Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2006 by Hammett, John S

Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures. By Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005, 345 pp., $19.99 paper.

This is an important book about a movement sparking considerable discussion in evangelical circles. The authors, both members of the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary, bring to their task diversity in age and background. Gibbs was ordained in the Church of England more than forty years ago and is a U.K. citizen; Bolger began the research for the book as part of his Ph.D. studies and is a native of Los Angeles. The book is the product of five years of detailed research, including extensive searches of the Internet and websites, dozens of interviews, and numerous visits to sites across the United States and the United Kingdom. It is an impressive achievement that has garnered praise from leaders in the emerging church, and it is a work that deserves careful examination.

The book is composed of eleven chapters, with an informative preface, a brief conclusion, two fascinating, lengthy, and important appendices, and a helpful index. The best starting point for understanding the book is the last major section, "Appendix B: Research Methodology." In that appendix, the authors give the criteria they used in the crucial task of identifying which churches should be included in their research as emerging. This is a crucial task, because one of the difficulties in discussing the emerging church is the diversity of the congregations that fit under this umbrella. The most important criteria are those that highlight the connection of emerging churches and postmodern culture. The authors limit emerging churches to those located in countries experiencing cultural transition from modernity to postmodernity, giving special attention to groups that "maintain a strong corporate expression outside the church walls through the forms of popular culture . . . groups that are strongly committed to engaging the outside culture" (p. 330).

With those criteria in place, the authors began in 2000 to conduct an exhaustive search "for anyone and everything associated with innovative churches" (p. 331). They eventually came to about forty to fifty churches deemed "most significant" in terms of their criteria from the United Kingdom and another forty to fifty from the United States. Next, they interviewed the leaders of these churches. The interviews provide the major source of material for this book. Gibbs and Bolger support the interview material with "document analysis, primarily through websites" (p. 334), but the interviews dominate the book in two ways. First, while most scholarly books contain copious footnotes or endnotes citing books and articles to support the claims of authors, this book has relatively few such footnotes but dozens of quotations from these interviews. Second, the interviews are the primary source for Appendix A, which is called "Leaders in Their Own Words," and contains the stories of fifty emerging church leaders, taken from transcripts of interviews or submitted by the leaders in writing. This appendix is ninety pages long, forming more than one-quarter of the book, and is completely from the leaders without comment from the authors. Appendix A is the second section of the book that a reader should tackle, for it introduces the reader to the people cited throughout the book.

These fifty stories are worth the price of the book by themselves. They give the reader a sense of the motivations behind the leaders of emerging churches, the diverse types of groups being produced out of these motivations, and some of the common features as well. Twenty-four of the leaders are from the United Kingdom, and twenty-six from the United States, highlighting the fact that emerging churches are appearing throughout the Western world. The note of protest is quite strong in the stories of many. Some describe feeling stifled by and alienated from existing churches, and wanting churches more open to creativity and the use of the arts. Others felt the culture of the church was so different from the popular culture that those they reached in the culture could not adapt to the church. Still others felt that there were aspects of modern culture that hindered existing churches from faithfully following Jesus. Among the fifty leaders whose stories are included, the voices of some are heard more often than others. Of the ten most often quoted, eight were from the United Kingdom, giving the book a strong British flavor. By contrast, some of the figures most prominent in American discussions are minor in this book, particularly the figure most associated with the emerging church in North America, Brian McLaren.

After reading the two appendices, the reader may turn to the book proper. It begins with a brief preface and acknowledgments. Chapter 1 gives eleven reasons why the Western church today must study culture. While some of the reasons given are questionable, the claim on the whole is well supported. In fact, an additional reason was surprisingly omitted: we need to study culture to recognize the areas of fallenness in it and avoid unwittingly adopting or accommodating them in our churches.