Eddie Gibbs - Churchmorph: How Megatrends Are Reshaping Christian Communities

church morph

how megatrends are
reshaping christian communities

eddie gibbs

2009 by Eddie Gibbs

Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 495166287
www.bakeracademic.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gibbs, Eddie.

ChurchMorph : how megatrends are reshaping Christian communities / Eddie Gibbs.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8010-3762-7 (pbk.)

1. Church renewal. 2. Church growth. 3. CommunitiesReligious aspects Christianity. 4. PostmodernismReligious aspectsChristianity. I. Title.

BV600.3.G527 2009
270.8 3dc22 2009009314

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION . NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Material from The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier by Tony Jones 2008 by Jossey-Bass reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Material from Reveal: Where Are You? by Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson 2007 by Willow Creek Association duplicated with permission.

contents

Allelon is a network of missional church leaders, schools, and parachurch organizations that inspires, engages, trains, educates, and provides resources to leaders working to fulfill the churchs mission in our culture. Simply put, together we are a movement of missional leaders.

We want, in particular, to serve those who are involved in new forms of missional communities (sometimes called emerging), those starting new congregations within denominational systems, and those in existing congregations who are working toward missional identity and engagement. Our desire is to encourage, support, coach, and offer companionship for missional leaders as they discern new models of church capable of sustaining a living and faithful witness to the gospel in our contemporary world.

The word allelon is a common but overlooked Greek word that is reciprocal in nature. In the New Testament it is most often translated one another. Christian faith is not an individual matter. Everything in the life of the church is done allelon, for the sake of the world. A Christian community is defined by the allelon sayings in Scripture: love one another, pursue one anothers good, build up one another.

The overarching mission of Allelon is to educate and encourage the church, learning from one another so that we might become a people among whom God lives, a people whose lives are a sign, symbol, and foretaste of Gods redeeming love in neighborhoods and in the whole of society. We seek to facilitate this reality among ordinary women and men who endeavor to participate in Gods mission to reclaim and restore all of creation, bearing witness to the world of a new way of being human.

To help accomplish this goal, Allelon has partnered with Baker Books and Baker Academic to produce resources that equip the church in thinking about and practicing missional life. We are excited to promote Eddie Gibbss book as it identifies the various trends and changes within the church in our context today. Eddie has been a wise mentor and an observer of the church for decades, and on the basis of this experience he keenly reveals some of the radical experiments that are being undertaken in the life of the church. He is a blessing to the church, and this book will help spur Gods people on into new and additional experiments as we seek to bear witness to Gods redemptive life.

Mark Priddy
CEO, Allelon International
www.allelon.org

In the course of teaching and mentoring in the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary for the past two decades, I have been deluged with books describing and critiquing persistent trends in churches throughout the Western world. These changes are evident in churches and renewal and evangelistic movements across the theological spectrum and within many traditions.

After forty-five years of professional ministry and years of reflecting on the many movements that have embodied church renewal, I feel that the time has come to step back and review the current picture, recognizing its intriguing complexity. At the outset, I acknowledge that this is an ambitious project to attempt within the pages of a short book and with my limited resources. Nevertheless, because of the convergence of a number of factors that I will address in the course of identifying the external and internal movements for change in the first two chapters, I believe an attempt is warranted and timely.

My purpose in writing is, in the first place, to inform and encourage by providing a representative, but by no means exhaustive, survey. Second, it is to offer an interpretive commentary on the most significant developments in various streams of church life in the Western world. It is important to appreciate just how extensive and complex are the changes represented by the missional church discussions, the emerging church phenomenon, the transitions taking place within some high-profile megachurches, various expressions of indigenous missional communities reaching out to the multifaceted urban cultural mosaic, and the resurgent Reformed network that is attracting a significant number of younger evangelicals. Many readers may be familiar with part of this picture, and as active participants may in fact be more knowledgeable than the author, but they may also be so immersed as to not have the benefit of being able to stand back and observe the overarching trends.

Recent retirement from a heavy teaching and mentoring load has provided me with the opportunity, between speaking engagements, to explore numerous Web sites and blogs, both to extend and to update my own awareness of current trends. The younger, tech-savvy generation certainly exhibits a high standard in terms of presentation and technical sophistication! I hope that readers will take time to sample some of the online sources that are cited. In addition to gathering information from numerous Web sites, I have had the opportunity to visit a few of the locations that are mentioned here, and I am privileged both to know some of the leaders personally and to consult occasionally with a number of them.

Having completed the first draft, I sought the wisdom of a range of leaders who could provide further insight and correct any errors they found there. I am especially grateful to the following people, who reviewed either the entire manuscript or sections that related to their own sphere of ministry: Brian Auten, Ryan Bolger, Peter Brierley, Wayne Gordon, Alan Hirsch, Cam Roxburgh, Bill White, and J. R. Woodward. I have benefited enormously from their insights and incorporated many of their suggestions.

This book is intended for two categories of readers. It is for people, like myself, who struggle to assess the extent and overall significance of current ecclesial trends, or who are worried about such trends, based upon the critiques of scholars and church leaders. It is also intended for leaders who are immersed in one of the streams to such an extent that they have little opportunity to view the bigger picture.