Threats
While many aspects of the EM church’s environment offer opportunities,
there are also threats to be overcome on the journey to healthy, sustainable
development.
Common Threats to Church Plants
Firstly, as most EM churches are new churches starting from scratch, they will face many of the same threats as any other church planting team. George Lings and Stuart Murray[1] identify some of the issues that are often unexpectedly troublesome: the pressure of keeping motivation alive; the attrition of weekly setting-up; ceaseless creativity in worship; a constant multifaceted learning curve; a widening agenda as the church matured; and a misunderstanding by surrounding churches.
Threats Faced by Churches Attempting to Reinvent
Themselves
However, there are also challenges for churches not starting from
scratch. Northern Community Church of Christ is an EM church formed by five COC
churches joining together and rearranging themselves into several missional
congregations with different cultures and target areas. Their pastor, Phil
McCredden, writes about some of the challenges of moving from traditional
church to a missional church with many congregations[2]:
- Maintaining unity – traditionally, ‘unity’ has been viewed or created by
all the people in the church attending the one service and participating in the
same style of worship; now, they are looking for alternative expressions of
unity – eg. combining for all church celebrations, seminars, prayers, and
cross-congregational ministries.
- Getting to know other people – rather than expecting to be close with
everyone across the spread of congregations, they suggest churchgoers focus on
intimate relationships with people within their own congregation.
- Respecting different congregations – rather than deciding one is inferior
or superior to another, or that one congregation is central or another is outdated,
congregations need to be equally valued as outworkings of the church’s vision
and mission.
- Measuring success – congregations should not compete for ‘success’
through numbers; some congregations have an upper limit to maintain intimacy.
Rather, growth is achieved by planting new congregations.
- Allocating paid ministry resources – congregations are valid as they
connect with the mission and vision of the church. It is not necessary for the
full-time pastor to attend every meeting of every congregation.
- Allowing risks – acknowledging that stepping out and doing something
different is risky, but the challenge is to look past potential pitfalls to see
opportunities, and to make decisions and release resources because of a shared
faith in each other and in God.
- Accepting failures – admitting that real risk-taking means there is a
possibility of real failures along the way, but that even mistakes can teach
important lessons. The challenge is to keep trying and heading in the right
direction without giving in to discouragement.
EM Literature
Another threat the EM movement faces is created by the fast-accumulating
EM literature. While it has helped spread their ideas, the weakness mentioned
earlier of revolution-inciting language, unfair stereotyping and false dichotomies
has caused massive strain in relationships with people working from other
models and churches. Denominations wanting to discuss how they might
incorporate and support EM thought and churches are struggling to find new
names for this kind of church, because the words ‘emerging’ and ‘missional’
have taken on such negative connotations[3]. Moynagh
argues that ‘creating dissatisfaction’ is an important aspect of helping people
see the need for and act towards change. Yet he encourages us to tell the story
that affirms the divine deposits into both established and emerging forms of
church[4],
so that we can walk the line between creating dissatisfaction and creating
despair[5].
Another potential threat brought on by the massive spread of EM
literature is that their ideas will be adopted so quickly that people don’t
actually critique them or make the change to a more missional worldview – they
merely tack on some “worship tricks”[6] to
their existing way of thinking about church, and so the deeper change called
for by EM pioneers is lost in the frenzy to jump on the latest bandwagon. Dan
Kimball shows his awareness of this risk, and in his book urges the readers to
resist the temptation to skip to the practical part and first read the section
that challenges readers to deconstruct their understanding of church and
culture – “if we don’t understand the causes of the symptoms, our treatment is
likely to be merely cosmetic, lacking in effectiveness”[7].
