The Emerging Church - Another Perspective
By Tripp Fuller:
Bruce Sanguin’s newest book The Emerging Church: A Model for Change & a Map for Renewal was fun to read. I read a lot of books, but very few ministry books do I actually get all the way through before I quit to read dead German theologians. The other two are Ed Friedman’s Generation to Generation and Tom Long’s The Witness of Preaching. Before I go on to tell you why I dug this book, let me tell what the book is not: It is not a summary of the “Emerging Church Movement” or even written for the post-evangelical majority of the movement. It is also not a handbook for a minister who wants to score Emergent cool-points without putting in much effort. It is also not a book for someone who needs theological congruency in order to learn from a fellow minister about navigating congregational transformation.
That aside let me tell you why I enjoyed this book so much and what you can expect to find should you read it (which I hope you do):
1. Bruce is a minister and open about his experiences. I get irritated with most ministry books because they are either by professors at seminaries who last served in a church before Carter was in the White House or they are currently ministers who make themselves (and more often their churches) sound like a little piece of heaven. Bruce doesn’t do that, and his openness about the difficulties he has gone through made me trust him enough to listen.
2. Bruce takes his theology seriously enough for it to impact how he approaches ministry. Regardless of your assessment of his theology, it is always nice to read about a minister who actually lets his theology shape how the congregation makes decisions, how power is used, how leadership leads, how spiritual formation takes place, and more. Doug Pagitt does this well in Church ReImagined, and Bruce does it here as he invested over a decade facilitating a Spirit-led transformation of a progressive mainline congregation.
3. Bruce actually uses emergence (the scientific theory) and applies it to congregational life. The Emerging Church Movement got its name from a previously developed theory, and Bruce returns to the theory and then moves to discussing the church. If new life emerges in the world through this pattern, then we should look for things to emerge in similar conditions and patterns in our congregations.
4. Bruce effectively introduces spiral dynamics into congregational thinking. If you don’t know about spiral dynamics then you probably haven’t been thinking someone should have done this already, but if you have, I think Bruce does a good job and mentions in the podcast doing more writing in this area. If you are interested, check out Ken Wilber’s A Brief Theory of Everything.
5. Bruce equips the reader for facilitating Spirit-filled community transformation. The second half of the book, after he spells out his theological vision of ministry, is really accessible to any minister who wants to hear how Bruce took the best out there in community development, transformation, and leadership and implemented it in a congregation.
I could think of a number of other reasons to read this book, but most of them I talk to him about in this week’s Homebrewed Christianity podcast, so do yourself a favor and listen to it.
Related: The Emerging Church – A Book Review by Jonathan Brink
Tripp Fuller is a Baptimergent, tag-team minister with his wife Alecia, proud father of Elgin, PhD student at Claremont, and co-host of Homebrewed Christianity.
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This book sounds very interesting in the way that the author wrestles with the reality of emerging theology in ministry. However, I’m pretty sure that the term “emergence” did not come from the previously developed scientific/philosophical definition. The term became popular after Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church. He used the term to describe churches which were connecting with “emerging generations.”
Tripp, I appreciate your view of the book. I think you’ve captured what I liked about it.
It is in someways sad that the two “emerging churches” in his explanations will get confused because I think they are both great conversations.
Hey Scot. George Henry Lewis first used the word “emergence” for a scientific theory in the middle of the 19th century. I imagine Dan Kimball was one of the first to use it in relation to the church, but I think the Andrew Jones found someone using it in the 80’s. I simply meant that Bruce develops his ideas out the ‘emergence’ theory in science and not what we know as the emerging church movement. Hope that clarifies.
Jonathan, I agree. I really like science-religion dialog and I really like hanging out a my cohort.
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The term “emergence” did not come from the previously developed theology. The term became popular after Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church. He used the term to describe churches which were connecting with “emerging generations.”