December 2005

Three Emerging Streams

Ed Stetzer has come up with an interesting analysis of the emerging church movement: Understanding the Emerging Church Thanks to the Kiwi for the heads up.

He divides the movement into three overlapping streams.

1.. Relevants

2.. Reconstructionists

3.. Revisionists

Definitely worth a read.

I need to do some more thinking and writing on the EC from a movements perspective. But hey, it’s summer in Australia and I’m still on a beach somewhere. . .

Technorati Tags: Emerging church, Movements

01/12/06 | Movements – General – Emerging church | Trackback | No Comments  »

Gerlach and Hine

Back in the 70’s Gerlach and Hine undertook a sociological study of the Black Panthers and the Pentecostals. In their ground-breaking work, here’s how they defined and described a movement.

“A movement is a group of people who are organized for, ideologically motivated by, and committed to a purpose which implements some form of personal or social change; who are actively engaged in the recruitment of others; and whose influence is spreading in opposition to the established order within which it originated.”

1. Organization

A segmented, usually polycephalous [many headed], cellular organization composed of units reticulated [connected] by various personal, structural and ideological ties.

2. Recruitment

Face-to-face recruitment by committed individuals using their own pre-existing, significant social relationships.

3. Commitment

Personal commitment generated by an act or experience which separates a convert in some significant way from the established order (or his previous place in it), identifies him with a new set of values, and commits him to changed patterns of behavior.

4. Ideology

An ideology which codifies values and goals, provides a conceptual framework by which all experiences or events relative to these goals may be interpreted, motivates and provides rationale for envisioned changes, defines the opposition, and forms the basis for conceptual unification of a segemented network of groups.

5. Opposition

Real or perceived opposition from the society at large or from that segment of the established order within which the movement has arisen.

Gerlach and Hine, “People, power, change;: Movements of social transformation”

Homework

1.. Read through Luke-Acts. How would you adapt Gerlach and Hine to describe the early Christian movement?

2.. How do we get back there?

3.. When did you last use “polycephalous” in a sentence?

4.. Read Pierson, Snyder and myself on the characteristics of a movement.

Snyder Updates Major Trends 1-3

Here’s the first installment of Howard Snyder’s “scattered thoughts” on his Ten Major Trends. He refers back to my “muddled thoughts”.

1. From regional churches to world church.

This is continuing. As you mention, Philip Jenkins’ Next Christendom is relevant here. It is not clear however what “world church” might end up meaning. The church will be increasingly diverse but increasingly linked, I think—both in terms of global electronic communications (e.g., your work) and in terms of various ministry and mission networks. This includes the continuing internationalization of denominations; denominationalism is not dead, even though it is morphing.

I don’t see a “world church” emerging in any organizationally unified sense (that would probably be Anti-Christ!). But I do hope for Spirit-led greater understanding and cooperation globally, and I think global communication and revival currents here and there will foster that.

Significantly, we are seeing the globalization and internationalization of Christian leadership and writing. I see this, for instance, in the increasing numbers of non-Anglos as book authors and organizational leaders in the English-speaking world. Also, influential Christian leaders are emerging already in (e.g.) India, China, Korea, and throughout Latin America. Their numbers and proportion will increase, to the good of the whole church, I believe. But new divisions, conflicts, and controversies will emerge unless trend #2 really flourishes.

Clearly, well before the end of this century the church will be predominantly non-Western in virtually every respect. In what has been “the West,” more and more of the church’s leaders will be non-Western or multiethnic.

2. From scattered growth to broad revival.

As you noted, we argued in 1986: “Now that the world has become one global, interconnected communications network, the unprecedented Christian growth worldwide is bound to have an impact in the traditionally Christian lands of North America and Europe.” And I agree you’re your observation: “Unfortunately, we’re still a long way off seeing the dynamism and growth of the church replicated in the ‘traditionally Christian lands.’ If the problem is consumerism, God may have to take away our toys before we’ll see significant revival in the developed world.”