Rifting Relationships with Churches and Denominations
Because of the rift created by EM literature and various other factors,
another threat to the EM church is that it will lose credibility and be
alienated from other churches. Michael Horton wonders if “modern evangelicalism
taught us all for too long to uproot ourselves from this faith we have received
and act as though we were ourselves the first to discover it”[8],
and Tony Jones describes his own struggle, working in an established church yet
meeting with missional church planters: “often I became frustrated with my
fellow church staff members who seemed apathetic and pudgy compared to these
edgy church planters, and I’m afraid I didn’t hide my disgust well. My
challenge was to become missional myself (as well as be more forgiving of my
coworkers).”[9]
Earl Creps looks at it sociologically and speaks of himself doing ‘worldview
therapy’ between two groups of people who are immersed in different thought
patterns and subcultures – offering “anger management for Pentecostal leaders
under 35 and grief recovery for those over 35”[10].
Carson likens the situation to part of
what Paul was addressing in his letters to the Corinthians, “two parties have a
corner of the correct position, but are treating it as if it were the whole”[11].
The threat of alienation from people with other viewpoints and churches leaves
EM churches more vulnerable to becoming caught up in their own ‘pet theologies’
and even helpful perspectives on the faith, but forgetting about other parts
that were taken for granted in their established churches, when what is needed
is both – “you should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former”[12].
McLaren asks, “can the gatekeepers of modern evangelicalism see these brothers
and sisters as resources, pioneers, a research-and-development wing of the
movement…or will they see them as a threat?”[13]. But I
would broaden the challenge: both EM and established churches need to be
willing to move outside the corner they find themselves in and meet in a wide
open space where they can see more of God at work (even in the midst of our
failing and confusion) and have more opportunities to reach out to the world. A
probing question is ‘can the EM church run with the baton passed on by modern
evangelicalism, without trying to disqualify their predecessors’ part in the
faith simply because it entailed different terrain?’
Maybe part of the healing of the rift can come if both EM and established
churches can be honest and vulnerable with one another – if established
churches can admit that changing cultures and churches is at times scary and
unsettling for them, and if EM churches can admit that they need support and
input from established churches – in a Melbourne Church of Christ EM church
leaders gathering[14],
church plants were described to be like teenagers – they want parent churches
to leave them alone and allow them their independent ‘rebellion’, but they
still want ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ to take an interest and peek their head in the door
every so often. The different churches need to find ways to affirm and
appreciate their differences.
Unsustainability
Another substantial threat the EM church faces is unsustainability. As
Steve Taylor writes in his A-Z of the
Emerging Church, “U = under-resourced. Mr Jones can’t even buy his
kids birthday presents and he’s our guru. Enough said”[15].
Moynagh points out that EM ideas are catching, but under-resourced[16].
Many of the EM churches I visited in Melbourne had big dreams and small budgets.
The EM churches that didn’t have as much pressure were those that had been
established churches that had then chosen to sell property and restructure
resources. But even some of these churches have a shortfall of hundreds of
dollars a week and limited time before they have to make some tough
budget-cutting decisions.
Although it would be ridiculous to claim that EM churches alone face the
pressures of sustainability, they do have some unique issues to negotiate.
Pastors in a Melbourne Churches of Christ EM church leaders’ gathering[17] talked about putting together an EM ‘starter kit’ with different
resources and ideas on issues such as ‘how to go about collecting tithe in a
housechurch’. Furthermore, EM leaders and constituents are typically wary of
manipulative talk about money (many of them would question the new covenant
relevance of tithing), and the temptation is not to address it at all[18].
A much larger proportion of EM churches are starting from scratch, and because
of alienation and suspicion caused by the literature and misunderstandings, it
is often harder to find support from outside churches and organisations.
So the challenge is, in the face of an instant-results, consumerist
culture[19],
to give and gather resources to take EM projects further. And while the pressure
is on to have ‘salvation statistics’ that prove the EM church is a worthwhile
investment, Richard Sudworth reminds us that we also need to be prepared to
“take the long view. A constant thread in all these discussions has been the
need for churches to invest in the long term as they step out with new forms of
mission. The results are not instantaneous and require commitment, patience and
the struggle born out of genuineness, not expedience”[20].
However, taking a long view into the future doesn’t help with the current
pressures and bills. Moynagh provides a reality check when he states that
“burnout can be a killer in emerging churches. New expressions can take a long
time to mature, they can be hard work, they can prove disappointing,
relationships can fracture and the pioneers’ own circumstances can become
fraught”[21].
