A few years ago the UK experienced a "Deep Church" wave. There were books, blogs, lecture series,  Now the USA is taking a look at this term that C.S. Lewis preferred for his book "Mere Christianity".

Hot off the press is Jim Belcher's book called Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional". I took a quick look this morning.

Initial responses:

- Jim Belcher seems like a lovely guy with a good mind and a big heart. I think we will be meeting up at Lausanne 3 next year in South Africa. Look forward to it.

- Jim has really caught the attention of the American church with this book and it seems to promote unity and understanding. Good.

-. I am a little uncomfortable with the idea that the emerging church emerged out of protest, which Don Carson also suggested in his book. For me, and thousands of others like me, it was a strategic move towards a more sustainable, effective, contextually appropriate way of creating new church structures for a new wave of Jesus followers in a way that jived with the Scriptures AND the denomination's [I was Baptist] framework at the same time. And not having any money to buy buildings or pay pastors salaries meant we just did what we could with what we had and what we could find (coffee shops, etc) . And the traditional denominations and organizations applauded what we were doing and were quick to support it. Of course we had to do a little reminding of what pioneer ministry looks like in our world as well as how it looked like for them when they first started.

- The distance between the traditional and the emerging is not as wide as most people think. Many denominations have a two track (traditional and emerging) strategy reflected in their budget and staffing. I would say most new church starts are actually "emerging" whether planted by traditional or emerging groups. Also, many of the emerging church's key leaders have either been brought on staff on older mission organization or denominations, or they have been deeply embedded all the time and there has not been a significant controversy over doctrine or methodology. The few mavericks get all the attention. Controversy sells.

- A really good review of the book is by Kevin DeYoung, who, despite being on the opposite side of me, comes out with pretty much the same conclusions.

- The Pryos liked it. Who would have thought?

-. The conversation on "deep church" and "deep ecclesiology" happened a few years ago in the UK, and was followed closely by Jason Clark . The key book was Remembering our Future: Explorations in Deep Church by Andrew Walker and Luke Bretherton.

- The conversation in the UK pointed back to the Great Tradition, especially as outlined by DH Williams in his two excellent books: Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism; A Primer for Suspicious Protestants which I suggested in my review was a better and more edgy book that his later "Evangelicals and Tradition". Jim Belcher also points to the Great Tradition, and references DH Williams, and I hope his American audience takes note.

- There is plenty of good material online around the subject "deep ecclesiology". I taught on it many times, In fact, I think I coined the word in Europe in 2002. It was later was picked up by Brian McLaren and adopted by Emergent Village officially, and other groups more informally. I dont find Belcher referencing much of this previous conversation. But maybe he is a book person and not a blog person. All the same, Belcher points the church in a good direction and good things will no doubt come of it.

"A deep ecclesiology, from what I have seen, is still around the corner." Andrew Jones, The Ooze, 2002

- I have 200 books on the emerging church and really don't need more unless they significantly add to the conversation. But Jim Belcher's book does and deserves to be on the shelf. However, I am still not convinced that we need a third way. So I will keep on planting new churches as someone equally at home in the traditional and the emerging global mission scene.

The post itself is not very interesting but there were some insightful comments that I guess were interesting reading. Cant remember what they were and I cant remember what the article that I was pointing to said either. Something about why nudes are OK in old Christian paintings but too controversial for photography in the Christian world of the 21st Century.

Nothing to see folks, please move on.

Festival organizer Denny Hurst has asked me to be the VJ [bless his heart] which was a WISE CHOICE! In fact, I really think the entire festival will be all about me and my out-of-this-world video jockeying abilities. Really! Suplementing my video magic will be a number of bands from all over Europe, USA and UK, including Verra Cruz [YEAH!] all of which will do a fine job in accentuating the various subtleties of my pixel painting, brain-numbing transitions, and glorious digital grafitti. Also present will be the legendary Pastor Bob Beeman and Rob Cassels who are probably just coming because they heard that I was the VJ.