We can now identify a number of “impacts” of church growth and revival around the world on the North Atlantic countries. I mentioned some above, and Jenkins speaks of this (and probable longer-term influences) in The Next Christendom.

I do see signs of a movement (or movements) brewing in the U.S. I just read the Time cover story on Bono, clearly a prophet of our time. He notes, as others have (David Brooks of the NY Times in some ways) numerous signs of ferment in the U.S., and probably elsewhere—a sense of a transition coming.

As to broad revival, in terms of a genuine movement of the Holy Spirit that will transform the church and society? I don’t know. I’m hopeful. I believe God is working in a number of subtle ways. I don’t see a lot of positive signs in (or hope for) U.S. churches that can’t distinguish between the kingdom of God and U.S. patriotism, but that’s being transcended or questioned in places. A number of Evangelical leaders, for instance, are becoming concerned with environmental issues and global poverty. (Quite a report recently on that in CQ Weekly, the influential magazine published by the Congressional Quarterly.)

Granted that no truly broad, authentic revival has yet occurred, I’m actually more hopeful about that today than I was in 1986.

3. From Communist China to Christian China.

This was stated provocatively, of course. Obviously China is not yet a Christian nation. As I see it, a great contest is underway there between the Christian faith and economic materialism/ consumerism. The remarkable growth of the church continues, much of it more or less underground, though Christians are beginning to have some influence in educational and political circles.

I don’t know where this will end up. If the Christian church can maintain radical fidelity to Jesus Christ and not succumb to materialism, and not be torn apart by internal divisions, a genuinely Christian China could emerge in the next fifty years. But the church in China will have to prove more effective in resisting the seductions of advertising, entertainment, and consumerism than Western Christianity has been.

I still believe China will evolve in a more democratic direction over the next decades and that the Christian faith will be less and less persecuted—as a result both of Christian influence on the society and of the openness demanded by economic globalization. But this is not assured.

Major Trends 20 years on This just came in from Howard Snyder. Over the next few days I’ll be publishing Howard Snyder’s update to the Ten Major Trends.

Steve

Thanks for sending me the comments by yourself and several others regarding the “Ten Major Trends” that Dan Runyon and I highlighted in our 1986 book, Foresight. I found a number of the comments very insightful and generally agree with them.

Here are a few of my own reflections and “second thoughts” regarding these ten trends. Another issue is what new trends do we see emerging now?

In 1995 I published “Earthcurrents: The Struggle for the World’s Soul” (Howard A. Snyder), which probably some of your readers have seen. I originally conceived of this as an update to Foresight but it developed into something else—a survey of global trends and an inventory of worldviews. Here I was dealing less with the church than with global society.

The eight trends analyzed there are: 1. The coming of online global society (Internet, etc.) 2. Economic globalization 3. The feminist revolution 4. Environment at risk—global warming, species depletion, water, etc. 5. The genetics and quantum physics revolutions (DNA, superstrings) 6. Virtual reality and artificial intelligence 7. Cultural and economic decline of the U.S. 8. Global culture vs. global clash of civilizations

These also deserve some updating comment, but that will have to wait for another time except for some scattered references.

Howard

The arena

No better way to start the new year than with a determination to follow Jesus into “the arena.”

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt “Citizenship in a Republic,” Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Snyder Updates Major Trends 4-7

The second installment from Howard Snyder on his Major Trends.

4. From institutional tradition to kingdom theology.

I am encouraged with the increasing emphasis on the kingdom of God, broadly understood, and on “holistic” and “transformational” mission and the missio Dei theme among Evangelicals. There is still little understanding that a “holistic” kingdom theology must include creation care, but I see progress here.

The most encouraging thing in this area is that much of the church outside the U.S. has a more holistic kingdom theology and sense of mission than does the U.S. church (especially Evangelicals and Fundamentalists), and this likely will have a reflexive impact on North America Christians.

I don’t expect that Christian organizations will ever escape the problems and cycles of institutionalism (re: your comment), but still believe that more flexible and organic models of organizational being and operation will become more influential, for the reasons I spelled out in EarthCurrents.

