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Reminiscent of our roots: Church experts liken emergent movement to early Methodism David W. Reid, Jun 12, 2009
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAKEESHA FISHER
David Fisher reads while holding his daughter Aliyah at the Revolution faith community service at Alley Cat Café in Fort Collins, Colo.
By David W. Reid Special Contributor
FORT COLLINS, Colo.—When a dozen people in the Revolution faith community gather on a Sunday afternoon in a carriage house on West Mountain Avenue, they are engaging in cutting-edge Christianity. They are part of the emergent “conversation” that includes many who are fed up with church-growth strategies.
When the congregation at First United Methodist Church meets Sunday morning, they regularly welcome new additions to an 11.5 million-member denomination that has been running a massive awareness campaign to slow the rate of numerical decline.
Over the past eight years, the national campaign—“Open Hearts. Open Minds. Open Doors.”—has created an estimated 4 billion unduplicated impressions to the target audience of persons ages 25-54 at a cost of approximately $27 million. Phase two of that campaign, called Rethink Church, was launched in May.
Is there anything besides a belief in Jesus that these two groups have in common?
Plenty, say experts on the Methodist movement that started with John Wesley in 18th-century England. The emergent movement is today what Methodism once was.
“I see amazing connections between early Methodism and contemporary developments” in North America, said the Rev. Paul W. Chilcote, professor of historical theology and Wesleyan studies at Ashland Theological Seminary in Ashland, Ohio.
The heart of that connectedness is the “rediscovery of the missional church,” he said.
“Missional” is a key concept of the emergent movement. For Makeesha Fisher, who with her husband, David, helps organize Revolution, it means living with an outward orientation.
“Instead of spending vast amounts of time and energy and resources serving our own churches, missional Christians seek to live externally—to invest in the lives of their neighbors, their neighborhoods and their cities,” she said. “They desire to do this not as a manipulative tool to get people to become Christian, but rather as a realization that we are indeed ‘little christs,’ we are incarnations of Christ on earth today.”
That’s exactly how early Methodists saw themselves, said Dr. Chilcote, an ordained elder in the North Indiana Conference who spoke recently in Fort Collins. Other commonalities include an emphasis on narrative and biography, the formative nature of worship, the importance of Eucharist and the centrality of eating together and sharing food.
Nationwide, many emergents continue to identify themselves as United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans and other denominations. Some 25 percent of emergents identify themselves as Catholic. In March, the first Emergent-Catholic conference sponsored by Emergent Village will be held in Albuquerque, N.M. There are even emergent Jews who seek to reinvigorate the Jewish house of worship using similar approaches.
How significant is the emergent movement?
Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the religion department of Publisher’s Weekly, believes it is central to the kind of massive global change in Christianity that occurs only once every 500 years. In fact, she can sound a lot like the Revolution’s Ms. Fisher.
In her book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why (Baker, 2008), Ms. Tickle writes, “The duty, the challenge, the joy and excitement of the Church and for the Christians who compose her, then, is in discovering what it means to believe that the kingdom of God is within one and in understanding that one is thereby a pulsating, vibrating bit in a much grander network.”
There are two kinds of interest in the emerging missional movement within United Methodism, said the Rev. Taylor Burton-Edwards, director of worship resources for the denomination’s General Board of Discipleship in Nashville, Tenn.
One strand is the people who are part of the movement and also identify themselves as United Methodists. To support them, Mr. Burton-Edwards has set up a blog, organized a conference and is planning another for later this year.
The other type of interest is from those who are trying to create worship services designed to bring more young adults into their congregations. For them, he has a warning.
“That’s not where the emerging missional church is coming from at all,” said Mr. Burton-Edwards. “In fact, it is the dead opposite.” The difference is between an attractional focus and a missional one.
“Attractional means we are trying to get more folks in with us,” he said. “Missional means we are trying to send more people out as disciples of Jesus to live this way wherever they are throughout the rest of their lives. Those two impulses are not real compatible.” Early Methodism swept through England in the 18th century by taking advantage of the existing structure called “societies,” which involved people gathering together to accomplish a common purpose. It was like a network, said Mr. Burton-Edwards.
Methodists were involved in class meetings of no more than 12 people who gathered every week for 60-90 minutes to “hold each other accountable” to live by the General Rules set out by Wesley. They encouraged each other to care for the poor, visit those in prison and overcome certain evil tendencies in their own lives.
Groups of classes came together for society meetings on Sunday nights.
Methodist societies forced people into direct contact with the poor, prisoners and the marginalized, and to do something about the situation. They were the driving force behind the abolition of slavery and child labor in Britain.
Wesley proved to be “absolutely horrible as a pastor,” said Mr. Burton-Edwards, but he was “a tremendous community organizer.”
Mr. Burton-Edwards believes the whole system began to bog down and lose its distinctive edge when Methodists started forming congregations in America in 1784. Wesley’s rules required active participation in both the class meeting and the society meeting. But by 1850, there were essentially no class meetings left in the church.
Today’s United Methodists should not accept the “mythology” that Methodism equals congregations, said Mr. Burton-Edwards.
“If you look at what John Wesley was doing in the latter half of his life with the Methodist societies, he was spending about as much time kicking people out as he was taking them in,” said Mr. Burton-Edwards.
“Part of the power of it was the recognition that congregations have no way to help people grow because they have no way to hold people accountable. The norms of accountability in a congregation are whatever the civil norms are. It’s not the way of Jesus and hasn’t been since about the sixth century.”
Contemporary spiritual renewal programs could help revive small-group accountability, said Mr. Burton-Edwards. For example, there is the Walk to Emmaus for Protestants and the Cursillo movement for Catholics.
Congregations serve a useful purpose as the public face of the church, he said, and they should welcome everyone. But they are not equipped to do what a network of small groups can accomplish. Too often, they are so overburdened that they become the point of network failure.
Unlike pollster George Barna, who has predicted the demise of congregations and rapid growth for house churches and other organic groups, Mr. Burton-Edwards believes congregations will continue. He is encouraged that in 2008 the United Methodist Church adopted an emphasis on starting new congregations.
“But if we think starting new congregations equals making disciple of Jesus Christ capable of transforming the world,” he said, “it isn’t going to happen.”
Mr. Reid is editor and publisher of Vital Theology newsletter.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAKEESHA FISHER
Nationwide, many emergents continue to identify themselves as United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans and other denominations. Some 25 percent of emergents identify themselves as Catholic. In March, the first Emergent-Catholic conference sponsored by Emergent Village will be held in Albuquerque, N.M. There are even emergent Jews who seek to reinvigorate the Jewish house of worship using similar approaches. 