Of course the Rock on Christmas story at Myspace is heavily biased towards the music, but its all a matter of perspective.

Hey - wait a minute . . . thats us!

This is me, waking up this morning in Portugal, in a pre-coffee state, standing next to our overlander truck named Maggie. Its a bit small for a family of 7 [and their friends] but we often find ourselves in tight situations where a larger vehicle wouldn't make it.

Because my job has me traveling to out-of-the-way mission projects and social enterprises that are often off the grid, I need a 4x4 truck that can get us there and back again. Its pretty slow on the highway - top speed of 90km - but its reliable. It has an air-cooled 6 cyclinder engine that gets about 14 MPG. Its not much but we carry a lot of people and weight. I call it the Great Commission vehicle.

Most frequent question is about schooling and our 5 children. Answer - we home-school our kids and they love it. Well, actually, my wife Debbie does most of the homeschooling. And right now we have a tudor named Donald who is traveling with us and helping to teach.

We have actually done this "families on the road" thing a fair bit. Our first motorhome was in California in the early 90's. We bought a 1969 Ford based camper van for $2400 and lived in it while I studied at Fuller Seminary in California. In 1998, we traveled around USA in a boring white van, sleeping at National Parks in a tent. A church in Florida took pity on us (Spanish River) and gave us a ten year old Winnebago that was donated to them and all of a sudden we were back to full time life on the road.

Those were great times! In 1999, we covered 25,000 miles around USA, going to almost every state. My job was to help start and encourage new church movements among America's urban youth so it turned out to be a very efficient and economical way of getting around. We went to all the states except the Dakotas.

By 2003, we were living in Europe. We bought an old Czech camper van for $1000 and used it to get around Europe. It died a sad death in Italy, as some of you blog readers might remember.

The next few years we rented a small apartment in Scotland while I flew out to speak at conferences and train church planters. I was gone a third of the time and I struggled to afford getting out to where I often needed to be. And my family felt disconnected from all these overseas projects. Eventually, we decided to get back on the road. We found Maggie for sale for £3500 but it needed a lot of work. Still does. But we are fixing it up as we go along, and as funds become available.

So here we are, on the road again. We have visited a dozen countries already this year and expect to visit nearly 30 by the end of next year. We get to visit the kind of missional entrepreneurs who, despite doing a fantastic job, would probably never attend the kind of conferences I have been teaching at over the years.

And all of this despite a whopping cut to our funds that would have immobilized us if we hadn't switched over to the itinerant lifestyle made possible through a home on wheels. Not saying its always cheap, because there are expenses related to traveling (food costs more) that you dont think about. But it certainly working for us. And about half a million Americans who live on the road. And that number includes quite a few families that travel because its an economical way to arrive at and stay for a while in places that have projects needing people to help.

Any other families like us out there? Love to meet up.

"Dear friends, after a long time in the making I am happy to finally present the release of "The Starfish Manifesto", my latest book. We released it in Antioch this October.   

Why?

The church in the West will use up much of this coming decade to rebound from the financial recession and to restructure in a more sustainable way, much like the church did in the 1930's after the Great Recession which started about 1929. As a response to the financial bruising on the Western church system (church, seminary, publishing. parachurch, conference - all of which are co-dependent and therefore suffering together), new forms of Christian based co-operative structures will emerge, as they did with Toyohiko Kagawa in 1930's Japan.

I wrote in 1999 that the next decade (this present decade) would see young people "turn old church buildings into art lounges". That happened. But in this new decade, many of these new art lounges, recording studios, coffee houses, craft spaces, and new media labs will move to a deeper level of involvement and empowerment.

In the next decade, a stronger business sense will inform these new forms as well as assist the new monastic communities and traditional churches in general. In a concerted effort to get church ministry on a solid financial footing, or to start new ministries with a diminished budget, many traditional churches will offer their buildings mid-week as micro-business enterprise labs and will become micro-credit unions for their local communities. The word "fellowship" will regain its meaning of sharing and risk-taking. Emerging church energies will be re-directed from creative worship arts to creative social enterprises which will enable long term sustainability. In both realms, women will come to the front as some of the most successful missional entrepreneurs

1930' s writings from theologians Barth and Bonhoeffer will continue in their popularity (no-brainer) but we will also revisit Dorothy Day (USA) and Dorothy Sayers (UK).