5. From clergy/laity to community of ministers.

Throughout much of the world church, as I see it, considerable progress has been made here. The priesthood of believers, ministry of all believers, diversities of ministries and gifts are much more accepted today (in most places) than twenty years ago. The “second Reformation” needed here (restoring the ministry to the people of God, as the Reformation attempted to restore the Word to the people of God), has not yet fully happened, but on a scale of ten, I think much of the church has moved from, say, a 1 or 2 to a 5 or 6. Still a long way to go—in practice and probably even more in theology.

6. From male leadership to male-female partnership.

It is probably unwise to generalize globally and transdenominationally(!!), but overall I do see this trend continuing. Women are fairly prominent in leadership in more or less underground churches in China and Viet Nam and there are many women pastors (at least among some groups) in the Philippines, Cambodia, and Thailand, I understand.

In the U.S., seminaries are seeing increasing numbers of women enrolled. I haven’t seen recent statistics on this, so don’t know what the current trend line is, but the increasingly higher proportion of women at Asbury, where I teach, is striking. Many of these are on an ordination track in the United Methodist Church or other denominations.

In the U.S., there has been something of an awakening (a new movement?) regarding women in ministry in the churches coming out of the 19th-C. holiness movement. Groups such as the Church of the Nazarene and Free Methodists (my denomination) initially had many women in pastoral leadership, but that faded many decades ago with institutionalization and movement-decline. Now some of these groups are seeing a gradual increase in women in pastoral roles.

You comment, “Strangely women are prominent in leadership roles at the beginning and end of the movement lifecycle. In the pioneering phase it’s all hands on deck regardless of gender or social standing. In the decline and death phase men are less attracted to leadership roles in an institution that has loss status.” Well put. Women have almost always been in the majority in the church but are given freedom to exercise major leadership roles most notably in the early movement stages. This is understandable but the decline in female leadership represents a spiritual and theological failure in the church—theological because theologies of authority, ordination, and male headship get introduced which are foreign to the New Testament.

Special note should be made here of the Salvation Army. Though its military structure may be problematic to some, the provision of having women be officers in the army (the legacy largely of Catherine Booth) has meant that women have had and continue to have prominent leadership roles in the Army. This says something about the importance of structure with regard to women’s roles.

7. From secularization to religious relativism.

Yes, I agree: “It’s questionable whether ‘secularization’ was ever a reality outside of the wishful thinking of certain academic and theological circles. The problem is not that people don’t believe. It’s that they will believe anything.” I think the significant development here over the past twenty years is the recognition of the importance of religion (whichever it is—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, shamanism, economism, varieties of “New Age,” or whatever).

Yet major influential sectors of U.S. society, and also some sectors in predominantly Islamic countries and in India, are aggressively secular in the sense that they oppose theocracy or attempts to give any religion privileged status within the political structure. We see this struggle being fought out right now in the U.S., Turkey, India, and to some degree in other places. We don’t know where this will lead, but I do expect to see a growing reform movement within Islam—in part in reaction to radical terrorist Islamic groups—toward more religious toleration and pluralism (paralleling to some degree what happened in Europe and the U.S. in the18th Century).

So I think religious pluralism and also religious relativism (which is something different) will continue and become increasingly prominent globally. This trend is fed by global entertainment, advertising, marketing and “branding,” and consumerism. This is a major (maybe the major) challenge for authentic Christianity.

I also concur with those who say that materialistic consumerism, and the forces of global capitalism behind it with the commodification of everything, including culture itself, is the new religion which it is now heretical to question. And I don’t see the church (at least in most places) being very effective in challenging this. In the U.S. most of the church has capitulated to a consumerist, celebrity-oriented, entertainment culture, and this same dynamic will be the main challenge, I think, in places like South Korea, Brazil, and the large cities of China.

Clearly the church, if it is to remain faithful, will have to figure out how to exist counterculturally in a world of TV and instant global video communications.

Snyder Updates Major Trends 8-10

Third and final installment of Howard Snyders thoughts on his Major Trends twenty years on.

