EMERGING CHURCH
One approach to Emerging Church ecclesiology is that it was born out of an experience seeking a theology.
In this, it is no different from the famous maxim of St Anselm of Canterbury, that theology ‘is faith seeking understanding.’
There are many different approaches to this topic. We can notice that Karl Barth commented that the English are naturally drawn to Pelagianism, because of their inveterate individualism. Barth was perhaps too polite to also underline the strong streak of anti-authoritarianism within English culture.
No historian can afford to overlook the political aspects of the English Reformation, and the desperate struggle over decades to safeguard England against the power of the papacy, and with it, imperial Spain.
Even now, English law enshrines a number of antipapal measures in the Act of Union of 1707, thus encoding sectarianism in the bowels of the United Kingdom.
The point of this preamble is that even after the break with Rome, (and indeed before in the person of Wycliffe and the Lollards) there is a long English history of Dissent.
The pre-eminence of the established Church, later to be derided as the Tory party at prayer, was challenged from the outset by non-conformism. The Civil War of 1640-1660 proved the point, and this sturdy individual Protestantism was and remains a breeding ground for people who are uneasy with fixed deposits of doctrine, traditions, and privileged structures .Nor can the impact of race and class differences ever be overlooked when examining religion in Britain.
Emerging Church was sourced by and sought what used to be disparagingly called ‘enthusiasm’.
Often marked by extreme unconventional behaviour in its genesis, Emerging Church often settles down as time passes. Quakerism is a case in point.
Nor is this merely a British phenomenon. Continental Europe saw the Hussites, Lollards, Waldensians, Cathars and Anabaptists. All sought freedom of religious expression: all rejected the dominant orthodoxy of the time. All were persecuted.
If Christendom is a river, then we can see Emerging Church as diverging streams, born out of the mainstream, seeking new channels, only to later return, (sometimes generations later) or to be recognised as a legitimate expression of Church, and no longer demonised as unsound or heretical.
In the West, the experiential explosion which had the most immediate, widespread and lasting impact was that of Azusa Street in 1906-1915.
Pentecostalism was born, the genesis of several denominations, and over the succeeding decades various aspects of its ecclesiology impacted the historic denominations.
Emphasis upon baptism of the Holy Spirit and the use of spiritual gifts, particularly tongues, spread to hungry believers who were desperate for sensation, and hungry for a power dynamic in evangelism.
In England, there was nostalgia for the revivals of Cornwall, Wales and the Hebrides, and excitement at rumoured outpourings in Indonesia and Korea. It is easy to follow this trend by examining the nature of Christian publications of the time
Billy Graham visited England in 1954, and stirred and excited Evangelicals. Yet after that high water mark, the evangelical churches of the 1960’s -1980’s were perceived, particularly by its youth, to be in the doldrums.
The sub-culture of those churches was conservative, passive and cerebral. There was also a strong defeatist thread, arising and fed in part by Hal Lindsay’s book ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’, which predicated and predicted the Rapture as the only available escape for believers from a rotten world. Such millenarianism was in turn based upon C.I Scofield and his famous (some would say infamous) Bible, with its dispensationalist commentary, of great relevance to Pentecostalists because its theology, which dominated much of the USA and the UK, was cessationist.
BB Warfield was much cited, and some writers, such as Masters and Whitcomb, were less than gracious in their doctrinal statements, indeed vitriolic. They declared that anyone who claimed to exercise spiritual gifts was deluded and /or demonised.
A cursory glance at Bible commentaries of the first part of the twentieth century illustrates this point.
Many young believers of those decades grew up in an atmosphere of beleagurement, feeling themselves to be an embattled minority and on the losing side in a spiritual war. Unsurprising really, given that many of them were raised by parents traumatised by the events of 1939-1945.
Various communities such as Chard, Post Green and Honor Oak Fellowship disseminated the new tastes, and many people, influenced by holiness teaching and despairing of any change in the historic denominations, established their own gatherings.
Some were forced to leave their home churches, and thus the House Church movement was born in Britain. Teaching tapes were crucial in spreading the new teaching, as were the later Bible Weeks, when the faithful were freshly enthused and informed by the various apostolic and prophetic ministries of the time.
Such leaders became celebrities in their own circles, and notorious in others.
Streams developed, such as Team Spirit (Romford), led by John and Christine Noble, Pioneer (Cobham), led by Gerald Coates, Coastlands (Brighton) and now called New Frontiers, led by Terry Virgo, Restoration (Bradford), led by Bryn Jones, Cornerstone (Southampton), led by Tony Morton, to name but a few.1
They had backgrounds as diverse as Brethren, Salvation Army, and Baptist Union. There is an interesting and controversial analysis by Alexander Walker. (Walker, A., (1985) Restoring the Kingdom. The Radical Christianity of the House Church Movement)
Whether to stay or leave one’s post was a major ethical issue for many believers. Howard Snyder’s book, Problem of the Wineskins: Church Renewal in Technological Age reflected and inspired much debate.
