frequently imitated Hollywood Free Paper, known for adopting the slang of the youth culture, sometimes to the point of absurdity, once wrote: “We’re rapping about a Person—Jesus Christ. And if you can dig Him (that means to depend on Him to put your head together) then you’re in for some heavy surprises!! He’ll turn you on to a spiritual high for the rest of forever.”)35 In so doing the Jesus People effected a widespread revival of conservative religion among their peers, one that ultimately aimed to rescue young people from the degradation of secular society. As one observer noted, the Jesus People were “not as much counterculture as counter-counterculture” in their critique and subversion of many of the secular counterculture’s values and lifestyles.36

The Jesus Movement began independently of the mainstream evangelical youth culture, sometimes through the work of Pentecostal evangelists but just as often through recently converted hippies themselves. Immersed as they already were in the counterculture, these leaders were able to adapt its styles and themes to their newfound Christian message with authenticity. By bridging both worlds, the Jesus Movement served as a means of eventually integrating countercultural youth back into mainstream society by way of the evangelical church.37 When the secular counterculture itself began to dissipate in the 70s, the Jesus Movement gradually faded out as well, but the Jesus People did not simply disappear. Rather, as they matured, got jobs, and started families, they increasingly settled into more mainstream religious settings—evangelical churches, overseas missions, campus ministries, and seminaries.38

These Jesus Freaks-turned-evangelicals still carried with them, however, many of the lessons and much of the passion acquired in the Jesus Movement, ultimately transforming evangelicalism itself in ways that would set the stage for the Emerging Church Movement a generation later. Two interrelated changes stand out in this regard. First, the charismatic/Pentecostal roots of the Jesus Movement renewed within evangelicalism experie...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: Defining Boundaries
• Part Two: Crossing Boundaries