Emerging church?

Statistics suggest that the church in Britain is facing meltdown. There are many responses but I categorise them basically as twofold. First, a new emerging church is forming tentatively and albeit on a very small scale. This is a localised, uncoordinated, grass roots movement, ignoring the traditional ecclesiasial structures where people are seeking to find ways to live based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. This contrasts with the more common institutional response to decline by those who cannot see beyond their inherited views and live within the known structures. These are people who seem to be facing backwards to steer forwards, envisioning a future based on the remembered experiences of the past.

Emerging church is small and locally based, aiming to fit in with peoples lifestyles and without a clergy class to control it. Most of the groups are based on three principles - : a concern to embrace those looking for God; a corporate desire to know and worship God; a commitment to live together that goes beyond superficial friendship. Membership of the groups is open and the boundaries are fuzzy - there are no controls or standards of belief for those joining. It is a community where participation is more important than doctrine and peer to peer help and support is normative. The church always has been tempted to believe it is an end in itself. The characteristics that Jesus showed are less attractive – love, vulnerability, redemptive suffering, service and these living communities try to live out these values in their corporate life. They are participatory, interactive, learning communities with the characteristics of honesty and reality in acknowledging ambiguity and brokenness in the world as they find it. They have minimal structure look for meaning and the voice of God in contemporary culture. There is little or no emphasis on buildings with sacred spaces created on an ad-hoc basis.

But being small, uncoordinated and informal is also a weakness. Should a new form of structural church emerge that gains widespread popular support, and there are large wealthy Christian organisations who using the latest technology and business models to achieve such ascendancy, then these “fresh expressions” of “emerging church” could be crushed and forgotten. They will go down in history as a temporary aberration, just as the hippy Jesus movement of the sixties now is a relic of a past age (though a fond memory for some romantic aging rockers in the church!)

Are those living an alternative lifestyle or counter culturally a source for renewal? They are little known beyond their own circles and they have no influence in the all important formation of opinion by the media. How do these experimental experiences become more widely known? Where else is the discourse and experimentation taking place envisioning futures for church away from the tired icons of the denominations. In which forums are significant debates taking place involving innovative blue sky thinking and who, if anyone, is listening?