So there is also a need to reassess: what resources does the church really
need? What can be done without? How can we think outside the box to make our
resources stretch further, or to get resources from a previously untapped
supply?
Many EM churches are already providing creative solutions to resourcing.
Northern Community Church of Christ in the Melbourne suburb of Preston takes on
‘work for the dole’ program participants, which gives them both a labour force
and fresh ministry opportunities to people who were once ‘outsiders’ to church.
Urbanlife church in the Melbourne suburb of Ringwood has managed to
network with the community so successfully that businesses and property
developers have included donations of labour, equipment and space in their
long-term planning. Erwin McManus has changed the church structure of Mosaic in
LA so that people don’t become ‘members’ of the church, but they ‘go on staff’
– which means that they find a secular job paid by an outside-church employer,
but treat their work as their full-time ministry, meeting with mentors in the
church to help them reflect and grow in their situation[22]. Frost
and Hirsch also raise an unconventional suggestion that congregations should
not just look to pay ‘pastors’, but as part of taking mission and spiritual
gifts seriously, seek to identify and financially support their gifted
evangelists so they are released to do their work well[23].
Beyond just the financial issues, the EM church needs to consider if
their core values can be sustained. EM churches often have an outlook that
idealises and attempts to recreate the ‘New Testament church’ – an unrealistic
outlook that fails to take into account the cultural distance of several centuries
and continents, as well as the difference between starting a new faith movement
and rethinking an established religion[24]. Churches need to look
carefully at their ideals to make sure they are both theologically and
culturally appropriate, in order to prevent disappointment and disbanding later
on.
Sustainability of the EM church’s core values is not only threatened by
unrealistic ideals, but also by the pursuit of cultural contextualisation. As
Clifton and Ormerod point out, if churches easily dispense with traditional
structures and forms in order to quickly embrace the latest intellectual and
cultural developments, then they run the risk of a rate of change so fast that
their key values are abandoned without extensive reflection on what they are becoming
and why[25]. Furthermore, if change is
too constant and rapid, it can erode the social glue of shared ideas and
patterns of community that make people feel settled enough to stay together
long term.
However, mere threats do not have to squelch success. As we have seen,
the threat of becoming financially unsustainable can actually be a helpful
trigger to rethink why and how resources are used in a certain way. Further,
social and ideological sustainability can be achieved by carefully setting and
returning to the core values and reasons for a church’s existence in the midst
of cultural change and adaptability. The church can then specify what their
goals are and what success will look like, and hence a sense of consistency,
enthusiasm and stability can be sustained as the church reflects on how they
are moving forward to achieve their goals.
Northern Community Church of Christ is an example of an EM
church that has set specific success goals and consequently has now been able
to write “It is already working”[26]
of their approach:
"Our experiment with a multiple congregation approach began a few years ago. Preston church of Christ, one of the original churches that formed Northern Community, laid the groundwork with a traditional congregation on Sunday mornings and a family focused one with a meal on Friday nights. Since then, as we have changed and planted new congregations, the model has continued to produce results:
• Our new congregations contain people who would not be part of our church if we did not have these congregations. We have connected with people that would not choose to walk into a church building, or even a home.
• We have engaged in church with people that are open to following Jesus but feel uncomfortable labeling themselves as “Christians”.
• We have lowered the average age of our church as we have successfully connected with younger generations in new styles.
• Within all these changes we have still maintained space for traditional expressions of faith.
• Our congregations have created multiple doorways to our church expressing many ways to discover and live out our faith."
Syncretism
Our final EM threat for this discussion is that of conforming to secular
culture and becoming syncretistic. While I have already discussed
contextualisation and engaging with culture as an EM church strength, without
careful thought and balance it could be taken too far. As Moynagh points out,
part of the need for changing our churches is that we no longer live in a
standardised world – people have “it-must-fit-me” attitudes, and expect to live
in a “customised world”[27].