Having already "re-traditioned" and "re-sourced" our theological and missiological base for church and mission, we will feel more confident to launch out further into the world with transformational models that will change the world without draining the next generation's resources. The next decade will be a time of sustainable outreach, measurable by a far more holistic criteria of success (4 bottom lines?) and we will find helpful and surprising precedents in the 1930's.

But then again, I am not a prophet and I could be horribly and embarrassingly WRONG!

"Andrew,

Thanks for blogging about SimChurch and taking part in the blog tour. Your question was, “Can you elaborate on the date 1985? What was going on then with virtual church?”

1985 was, as they say, a good year. You have pointed out the roots of the emerging church begin in 1985, but this was also the same year that we can see a beginning for the online church movement as well. Not disregarding your post about the ‘Virtual Church in the 1940’s’ or the church’s long-standing and largely-successful relationship with using technology to ‘help make church happen,’ 1985 was the year that online church actually occurred online.

Today, no one seems to really know much about that very first church in 1985, who was involved or what it believed … it appears more as a footnote in books on the internet than anything else (and since I too am interested in knowing more, if anyone knows details about this group, please email me). So I can’t give you their name or their specific creed, if they had one. But I can say that it reveals one striking fact about the church and God’s work in our world.

1985, if I have my internet history correct, was the first year that any ‘regular people’ could get online in any real capacity. I at the time had a PCjr, and was not online, but MS-DOS that year had networking support, and CompuServe was available in the US. (As a marker, AOL and Prodigy launched in the 1990s). Even though this was at the very outset of a new medium of communication, the church went there and became the church. And to me, this is what it reveals about the beauty of the church: that it can go anywhere, by anyone, by the power of God. In fact, I would argue that it must; that if God’s word is true that his people will naturally extend the church to wherever they may be; whether that be in a different continent or even a different ‘world,’ the virtual world. 1985 shows that there will always be people of God who are on mission, wherever that mission may lead. And I for one praise God for that." Douglas Estes

Thanks Doug

Can anyone shed more light on 1985?

I can relate to Dr Masters and this is one of the reasons why, even though I should probably be a New Calvinist, I am not.

I should be a New Calvinist

I was baptised Presbyterian. I graduated from a reformed Bible College. All my church history professors were from Westminster Theological Seminary. My nickname was Spurgeon because I read so much of him and would not preach a sermon until I had consulted what Charlie said on the same verse. I used to fall asleep with a copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs in my hand. Anything the Banner of Truth published, I bought and read. I SHOULD HAVE BECOME A NEW CALVINIST!

What attracted me was a high commitment to the Scriptures and the no-compromise stance of Reformers who were willing to risk death for their beliefs. I didn't find the same commitment in other streams of Christianity. If I was living back then, when the Puritans and Covenanters and Reformers were shedding their blood, I would have joined them.

But I am not a New Calvinist.

I have issues with some Reformed theology and New Calvinism which hinder me from going further. In a nutshell, I think a lot of the reformed theology I once considered dear is:

- irreversibly Western and not accountable to nor appreciative of the emerging global-south based theology (afraid of the power shift?)

- strangely stuck in the 17th and 19th Century

- locked up in the New Testament, especially the epistles, and not always sourced sufficiently in the Old in a way that brings continuity and coherency to the New.

- often lacking in an adequate Biblical response to the threat of materialism, consumerism, military aggression, environmental degradation, poverty, celebrity-based pulpit ministry, and a few other issues that seem to be blind-spots.

- overly committed to highly attractional forms of Sunday morning ministry that center too strongly around the one-big-hairy-male behind the pulpit and not enough around sending out the church (priesthood) to preach the gospel in the world during the week.

