by Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs

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review by C. Wess Daniels

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in learning what the emerging church is, does, and believes, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures is a must read. Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger spent five years researching, interviewing, and compiling information for this book, and they are the first to tackle such a widespread feat concerning the movement. They interviewed more than one hundred emerging church leaders in Britain and the United States hoping to observe characteristic patterns. In the midst of much confusion and misunderstanding about this movement, I believe this book will act as both a compass and critique for groups wishing to follow Christ in the postmodern world.

I find one major misnomer—the book's title. Though the book has received an overwhelming amount of praise and popularity in the four months since its release and has already gone into a second printing, the title might lead one to dismiss its contents as “time-sensitive” and only a fad. The major thought that continued to occur to me while I read this book was that the practices of the emerging church look very similar to early Quaker practices. In fact, a number of times throughout the book interviewees and the authors both cite Quaker spirituality and theology as inspiration for the way things are done today. Though the book speaks about how the Spirit of Christ is leading his church in the postmodern world, it is really timeless Christianity playing itself out in sometimes new, sometimes old ways.

Gibbs and Bolger refine their five years of research into nine practices that set the emerging church apart from “young adult services, Gen-X churches, churches-within-churches, seeker churches, purpose-driven or new paradigm churches, fundamentalist churches or even evangelical churches” (235). All emerging churches display three main practices, and another six practices derive from the first three.

"Emerging churches are communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures…[thus] Emerging churches (1) identify with the life of Jesus, (2) transform the secular realm, (3) live highly communal lives. Because of these three activities, they (4) welcome the stranger, (5) serve with generosity, (6) participate as producers, (7) create as created beings, (8) lead as a body, and (9) take part in spiritual activities" (44-45).

This undoubtedly provocative definition identifies what Gibbs and Bolger consider to be the first group of churches explicitly doing church in a post-Christendom and postmodern world (65). In other words, the emerging church challenges the values of modernity and its influences both in the culture and within the church.

Gibbs and Bolger argue that the very core practices of the emerging church—identifying with Jesus, transforming secular space, and living as a community—cut at the very center of modern values (thus it is understood to be the first truly postmodern movement within the church). For the emerging church there is no separation between living like Jesus and believing in him; when one confesses Christ, one also accepts his or her responsibility to live life the way Jesus did. To be a Christian is not only to believe, but to become Christlike. These people see following Jesus as inherently political, social, economic, and physical as well as spiritual and emotional. This idea is rooted in the work of people such as Dallas Willard, John Howard Yoder, and N.T. Wright. In Gospel narrative, “the good news was not that Jesus was to die on the cross to forgive sins but that God had returned and all were invited to participate with him in this new way of life, in this redemption of the world” (54). Emerging churches follow Christ into the “secular” parts of the world—the disenfranchised and outcasts that the modern church has neglected. Following Jesus also means that the majority of emerging churches are nonviolent, and all of them are missional, seeking to live in ways that transform their society (63).

Because they also focus on transformation, they believe God has called them to redeem every aspect of life. Gibbs and Bolger write that “emerging churches tear down the church practices that foster a secular mind-set, namely, that there are secular spaces, times, or activities. To emerging churches, all of life must be made sacred” (66). Modern dualisms are thrown out the window in exchange for more of an understanding that all domains of reality are spiritual and can be redeemed by the power of God.

Finally, emerging churches refuse to buy into what John Drane has called the McDonaldization of the church. In other words, everyone within the church is asked to participate. They take seriously the biblical teaching of “the priesthood of all believers,” rejecting the idea that the church is a building, a set of programs, a service. They refuse to turn Jesus into a commodity to sell or eliminate prophetic critique from his message for our world.

The emerging church invites people to be active recipients with the Spirit of Christ and practice the Kingdom of God (155-56). There is no hierarchy; they reject male domination and are opposed to meeting in “steeple-houses.” Many emerging churches have both men and women leaders and meet in houses, dance clubs, old warehouses, or even bars. The main point is that for the emerging church old structures and ways of doing and being church are no longer valid for following Christ in a postmodern world.

Many churches have succumbed to the modern influences of the culture, especially among evangelical Friends, but the emerging church movement offers new ways to follow the life of Jesus in peace, simplicity, creative spirituality, and non-hierarchy while not forsaking the good news of the kingdom.

Emerging Churches enhances our understanding and recognition of emerging churches. But I think it is also vital reading for any Friends church wanting to see Quaker ideas being used and translated for postmodern culture.

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