So the challenge is for the EM church to reach people where they’re at and
offer a ‘service’ that is natural for them and their friends to be invited to
and comfortable for them to attend – but also, people need to be discipled
beyond ‘it-must-fit-me’ comfort zones, to look beyond simply ‘what do I want?’
to ask ‘what does God want?’. Ben Meyer warns against ‘strong syncretism’,
where a religion is so immersed in culture that it has “little identity of its own, but is the sum of elements assembled
from outside itself”. He instead advocates ‘weak syncretism’, where a religion,
“having a distinct identity of its own, borrows, transforms what is borrowed,
and enhances its native identity by this borrowing and transforming”[28].
The EM church’s emphasis on ‘contextualisation’ is in theory, weak syncretism.
But in practice, how can the EM church maintain contextualisation without
compromising to strong syncretism?
One of Don Carson’s chief critiques of the EM movement is they are
especially prone to syncretism because he hasn’t seen them produce “a critique
of any substantive element of postmodern thought”[29] – yet
he acknowledges that Leonard Sweet in Postmodern
Pilgrims[30]
“warns us not to embrace the postmodern worldview”[31]. A
major part of the problem is that postmodernity is so difficult to define –
since Brian McClaren and Andy Crouch could not even agree on what postmodernity
is, how could they even begin to critique it together and discuss which aspects
are helpful or unhelpful for the Christian faith?[32]
However, there are individuals and smaller groups who have more
commonality in their definition of postmodernity, and these people are able to
raise some societal issues affecting and infecting the church, with the hope
that EM church can use their brand of postmodern Christianity to challenge
them. For example, Moynagh suggests that the postmodern mindset can be used in
EM churches to help them overcome issues such as fragmentation, a menu mindset,
passive consumerism (church as entertainment), Sunday school as substitute
parenting, overdependence on programmes rather than personal development of
faith, and breaking the ‘me-mould’ (meeting with my personal saviour, having my
worship experience)[33].
But as well as borrowing from what postmodern culture has to offer
churches, there is also the need to be challenging and transforming
postmodernity into something increasingly more like God’s kingdom. Positively,
EM leaders acknowledge that sometimes the proclamation of God’s kingdom will
seem offensive or counter-cultural, yet in order to follow the radical Jesus we
will need to be confrontational for the right reasons – Jesus came to bring not
peace, but a sword[34]; he overturned the
business tables at the temple[35]; and when he exorcised a
demon-possessed man, people were upset about what happened to the pigs[36]. Following in Jesus’
footsteps, Paul stepped on people’s toes by exorcising a slave girl and her
masters were upset because they lost their fortunetelling income[37]. We need to admit that to
some people the gospel is the fragrance of life, but to others the stench of
death, and no amount of contextualised air freshener is going to change that!
But critiquing one’s own culture is difficult, and there are many blind spots. My only suggestion for minimising these blind spots is that we should keep ourselves humble, in fellowship and discussion with people of other cultures and perspectives, and dependent on the Holy Spirit and the Scriptures to lead and challenge us. Perhaps a devotional way of fostering self-awareness and openness to correction is to think of different prayers and attitudes we can choose between, much like Jesus’ parable of the tax collector and Pharisee who were both praying at the temple. When we come before God, one person may pray “thankyou that I’m not like those narrow-minded modernists who think they can box truth and sell it in attractional consumeristic giftwrap”; another may pray “thankyou that I’m not like those syncretistic postmodernists who have an unsettlingly loud call for revolution and abandon the grasp of truth”; but still another may pray “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Redeem me from where I have sold out to my culture. Lead me out of darkness and into your marvellous light, that I may show others the Way”.
[1] George Lings and Stuart Murray, Church Planting: Past, Present and Future, Grove Evangelism Series 61, (Cambridge: Grove Books) 2003, p.21
[2] McCredden, Phil “Facing the Challenges of Many Congregations” (Northern Community Church of Christ document with no date, but still current when given to me in November 2005)
[3] eg. Claire Dawson was employed jointly by the Victorian sectors of the Uniting, Anglican, and Church of Christ to research new EM churches, but it was constantly requested that the terms used in the paper be changed to something ‘less controversial’ – hence ‘young mission-shaped churches’.