- an identity forged out of not belonging to the Roman Catholic Church (apparently the bad guys) that often becomes an unguarded smugness against the influences of Babylon in its own backyard.

Or am I missing something?

However, I am thankful that so many inside and outside the emerging church have managed to salvage and secure much of the Reformed contributions under this banner of New Calvinism and amazed that Time Mag took note of it. I even bought a hard copy!  I also have much to be thankful for regarding my many years of immersion in Reformed writings. Some parts of Reformed theology have been recently enhanced in my own mind, including a robust theology of the invisible church. The Book of Hebrews in particular, that I blogged about recently. And probably a whole lot more that will come to mind once I have uploaded this post. I am sure there are eager readers out there who will remind me.

Anyway, Happy Reformation Day!

Check out my Previous Reformation Day Posts: 2006  2007 2008 and others on the topic today:

Campi, The Riddler, Big Al, DeYoung (of 'Why We're Not Emergent, By Two Guys Who Should Be' fame), a brand new blog that opened today called Justification by Grace . . and . .. . actually, just go back to Campi and click on the bloggers in his "Blogs Worth Reading" list.

Steve Knight is the guy behind it. Steve and I had a really long SKYPE call a month or so ago and he explained the ideas behind this network and also their event next April. Steve is just a really great guy. He has been with the Billy Graham Association and more recently a mission called SIM. He gives time to other groups also like EV and whatever projects he sees God doing something in. And of course he has been blogging for a long time.  

- Mark DeVine speaks well of the Emerging Church on MP3, making it safe for emerging Baptists to come out of hiding.

- Carson Clark responds to Dr Claytor's claims about the emerging church at Toccoa Falls College. Start at Part 3 and work backwards.

- Johnathon Wilson-Hartgrove discusses his new book on Cooperative economics called "God's Economy: Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel."

- Dallas hosts an emerging church meeting Nov 13 with McLaren and Rohr.

- Episcopal Village launches in USA. It raises the question "What if the church took the responsibility of raising young emerging churches or new fresh expression ministries in their neighborhood, diocese, and nation? "  

- Becky Garrison just published an essay on alternative church movements in Yale's Reflections. Its called "A Mixed Economy of Church in a Post-Christian Marketplace" and I wish I could upload the article here but you will have to buy the paper version. If you are reading the quote from me and wondering where on my blog that wonderful eloquent quote is located, well, sorry but its in the 2004 archives but Google was ignoring it this morning. Maybe someone else has the link?

- The "Fresh Expressions" movement in the UK, an initiative of Archbishop Rowan Williams , happily reports that there are close to 800 projects now in the UK. The Fresh Expressions one year course named Mission Shaped Ministry now has 1200 students. Not bad for the first 3 years of existence. More information on Fresh Expressions and some practical advice on how to get started, with the occasional comment by me and a few others, is available on Share The Guide.

Anyway, the innovative Christian leaders conference last week was held in Turkey which, although the birthplace of Christian missions, is now quite a sensitive spot to discuss these issues and thus the lack of publicity. A few bloggers were there, like Guy Muse and Marc Van der Woude but the blogger with the skinny on Antioch is actually Mercy Simpson at While We Slept. Who else was blogging???

The significant but understated Antioch Gathering involved 72 [now there's a biblical number] church and mission leaders praying and talking for a week in Seleucia, near Antioch. My good friend Wolfgang Simson, who gave much of the inspiration to this event, just sent me some collected thoughts on the meeting and has given me permission to post the report here on my blog. Which I am doing right now. Happy reading.

Summary of Antioch gathering in Turkey, 2009

Was I there? Well, you would think so because I was planning on it and talking about it for a long time. And because I spent a good amount of time at Wolfgang's house in Germany, discussing this meeting in Turkey and his Starfish Manifesto, which he officially released during the week. But, alas, as it worked out, I could not swing it due to lack of finances, my family on the road, and my passport getting processed for UK visa. But hey - a mission gathering of 73 Christian leaders would not have had the same music as a number like . . . 72.

Enjoy the read. I would be happy to host a conversation on some of the issues if anyone was interested. Let me know.

