emergingchurch.info day
Yesterday was spent in Birmingham at St Martins Church in the Bullring. Surrounded by some amazing architecture; the gods of 'shop' and christendom side by side.

I joined a group of around 30 to offer some feedback on the emergingchurch.info web site
.

Hosted by Chris Stoddard from the Reaching the Unchurched Network we heard from Adrian who is the designer and main editor of the site which has proved phenomenally successful with over 250,000 hits per month. Given its success they need to ensure that any developments on the site are going in the right direction, hence the day.

We then heard some real live stories from 3 very different missional works in Birmingham. Firstly Geoff from B1, then The Sanctuary, led by Pal Singh and finally Richard Sudworth who blogs here. It was very good to hear all of them sharing openly and honestly about the failures and struggles of pioneering in this new territory. We are presently, and probably for the forseeable future, in a transitionary period. This is not a time to set up 'successful' models which answer peoples immediate question - 'how do we do this emerging church thing?' It is rather a time to ask what is happening and why? Part of that process involves lots of courageous exploration and experimentation, which by nature entails more failures than successes. We need to allow room for this brave experimentation and for the failures along the way because in the end we will all benefit from the lessons learnt.

It was good to meet up with a variety of people currently planning or actually doing pioneering work in different parts of the country. I came away with a similar feeling I have had on previous 'emerging church' events: a lot of this 'emerging church' stuff is important, fascinating and helpful, however I have a gut feeling that something fundamental is being completely missed by a lot of these guys. I suppose one of the questions I want to ask at these events is 'how much of this stuff is reproducible?' Why? Because if we are ever going to see something akin to a movement generated on a national basis then however church is being expressed will have to be easily reproduced. I wonder whether a lot of these EC expressions are in truth still mimicking the essential structures of the existing church?

posted by alexander @ 1:41 PM    3 comments

3 Comments:

Hello, it was nice to meet you in Birmingham. It was an interesting day, I must admit I wasn't entirely sure why I was there, but I was glad I went.

I'm interested that you felt something missing from all this emerging church talk, would you be able to elaborate on that further? I think it might be important.

By  lou, at 2:11 PM  

Hi, likewise. Glad you found your way here. In answer to your question: I was hinting at it in the questions I posed after that. It seems to me that most EC expressions have quite a narrow missional focus, they concentrate (& do it extremely well) on being missional culturally, usually in a very niche way, which again is fine. But they don't have anything beyond that. There's nothing in their thinking or ecclesiology which might flow further and embrace the nation as a whole. They are still fundamentally focused on trying to build a "successful" stand alone work in one place, rather than something with a total outflowing dynamic. Difficult to explain in 1 para! Try http://www.simplechurch.co.uk/NWOBC5.htm in the meantime!
BTW like your sites, you're a good designer, where did you learn?

By  alexander, at 2:42 PM  

Thanks, that's very useful.

As part of my degree I looked at the emerging church discussion and at some diferent models of church. I found the study really interesting and helpful but I also felt that there was something missing. I think I'm going to blog on this really soon because I think it needs more than a paragraph to get my thoughts sorted out, but it is partly to do with emerging churches being limited in scope.

I'm glad you liked my sites, I trained as a programmer and was quite happy just working on the backends of websites until I was asked to try out designing a couple of front-ends for projects, and I just picked up the design side of things as I went along.

By  lou, at 7:44 AM  

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