[4] Ibid., p.218
[5] Michael Moynagh, emergingchurch.intro (Oxford: Monarch Books) 2004, p.217
[6] see, eg. Jonny Baker’s blog. Online: http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/text/worshiptricks.html
[7] Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan) 2003, p.16
[8] Michael Horton, commenting in an article by Brian McLaren, “The Method, the Message and the Ongoing Story” in Leonard Sweet (ed.), The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan) 2003, p.248
[9] Tony Jones, “Toward a Missional Ministry” in Mike Yaconelli (ed.), Stories of Emergence: Moving from Absolute to Authentic (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan) 2003, p.68
[10] Earl Creps in ibid., p.157[11] Don Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan) 2005, p.212
[12] Mt 23:23
[13] Brian McLaren, “We’re Not Finished” in Mike Yaconelli (ed.), Stories of Emergence: Moving from Absolute to Authentic (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan) 2003, p.224
[14] Held in Fairfield, Melbourne on November 17, 2005.
[15] Steve Taylor’s blog. Online: http://www.emergentkiwi.org.nz/archives/a_to_z_of_emerging_church.php; cf. Andrew Jones’ blog. Online: http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2004/02/finding_a_home_.html
[16] Michael Moynagh, emergingchurch.intro (Oxford: Monarch Books) 2004, p.91
[17] Held in Fairfield, Melbourne on November 17, 2005.
[18]In Rob Bell’s sermon from June 12, 2005 – “Money Sunday: A Theology of the Clicks”, Rob preached about his journey of having to figure out how to challenge people on the money issue when he realised his church was giving below their own budget, and well below the offerings of churches of a comparable size and demographic. The sermon was downloaded from Mars Hill Bible Church’s web site: http://www.mhbcmi.org.
[19] Michael Moynagh, emergingchurch.intro (Oxford: Monarch Books) 2004, p.47
[20] Richard Sudworth, “Do You Have Any Principles?” Online: http://www.emergingchurch.info/reflection/richardsudworth/principles.htm
[21] Michael Moynagh, emergingchurch.intro (Oxford: Monarch Books) 2004, p.196
[22] Erwin McManus, “An Unstoppable Force” seminar at Morling College, Sydney, August 1, 2005
.[23] Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson) 2003, p.58
[24] Shane Clifton addresses the problem of idealist ecclesiologies in “Pentecostal Ecclesiology: A Methodological Proposal for a Diverse Movement” (unpublished paper) 2006, p.2
[25] Shane Clifton in “Pentecostal Ecclesiology: A Methodological Proposal for a Diverse Movement” (unpublished paper) 2006, p.20 reflecting on Neil Ormerod’s “Church, Anti-Types and Ordained Ministry: Systematic Perspectives” Pacifica 10 (1997)
[26] Phil McCredden, Northern Community Church of Christ document, 2002
[27] Michael Moynagh, emergingchurch.intro (Oxford: Monarch Books) 2004, p.17
[28] Ben
F. Meyer, The Early Christians: Their
World Mission & Self Discovery (Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier,
1986), 186-196, cited in Shane Clifton, “Pentecostal Hermeneutics: An Open
and Creative Approach” (unpublished paper) 2006, p.6
[29] Don Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan) 2005, p.36
[30] Leonard Sweet, Postmodern Pilgrims (Nashville: Broadman & Holman) 2000
[31] Don Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan) 2005, p.40
[32] See Brian McClaren’s interactions with the article by Andy Crouch, “Life After Postmodernity”, pp. 62-104 in Leonard Sweet (ed.), The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan) 2003
[33] Michael Moynagh, emergingchurch.intro (Oxford: Monarch Books) 2004, pp.119-142
[34] Mt 10:34
[35] Mk 11:15-18
[36] Mk 5:1-17
[37] Ac 16:16-22
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