At Last Emerging Church in a Language I Can Understand!

It was a great pleasure to have Steve Taylor (of Emergent Kiwi and Opawa Baptist fame) talk to us recently at an Officer’s Fellowship in Masterton.

He said a lot and I took truck loads of to put up here.  BUT… what I’ll actually do is just take snippets and discuss them in (hopefully) greater depth as the mood takes me and as people’s responses dictate.

Steve highlighted a couple of issues about the “Emerging Church“.

• Concepts about the emergent church are stylised heavily in an American context simply because so much of the literature comes out of the USA, and

• Too many people are more worried about “emerging from” and not “emerging to“.

It’s this second point that I’d like to discuss further.

First, the story of The Salvation Army Johnsonville.

At the time SAJ started there was a clear need to look afresh at just how The Salvation Army “did church” in New Zealand.  Numbers were declining and the older traditional style and content just wasn’t cutting it.  So SAJ began with a mandate to try being different.

To a large degree it’s been successful.  SAJ has grown quickly and the style of worship service has such that people will actually ask their friends to come to church with them (in the past, many felt they couldn’t really invite to a service they knew would either bore their friends or, worse still, alienate them with strange language and clothing!)

Some issues have arisen of course and when Raewyn and I came to take over leadership about 5 years ago there was a definite faction who were in the “emerge from The Salvation Army” camp.  This meant that anything that had a hint of being Salvation Army was rejected simply because it was Salvation Army.  Happily this is no longer the case and we have been “emerging to” a contemporary, attractional style of worship that has both depth in biblical teaching and relevance to the congregation.

The Salvation Army Johnsonville as an Emerging Church?

To the extent that we are emerging to something relevant I’m quite happy.  I’m especially happy that we’re not throwing the baby out with the bath water and that we are valuing more and more our Salvation Army heritage.

However…

Steve has thrown down a gauntlet I can’t ignore.  Should we merely be emerging to an attractional style of church only.  If we continue to do this are we ignoring most of the people in our community who simply won’t come into any church.  Should we be emerging to a church that not only meet people at their need (and the Salvation Army does) but also at their time, place, and in their style?

These are questions that demand discussion.

What is “Doing Church”?

Steve put forward a very interesting idea on what three aspects we need to have to call something “church”.  I’ll discuss these in a later post.

Photo credit: jam343

Related posts:

1. Where to for The Salvation Army? It’s the time of the mega church.  Heck, even emergent...
2. Shut Up and Lead We’ve got a very strong leadership team at The Salvation...
3. Attitude is King Yesterday I had to do something I really loathe.  Stand...
4. Should Women Teach in Church? What a strange question to arise the way it did!...
5. A Hero no more You may have noticed that it’s been a while since...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.