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TechnoratiThe traditional church and the emerging church can't seem to get along.
They're often hostile to each other and denounce the other side in their writings and at conferences. But one insider to both sides has made the effort to listen to both positions without cherry picking arguments and bring some understanding to the debate.
"I just felt like nobody was listening," Jim Belcher, author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional, told The Christian Post.
Although criticisms have been thrown left and right for more than a decade, neither side was being fairly represented and attacks were being made using the most extreme cases or worst-case scenarios, Belcher notes in his book.
Just as Calvinism cannot be defined solely by the unfortunate event of the burning of the heretic Servetus or by the claim that John Calvin was a theocrat, the emerging church cannot be narrowed to Brian McLaren or to the denial of truth and the traditional church cannot be solely linked to fundamentalism or sectarianism.
"Anytime if we’re going to persuade someone we have to listen well and we have to represent them in a way that they would recognize, not the way the critics would recognize," Belcher said.
An insider
Belcher, 44, was part of the emerging church circle even before the term "emerging" was coined. In the late 1990s, he teamed up with Mark Oestreicher in ministry to launch an alternative service for Generation X; started up weekly conversations in Southern California with such young pastors as Rob Bell; and attended a Gen X conference where Mark Driscoll first started the buzz about postmodernism when many were still unfamiliar with the term.
All of them were not satisfied with the way church was being done. As Belcher wrote in his book, "We were young and idealistic, trying to devise the perfect church, or at least one that was better than what we had known."
Although he was an insider to the emerging church discussion since its inception and his friends and former colleagues are now major players on the emerging stage, Belcher had serious qualms about the direction some were headed. He agreed with them when assessing the problems in the traditional church but was uneasy about some of the answers to the questions they raised.
He was caught in between but he was comfortable with that ambiguity. It allowed him to learn from both camps, he wrote.
Today, Belcher leads a church within a historic Protestant denomination – Presbyterian Church in America. It's not so much that he gave up on the emerging church and returned to the traditional route, but it was his attempt at finding "a third way," or what he calls "the deep church" – a phrase he borrowed from C.S. Lewis.
Is unity impossible?
In his quest to find the third way, he was motivated to help heal the divisions in the church. And with a foot in both camps, Belcher was able to move beyond the assumptions and rhetorical shoutings and present both sides without any bias – at least judging from the feedback he's been getting.
"What I’ve been absolutely amazed is that people on both sides, even if they disagree with my third way, really are not disagreeing with how I represent them," Belcher noted to The Christian Post. "They’re all feeling like they were heard."
When writing the book, Belcher did not rely solely on his past experiences with those in the emerging camp to present their convictions. He read dozens of books (some three times over), perused many blogs and jumped on airplanes to visit and spend time with emerging church leaders.
He boiled down all their dissatisfaction with the traditional church to seven main categories of protest: captivity to Enlightenment rationalism; a narrow view of salvation; belief before belonging; uncontextualized worship; ineffective preaching; weak ecclesiology; and tribalism. Continue »