What can be termed the Charismatic Conflict raged during this time.
Bitter battles were fought over the theology and practice of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of tongues, and of prophecy, guitars in church services, removal of pews and the ejection of liturgy.
Charismatic experience was seen as emotional, sentimentalist, and without intellectual foundation.
For example, I was accused by one of my brothers, in accents of withering scorn, “ You Second Blessing man, you.” My other brother told me I had kissed my brains goodbye.
There were schisms and unpleasant disagreements. IVP, via UCCF, sought to maintain the classic conservative position as being the only true expression and understanding of evangelicalism.
Pentecostalism provided little theological underpinning for ‘Charismatics” apart from books by Anthony Hoekema and Arnold Bittlinger. The House Churches movement of China was taken as a useful and inspirational model.
These new Churches, as they came to be known in time, (and interestingly now prefer the cognomen, Independent Churches) espoused restoration.
They believed they were recovering what had been lost from mainstream Christian praxis. Even while Michael Harper, Colin Urquhart and others were exploring aspects of the Charismatic Movement within Anglicanism, the New Churches were busy church planting, and in addition to transfer growth, initially saw conversions and considerable numerical growth.
They learned from missiological studies, and sought to be culturally relevant, impatient with the glacial slowness of the historic denominations’ response to the increasingly rapid socio-cultural changes in British society.
Christianity was “privately engaging but socially irrelevant” said Gerald Coates, and needed to transform society, not be enslaved by it.
George Eldon Ladd’s teaching on the Kingdom of God found fertile soil in the UK, and the USA, where John Wimber stated it needed to be at the heart of the gospel.
Indeed, it is a feature of Emerging Church that it swiftly responds and hungrily seeks out ‘charismatic’ outbreaks, whether Wimber’s signs and wonders, or the Toronto Blessing at John Arnott’s church. More modern examples include ‘stirrings’ at Pensacola and Lakeland. All of these initiatives are seen as highly controversial and suspect by other aspects of the Worldwide Church.
This tendency to attempt to reinvent the wheel can be praised on the one hand as proof of zeal and vigour. On the other hand, it can be criticised as naïveté and signs of arrogance. Why not profit from the lessons of two thousand years of church history?
Some groups such as Revelation, Chichester, seeking roots and validation, found links with Celtic spirituality. The Synod of Whitby has since been anathematised by some, and its outcome seen as a major defeat for true Christianity in the UK.
Andrew Walker (op cit) classified the new Church developments into R1, which had structure, tended towards discipling by way of ‘shepherding’ and forbad women from leadership, and R2, which claimed group eldership as its leadership model and included women therein, initially eschewed structure as being ‘religious’ and sometimes revelled in its anarchic flavour.
Emerging Church can be seen as nothing other than yet another attempt to find newness and relevance by disaffected youth. Its espousal of the sitz im leben, by way of the old Celts, and ecological issues, its emphasis upon clubbing and youth sub-cultures, its establishment of numerous NGO’s as new charities, all reflect a vibrancy and enthusiasm, yet also the fragmentary and fast-paced nature of modern Western society.
It has provided leadership to fill an aching void. It has sought to rediscover joy and enthusiasm in acts of worship, and revivify the numinous as an accessible experience for every believer. It has reintroduced the concepts of tithing and personal discipleship.
Above all, Emerging Church has revived prophecy as a source of encouragement and direction: the rediscovery of a long overlooked pastoral tool. Indeed it has brought prophetism back into mainstream Church thinking in a way Pentecostalism was never able to do.
In its early days it also became embroiled in similar controversies as Montanism. This conflict can be seen as excitable prophets against sensible Bishops. It is also often a mask, obscuring personality differences and power struggles at leadership level. Such matters do not change, in whatever culture or century!
Emerging Church has harnessed the work and skills of an entire generation which might otherwise have been lost to the Western Church, by recognising and releasing gifts and ministries into what had previously been the domain preserved for the clergy.
Always fundamentally sourced in Protestantism, fuelled by Pentecostalism, it has now aged with its leadership, and faces the concomitant social challenges of continuity without loss of energy.
The new generation in this country were reared in a hedonistic and wealthy culture, which prizes instant gratification. With the impending change in the World Order, as the West loses its prestige and power and faces economic losses of unprecedented severity, there will be a consequent massive surge in unemployment and relative deprivation.
It will be interesting to see if old structures endure, if Emerging Church will survive, but if so both will need to re-invent themselves to serve the needs and aspirations of the next deracinated and indebted generation.