I left my first pastorate because I felt too constrained by the congregation’s traditional mindset. They simply were not interesting in asking deep questions and finding new ways to engage the culture. The church was in rural Arkansas and was attended mainly by welders, electricians, and log truck drivers. We used the Heavenly Highways hymnal, had fifth-Sunday sings, and read from the King James Version. After a couple of years, I went looking for something more (whatever that means).
I ended up at an emerging church, although I didn’t know to call it that. We met in a coffee shop filled with candles, played moody rock worship music, and talked a lot about authenticity. It felt more like a family than a church. And that’s just what I was looking for. Unfortunately after a few years, I became disenchanted with that church, too. I felt like our values kept us from effectively carrying the gospel to our neighbors. The trouble was I didn’t know where to go. Neither the traditional nor emerging churches seemed to have the answers I was looking for.
In the mid 1990s, Jim Belcher was on a similar journey. He and his wife began hosting a few friends who were hungry for intimate Christian fellowship. They felt limited by their traditional church context and wanted to wrestle with difficult issues and be rigorously honest about their struggles. They became the church they all were looking for. “Over the next year,” Belcher writes, “hope … began to return. People were being set free …. Lives were changed forever.”
Belcher’s experience brought him into conversation with young ministers all over the country who were experiencing the same sense of discontent with the traditional church and were asking probing questions about the future of ministry. These conversations would eventually become known as the “emerging church.” By then, however, Belcher had begun to have what he calls “Calvinist misgivings” about the movement’s core and direction. Like me, he found himself in a no-man’s land between movements.
Fortunately for us, his struggle with the issue resulted in his new book, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional (IVP, 2009). It is a pastor’s effort to make sense of the ideological differences that divide traditional and emerging Christians and to synthesize the best instincts of both into what he calls “deep church.” That’s no small task.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Belcher tells his story and introduces the reader to the emerging church, which he identifies as a protest movement. Then he identifies what emerging Christians are protesting—things like “captivity to Enlightenment rationalism,” “a narrow view of salvation,” and “weak ecclesiology” among others. Belcher is careful to clarify that the emerging movement is not a monolithic organism, but is made up of at least three major branches (which he describes). Belcher concludes the section by casting his vision for “deep church.”
In the second section, Belcher addresses seven issues that divide traditional and emerging Christians. He identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective and argues for a more productive middle way.
In his chapter on preaching, for example, Belcher suggests that traditional preaching can be “deductive, legalistic, imperative-driven” and “appeals to bounded-set evangelicalism,” while preaching among emergents is often “inductive, open-ended, experiential” and appeals to the relationally oriented. Neither of these is satisfactory for Belcher. He argues instead for a “centered-set” homiletic that delivers “the life-giving power of living water via the redemptive drama that runs from Genesis to Revelation.”
Belcher tackles the big questions head on. But what makes the book powerful is that he writes as a pastor who never loses sight of what’s at stake in these conversations. His accounts are full of stories—his own and those of his parishioners—that keep the theories grounded.
What may be more helpful, though, is that Belcher avoids stereotypes and straw men. Neither traditionalism nor emerging Christianity comes out unscathed. But his analysis is fair and even. I hope all our future conversations about what divides us is done in the spirit of this book, which reminds us at every turn what unites us: the gospel of Jesus Christ.
—Brandon O’Brien is associate editor of Leadership and a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
