Helpful Resource for Existing Churches Exploring Emergent Worship

Last night I started a new book (Tim Conder's "The Church in Transition: The Journey of Existing Churches into the Emerging Culture"). I think it has the possibility of being the most helpful resource I'll find this summer as I grapple with the process of introducing an emergent worship experience into an existing church. In my first 10 days, I've noticed that there are a couple of serious divides that separate communities exploring emergent worship: the most obvious are mainline efforts vs evangelical efforts; another is existing churches vs new church starts. Conder's first chapter helped me realize an unexplored assumption of mine. I had previously assumed that evangelical new starts would have a serious advantage in their emergent efforts over mainlines. I no longer think that is the case. For the past week I've been watching an emerging community attempt to emerge as a new church start from an evangelical community. What I've noticed is that this community seems to be grappling with some issues left over from the contemporary worship orientation of their previous community. It would be EXTREMELY difficult, for instance, to try to birth a small struggling community when you have previously been tied to a huge worshipping community with practically unlimited resources. Mainlines, unfortunately, have been more experienced with what it means to grapple with limited membership and resources. When I think about our efforts to explore emergent worship at Mountain View United, I feel particularly blessed since we have a rich mixture of an openness to post-modern theological exploration and resources (such as a wonderfully flexible church building) that will offer us many of the benefits of a variety of faith traditions. There are two statements from Conder that I feel especially compelled to share as they are both a wonderful words of warning. His first statements is about the task at hand, and puts our 21st century challenge into a balanced sense of historical perspective: "As in every era of challenge and change, our primary task is to find and to follow the leading of God's spirit, rather than stubbornly insist on the static paths of comfort and convenience made by our own hands and feet" (16). The other statement reminds me of the larger systemic issues involved with birthing an emergent community: "Churches that tend to copy the practices and methods of emergin church ministry without simultaneously pursuing the dialogue of transition in thought are very likely to exhibit the inauthenticiy of a really bad [hair] comb over". Til next time ...