The Emerging Church: A Pig in Lipstick?

‘Be not afraid of insecurity’

It has been repeated many times in recent years that the age of Christendom is over. Yet there are also many talking of a new ‘emerging church’ that is a shining beacon of the future. Recently Stephen Webb asked some pretty good questions… ‘Where is this emerging church? How long do we have to wait before there’s a sign? Or are we just too busy kicking the existing church to death?’

During September and October [2001] three of the patron saints of the ‘emerging church’ were in Sydney. Dave Tomlinson, Mike Riddell and Mark Pierson were in the country to speak at the Blackstump Christian Music and Arts Festival which is normally held over the October long weekend. Recognising the opportunity Glen Powell (Uniting Church Board of Mission) and Michael Frost (Centre for Evangelism and Global Mission) brought the three patron saints together to create a three day ‘emerging church’ conference.

I managed to have an opportunity to spend some time with Dave, Mike and Mark and these are essentially some notes that I made during the conference and during the discussions had with them individually and in a group chat. Every conversation and talk we had carried with it a disclaimer at the beginning… so it is here that I will alert the reader to the disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

In 1995 Dave Tomlinson ended his newly published his book entitled ‘The Post-Evangelical’ with a quote from German ecologist Rudolph Bahro:

‘When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.’

What Dave has found is that there are a growing number of stories of hope. There are a lot of people out there who are ‘not afraid to be insecure’.

The publication of Dave Tomlinson’s book sparked a heated debate in the evangelical church. The success of the publication caught Dave by surprise because he thought he had written the book to help a small group of his friends who he had met on the fringes of the church. What Dave discovered was that large numbers of people all over the world identified with the experiences that Dave had written about. People inside and outside the church. Many people have described his book as significant in helping them name their personal experience and their deep sense of discontent with the church and the expression of their faith.

There are a lot of people “who feel that they are on the fringes of the church”, Dave said. For many people the fringe is a place of struggle as they are caught between cultures (that of the church and of outside world). The hardest struggle is with the institutional church. There are many followers of Christ who have found that they simply cannot live inside the institutional church.

At the conference Mike Riddell told of his experiences in remodelling his home in Dunedin. He said that he had learned that ‘doing the demolition work is often more fun than the building work’. He continued to explain that there is a sense that ‘we have become very critical of the old… and that it is much easier to deconstruct the church than it is to create new things’.

“too often we have simply changed the church by putting lipstick on the pig”
- Mark Pierson

‘It is arrogant to think we have the right to “transition” the church’, said Mark Pierson. The problem is that ‘too often we have simply changed the church by putting lipstick on the pig’. Mark agreed that new things needed to be tried but he said that the ‘process is very important… it is everything’. Mark suggests that the church has spent too much time and effort in adopting ‘packages from the USA’ in a simplistic attempt to re-invent itself. ‘Buying a Harley and a leather jacket doesn’t make me a biker’, said Mark. ‘Whatever we do in worship should reflect who we are as a worshipping community.’ Essentially, as Mark Pierson puts it, ‘integrity is everything – reputation is nothing.’

This was echoed by a presentation by Mike Frost at the conference who noted that while ‘the church should be attractive the emphasis needs to be on the incarnational’. The Gospel brings flavour, depth and colour back into the community ‘not because we have a better program or worship service’, said Mike Frost, ‘but because we have entered our local community to which God has called us to serve’.

Dave Tomlinson was clear that he didn’t want to be a part of ‘re-inventing Christianity’ either. He also believed that essentially the institution of the church was indispensable. However, he was also sure that ‘the reasons for the institution to exist had changed’ and that ‘the structures of the church cannot continue to exist to sustain Christendom’.

Mike Riddell said that the church “needs to invest resources in new things that might become stories of hope. It needs to be free to risk and to invest in new things that might not “bring in a return”.

I was reminded in the conversation of what Mark Pierson had said earlier that day. He had found that “being a grand-parent was more fun than being a parent” and I asked if perhaps the institutional church needs to be more like a grand-parent than a parent when it comes to resourcing the new and risky things. Dave Tomlinson pointed out that ‘a large number of alternative expressions of the local church had come from out of the umbrellas of the institutional church.’ He thought that this was a healthy thing for both the ‘institution’ and the ‘emerging church’ in that both gained benefit from the experience.

The significant thing that Dave highlighted in one of the conversations was that he “believed that the church needed to have more imagination when it came to finding and resourcing leaders.” According to Mike Riddell, “there is a significant need to nurture theological literacy” the whole church – but especially amongst the lay leaders. Dave Tomlinson said “theological education is also important for lay people not just the professional clergy”. But, Dave added that “the pulpit is not the way of education” for lay people.

The future church will operate “with diverse models of leadership that are not normally found in today’s church culture” according to Dave. The leaders and the styles of leadership of the ‘emerging church’ tend not to be “regulated or given authority by decree” and there is also more emphasis on participation. The ways in which the church identifies, prepares and resources leaders (and the followers) have to change to take this into account.

The institution is ‘at a point of crisis’, said Mike Riddell, and now it is time for ‘Theology in Extremis… Theology for a crisis situation’. Mike suggested that it is time that we need to start ‘asking the questions that we have not been allowed to ask’. This was because ‘when we begin to explore the hard questions we find that we have to look at everything the church does.’ He hinted that for the church going through this process will mean that ’some people will be excited and some people will be concerned – because we are out of our territory, and the change is likely to be threatening’. However, Mike was also clear that the church should “allow change to happen”.

Regardless of future existing denominational and institutional structures, Mike believes that as a community of faith, the way forward is to be ‘responsive to the movement of God in the world’ and that we need to ‘go to the roots of the tradition’ and be ‘creative and constructive’ as we move forward while ‘remaining true to what we have been given’. ‘Whatever the emerging church ends up being’, Mike said, ‘it is unlikely to be the way it has been’.

So in the end what is the emerging church? Well here is what is a poor working definition in my head right now… (keep the disclaimer below in mind… because I am likely to change my mind.)

It is not another church or simply a church in the future – it is the church now. The ‘emerging church’ is the diversity of people who are not afraid to be insecure. It is the generosity of people that enable a myriad of experimental activities at the fringes of the church – risking time, energy and resources knowing that some will fail. It is the church where people are willing to sacrifice everything that is important to them for the sake of the Gospel. The ‘emerging church’ is the stories of people who are actively taking risks to explore new ideas and opportunities to discover what it means for them to be a community of Jesus Christ. It is the church actively resourcing people at the fringes to help discover the new entry points for the church to creatively engage the world God calls us to serve.

Perhaps what many people see in experimental things happening in the church are the signs of the ‘emerging church’ – and we name the ‘emerging church’ because it is stuff we are not used to. Whatever will emerge into the future, it will be the result of the whole church trying to be what God calls us to be.

This is the unedited version of an article by Dean Tregenza published in Insights Magazine, November 2001.

Disclaimer: The opinions in this article are not necessarily the opinions or the beliefs of the author, the people he quoted, the editor, the publisher, or anyone else for that matter.