8. From nuclear family to family diversity.

This continues in the U.S. where something close to half the population now lives in single-person households. That is staggering. It produces many shifting “virtual families” and communities in the form of social groupings around work, “third spaces” like health clubs and coffee shops, and the Internet. Increasing general acceptance of homosexuality is also a factor here though I think U.S. society is coming to a sort of modus vivendi in which many people accept homosexuality as normal and many do not.

Globally the most important development in this area, it seems to me, is the rapid decline of traditional family patterns (particularly the extended family) in places like China and India under the impact of economic globalization and urbanization.

The obvious Christian challenge and opportunity here continues to be building churches that really function as “the family of God,” where the church becomes the most important form of social identity and belonging and the builder of healthy Christian biological families.

9. From church/state separation to Christian political activism.

This varies greatly according to the socio-political context, as it always has. On the plus side (in my view), some influential Evangelicals are beginning to form political alliances around specific issues (the environment, poverty, religious persecution, some family issues) which could bring significant results (depending on the impact of #1 and #2 above). The great danger of Christians in politics is cooptation, and that danger will remain. However I am encouraged to think, due to several factors, that more populist political movements (in the sense of a genuine concern for the well-being of all the people, not just the rich and powerfully and globally connected) will be emerging over the next twenty years in a number of places around the world. Partly this will be driven by ecological concerns and partly by the rather remarkable emerging concern with combating poverty worldwide. Countries like Brazil, India, Bangladesh, and perhaps even Lebanon and Saudi Arabia will be key places to watch.

You comment, “I’m old enough be to disillusioned by both the ‘Christian Right’ and the ‘Christian Left.’ I think I have Anabaptist tendencies.” Yes, of course. I’m not sure what’s happening elsewhere, and in many ways the U.S. is atypical, but recent writings in the U.S. by Jim Wallis and Jimmy Carter are, in my view, encouraging. Wallis’ God’s Politics has created something of a stir and Carter’s Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis is selling well.

The proper Christian stance here, in my view, is first of all the church existing as its own (that is, Jesus’) “culture,” being truly countercultural at the points of the world’s idolatries and properly contextualized in each instance, reinforcing kingdom values and virtues, raising up generations of people who will live the kingdom life. But secondly: helping equip people who will become activist in all the sectors of society, including politics, to the degree that that is possible and can be done with integrity within the context. (Remember Daniel, Joseph, and Esther, e.g., in the O.T.)

In this area the faithful response is both/and, not either/or. But whatever is or is not possible and appropriate politically, the church must be the faithful community gathered around Jesus with its values and virtues grounded in Jesus by the Spirit as revealed in Scripture.

Christians should never be na ¯ve as to what can be accomplished politically (see Ellul’s The Political Illusion) or how easily they can be co-opted. On the other hand, they should not give up the political fight where their voice can make the deciding difference. In past centuries key reforms in the U.S., Britain, India, China, and Japan for instance have come partly through Christian influence.

10. From safe planet to threatened planet.

The key challenges here are global warming, species depletion, and control of water.

On the climate-change front, 2005 was a highly significant year. It will I believe prove to have been the tipping point when global business discovered global warming and learned that a corporation actually can gain an economic edge if it moves now to become environmentally responsible. A number of large corporations (e.g., BP and DuPont) are learning this and will be setting the pace. Further, 2005 was the year in which a number of major U.S. and some multinational energy companies began to move seriously into alternative energy sources, particularly wind and solar.

But the race is on. Though global environmentalism is on the rise, it is not clear that ameliorative steps can be taken in time to prevent disastrous effects from global warming, including the shutting down of the Great Ocean Conveyor which would produce a new ice age in just a matter of decades.

And then, as always, war (nuclear, biological, convention) remain a threat.

So we face what may be apocalyptic and yet potentially very hopeful times. Of course, as a Christian, I am in any case hopeful!

Howard Snyder

From Steve Addison’s Blog – a very interesting one on these topics

http://www.steveaddison.net/