Related: John Piper just talked about The Legacy of Antioch

- Makers: Cory has a new book called Makers being serialized at Tor. It comes out November. I met Cory at Tech Active in London

- Yahoo just pulled the plug on Geocities which was the host for my first blog "Andrew's Tea Salon" back in 1997. We had no computer, no software, no money and no idea how to make a website but Geocities solved all that for us. Thanks Geocities. We will miss you.

If I had any questions about the book, it would be about the history of the virtual (internet based) church which Douglas points to as starting in 1985. Thats an interesting date because I have been saying the Emerging Church movement also started in 1985 with some fresh models of church that informed and inspired many of us. Douglas - what community or project were you thinking of when you said that? I have just sent you an email and will post your response below when you reply.

Related on TSK: The Skinny on Cyberchurch, Virtual Church in the 1940's, The Virtual Church: Keeping It Real

Wow! Its been amazing and really heart-warming to see so many of you pitch in to help us launch into the next season. People have created their own widgets on our behalf, pur other widgets on their blogs, promoted our cause through twitter and facebook and good old fashioned email, and suggested ways to use new media for our mission. Bill Kinnon even made a video from an interview of me and went viral on it. Wow! We have now raised $3000 on Givezooks. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!

But we are not there yet. Most urgent need right now [since you were asking] is £895 for visas that we absolutely MUST pay by Oct 18.

And so we are off, thanks to you, across England today to get the midnight ferry to France. Pray for safety.

Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss was sitting in front of me at The Feast. She is a web design guru with a huge following among designers and geeks. It was really nice to meet her but I have to say that her blog is sooooooo much better looking than mine which now appears SCRUFFY and very . . . non-Swiss. Maybe its time for a redesign?

I asked her if she used Helvetica as her favourite font which was a redundant question. Of course she does. On her blog is a link to a arial vs. helvetica test. YEAH HELVETICA!

Would you agree with me that her design appeals more to men [and geeky men like Johannes who is sitting next to me) than women?

This was my most re-twittered twitter for the day. The sentence was given to me, not by a presenter, but by participant Brad Sargent (futuristguy) who is actually paraphrasing Helen Haste. I edited it further into Twitter length. Nice to hang with you, Brad!

Values: Community ownership, financial viability, cultural contextual, comprehensive sanitation, women participation.

Avoiding a lot of big time foundations, Charity Water raised $11million from 60,000 donors. 100% goes to the field and they raise money for their own expenses. They are "restoring faith in charity work." Donors can view all the projects on Google earth.

Social media has been helpful. They are the first charity to surpass one million Twitter followers. Impressive!

Her solution involved "amplifying girls' and women's economic potential by launching female-run franchises that manufacture and distribute low priced, high-quality, environmentally-friendly sanitary pads." Her idea became a reality and its called Sustainable Health Development (SHE)

She is talking now, here at The Feast, about her social enterprise and noting that words like "menstration" and "sanitary pads" make guys feel uncomfortable [not me!!] so she is helping us all "shake it out" by having us shout out the words. Hey . . . I can do that right here on the blog. MENSTRATION!!!! SANITARY PADS!!! There you go. Not too hard at all.

Challenge: Do your homework before you pitch your idea. Elizabeth did and it worked. And her enterprise is working also. Check it out on Facebook and the current campign

Trivia: Mum.org is the official Home of the Menstrual Museum

BTW: This is the first post on TallSkinnyKiwi that has used the tag "menstration" and will probably be the only one. Period. I mean full stop.

- Collaboration, not competition.

- Appropriate technology.

- Engage. Entertain, Connect.

- Dont lose sight of the bigger picture.

Josh is President of Slow Food USA, a movement that I have always appreciated. He is talking about school lunches under the Time For Lunch campaign, diabetes, obesity, waste, and other food related issues that need to be addressed.

Previously on Tallskinnykiwi, I have suggested a slow Sunday and a cruelty-free Christmas. I also have some thoughts on what the Bible says about a cruelty-free diet