“Can we expect emerging churches to emerge in an institutional context?” I asked this question in a post a couple of weeks ago and have been asking it of myself, my colleagues and practitioners in the emerging church movement for some time.
My answer to the question would be “probably not”. Some people in the institution would say the same. What I find interesting is that we say one thing and do another. When you’ve been immersed in an institution, it takes major resolve to identify and challenge the way we do things – our culture. And, as Mark Greene memorably told our clergy conference last year, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. When our institutional culture dominates, we default to a one-size-fits-all approach to inherited and emerging church alike and deal out all our traditional forms of accountability, training and support (financial, pastoral etc) to the emerging church.
The result is disillusionment among some emerging church practitioners in the Church of England who have been encouraged by what the leadership have said and subsequently felt misunderstood. “I am not sure whether the Diocese knows how to deal with ‘fresh expressions’ or anything that’s not a parish-based effort,” wrote one such practitioner in an e-mail to me.
This asks big questions of someone in a position like mine. We’re giving serious thought to challenging the assumptions we’ve got about how to do church and to creating completely different forms of accountability, training and support which will empower pioneer leaders to step out of traditional expectations. I’m going to share some of that thinking here. But the next step will be putting it into action and creating a different culture. If we fail to do this, we’ll just reinvent the wheel and the thinking will not be worth very much.
January 25, 2007 at 10:49 am
great to hear you raising these questions…
January 25, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Working with prison offenders, often the process of rehabilitation involves helping men to walk a journey of de-institutionalisation in order for them to find a sense of ‘freedom’. In the case of the Church, there is a larger degree of flexibility because, even within trad parish settings, there is less understanding/experience/awareness of ‘Church as institution’ and so, perhaps, emergence of fresh expressions could provide a ‘new church culture’ for those groups within society.
Pioneer leaders, maybe, would need training on how to pioneer language with a similar newness and consciousness to kerouac, who was considered a pioneer in the sense of related-language to a certain culture-group.
I look forward to your thoughts in the coming months
January 25, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Wow. Such great insight. A challenging task nonetheless. I hope you share more about this from your own context.
February 12, 2007 at 8:41 pm
I’m not convinced. I’ve seen the Salvation Army – (an institution if ever God smiled on one ) – pour energy into thinking and ministering beyond the boundaries. (I’ve also seen the opposite, but that’s inevitable.)
It depends, I would imagine, on money and logistics. If the emergent church needs resources it has to jump through hoops set by that institution. If it can be self supporting from scratch, it can emerge alongside the formal church and be its creative companion?
February 16, 2007 at 12:51 am
As the UK moves more rapidly into a postmodern post Christendom era church attendance is collasping ( I talked to a CE priest a couple of weeks ago who is heavily involved in the emerging church who estimates the established church has a life span of 10 years in the UK).
In the face of such a senario is the C of E living in denial can it develope a strategy, vision or plan to negotiate this challenge?
Rodney
February 17, 2007 at 3:35 pm
If that is the case, and I’m not convinced, have we done enough to identify together those elements of stability in Christian life that need to endure such a transition, as against those that need to be able to change in a fluid way? What legacy of concepts of necessary stability (in the sense a modern Benedictine might understand them) are those fading parts of the established church passing on, and how?
And have we any clear idea how to help emergents in rapidly changing contexts and ministries prepare for the conflicts inherent in churches in that situation. Churches ‘unformatted’ by their own history of traditions seem to have even more propensity for destructive conflict than those in the established set-ups, and as far as I understand it the statistical incidence of church conflict does peak naturally in the early stages of a congregation’s life. How many of us have seen small, new independent groups of around 12-15 that really were beginning to gel and ‘go somewhere’ simply disintegrate because two people fell out?
Eleanor
Sister under private vows, Penzance