Murder on the Emerging Church Express. 

INTRODUCTION: The Emergence of the Emerging Church movement in 2000AD.

The Greenbelt Festival office in London, when I visited it in April, 2000AD, had part of the original stone London Wall, the line of the old Roman wall of Londinium, running through their office. What might have looked like an architect’s serpentine block of white stones was actually part of history, reaching back to AD200.

My host was Andy Thornton, a well-respected musician in the London clubs, and Director of the Greenbelt Festival that had suddenly dropped from 20,000 people every Bank Holiday in August to only 2,000 people due to a controversy involving someone invited to speak on stage who had claims to witchcraft. The churches were appalled and pulled their youth groups out and Andy was left with the task of restoring Greenbelt to its former glory, which actually happened, much to his credit, in only a few years. 

Greenbelt Festival has now been running over 50 years. My late friend Andrew Lawson-Johnson up in Scotland once told me it was started on his father’s farm in the days of hippies and it had connections with the American Cornerstone Festival in Peoria, Illinois. By the time I got to visit Greenbelt, there was a regular group of creatives who experimented with how new technologies could influence the way we do worship. They were assigned a special area at Greenbelt called the “New Forms Venue”. The name for this experimental movement was Alt. Worship, with a history reaching back to Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield in the late 80’s, and the Late Late Service in Glasgow that Andy Thornton was a part of, but later would be connected also with Fresh Expressions and Emerging Church. 

So I was feeling a little overwhelmed with all this history of Christian creativity and connection to the fringe parts of culture and feeling privileged to be at the centre of the greatest Anglican festival and at the heart of this artistic innovation. While I was there at the Greenbelt office, Andy checked his mail right in front of me and there was a package from New Zealand. This interested me because I am from New Zealand although have lived overseas most of my life. 

Andy recognised the sender immediately and tore off the paper. It was a book. The title was “The Prodigal Project: Journey into the Emerging Church” and its writers were two Kiwis, Mark Pierson and Mike Riddell, and one Aussie, Cathy Kilpatrick. 

Apparently Cathy had a kind of cafe church in Sydney. Mark Pierson was a Baptist pastor in Auckland who was experimenting with different forms of decentralised worship but managed to gain great respect among the Brits. Mike Riddell was also a Baptist pastor who created a sensation when he stood up for the poor at the courthouse in his area of Auckland (Ponsonby) who were losing their housing to yuppies. “This is what you are doing to the poor”, Mike said, as he stripped off all his clothes to make his point. Of course the newspapers spread that story up and down the country but the real reason why the Baptists kicked him out was a novel he wrote called “The Insatiable Moon” (1997), which became a movie in 2010 and had a love scene that was somewhat erotic. And so Mike Riddell became a Roman Catholic.

But the book The Prodigal Project was quite passionate, a critique damning the banal church worship and dull church life that turned people off from church and pointed towards a new potential path of creativity using the current tools of technology and redemptive imagination. The book even came with an interactive CD-ROM which was way ahead of its time. 

In 2000AD, as I stood in that Greenbelt office, I had just come over to UK from the USA where I was part of a group of initially ten people called “The Young Leaders Network”. We were sponsored by Leadership Network and we hosted conferences all over America trying to help church leaders see that there was a big change afoot, more than a generational age difference but actually a worldview shift. We used the word “postmodern” a lot. At these conferences, Tom and Christine Sine used to come and offer a supplementary final day to help synchronise what we had learned. It was Tom Sine who told me about the amazing people in NZ including Mark Pierson and Steve Taylor, who was also a Baptist pastor and would become another amazing emerging church leader, with a blog called EmergentKiwi, as well as later becoming the Principal of Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership. I actually did not know any of these Christian leaders at the time but eventually they all became my dear friends. 

But anyway, in the year 2000AD, the term “emerging church” from that book stuck with me. It made me feel like a movement was underway and perhaps I might be a part of it. Because as the book described the kind of decentralised journeys of worship experiences, I had already created a large multi-media worship labyrinth in 1999 at Austin First Baptist Church, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy for the SXSW Festival. And even though the alt. Worship scene in the UK was a little more mature and deeper than what we were doing in USA at the time, I felt I was part of a movement. 

That movement went by different names. Both emerging and emergent. Steve Taylor in NZ was “Emergent Kiwi” on the blogs. Kester Brewin, whose alt. Worship church called Vaux was an early example, wrote an amazing chapter in his book The Complex Christ (2003) how emergence theory related to this new movement of church and worship and so “emerging” and “emergent theory” were always connected in our minds. 

So . . . that was my introduction to a global movement called The Emerging Church which would take me all over the world to connect with similar minds and hearts and worship experiments and organic forms of church, in Japan, Colombia, Prague, Indonesia, China, Canada, Australia, and dozens of other countries. 

Over the next few years, many movements arose that would claim that term. The “Emerging Church Network” in Texas, sponsored by the BGCT was the one I was most involved with. But there was also “Emergent Village”, also in USA, who would start up about 18 months after, who had some origins in the Leadership Network group I was a part of and gained more attention because they secured book contracts from the Christian publishing world. And of course similar groups in Europe and Asia and beyond. Some used the term and others did not. 

And yet this movement that was touted as one of the most exciting and pivotal church movements of the 21st century came to a tragic sudden end. Either a natural death or something more sinister. Either it ran its course and gave way to the next incarnation or someone or something killed it on purpose. And this is the mystery.

And that is what I would like to find out. I am interested in taking this conversation forward. Are you???? If you are, let me know in the comments and then we can start playing out what might have happened. I might need your help to fit all the pieces together. Are you game????