the Church of Scotland declared that the emergence of these churches ‘has every appearance of being one of the most significant missional movements in the recent history of Christianity in these islands’ (Drane and Drane, 2010, p. 3). Alongside an expanding flow of nonacademic books, the academic literature is taking steadily more notice of the phenomenon. Academics have begun both to critique it, such as – in the UK – Hull (2006), Milbank (2008), Davison and Milbank (2010) and Percy (2010), and to provide more sympathetic treatments, such as – again using UK examples – Ward (2002), Williams (for example 2006), Dunn (2008) and Drane (2010). Fresh expressions of church have become a topic of study in many of Britain’s theological colleges and courses (Croft, 2008a, p. 47), and the subject of a growing number of MA and PhD dissertations.1
We begin with an introduction to these new types of church – what I shall call ‘new contextual churches’. It describes four ecclesial currents that are giving rise to these churches. It offers a definition of new contextual church, provides some examples and supplies a rationale for the definition. It then summarizes the concerns these churches are raising, and against this background outlines the purpose and shape of the book.
Four tributaries
‘New contextual church’ is used here as an umbrella term to describe the birth and growth of Christian communities that serve people mainly outside the church, belong to their culture, make discipleship a priority and form a new church among the people they serve.2 They are a response to changes in society and to the new missional context that the church faces in the global North. In contrast to when it dominated society (what is known as ‘Christendom’), in most parts of the economically advanced world the church now finds itself in post-Christendom, among populations who increasingly have little or no Christian background. Four overlapping tributaries, representing different responses to this new situation, provide the streams from which new contextual churches are emerging.
Church planting
The first is church planting, which has a long history in the UK. It stretches from churches built in new urban areas during the industrial revolution, to the planting of daughter churches, to the beginnings of a new phase of church planting in the 1970s. During that decade, Patrick Blair started to develop his seven satellite congregations in Chester-le-Street, and Roger Forster began multiplying churches across south London in what became the Ichthus movement.
The tributary started to flow more rapidly in the early 1990s largely as a result of church growth missiology. The latter included an emphasis on evangelism and encouraged a new wave of church planting, inspired by the international DAWN (Disciple a Whole Nation) strategy. The strategy represented a shift from ‘come’ to ‘go’ evangelism. Rather than invite people outside church to existing congregations, new gatherings were planted in the hope of attracting those who did not attend.
However, many of these church plants suffered from having a dominant gene3 that saw church primarily in terms of Sunday worship, albeit done differently. They started down the contextual road, but did not travel far enough to reach people who were outside the church. Largely for this reason, a number of these plants were short-lived, while others had little effect on the surrounding community. ‘Many new churches failed to thrive. Some closed after years of struggle. Many more are small, weak and making little impact’ (Lings and Murray, 2003, p. 4).
A deep desire to connect church with people outside, missional reflection on postmodern culture and in some cases ‘post-evangelical’ angst encouraged more contextual and diverse forms of church planting in the late 1990s, often involving small groups below the radar of the wider church. The momentum has built up since. In addition, churches serving ethnic minority communities have proliferated, but have generally not expanded to include other cultures.
The emerging church conversation
Originating in the United States, this second tributary consists of a smorgasbord of groups and individuals who want to find what they consider to be more authentic ways to live the Christian faith. Found mainly among the Gen X and Gen Y generations, participants in the emerging church conversation seek to connect with popular culture, postmodern practice and philosophy, and reflect a widespread disenchantment with evangelicalism (Cox, 2009, p. 132; Jones, 2008, p. 68). The conversation, in which ‘Emergent’ is a prominent sub-group, comprises ‘a network of networks’ (Drane, 2008, p. 90) and has an extensive presence online and in print.
Some of those who would identify with the conversation have started new ‘emerging churches’. Based on an extensive study between 2000 and 2005, Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger (2006, pp. 44–5) found that three core practices were common to all these churches – identifying with the life of Jesus, transforming secular space (rather than separating the sacred and secular) and living as community (as a way of pursuing the kingdom within the church and beyond). These central practices combined to create six further practices – welcoming the stranger, serving with generosity, participating as producers, creating as created beings, leading as a body and taking part in spiritual activities.
Many emerging churches have developed alternative forms of worship to re-engage Christians who find existing church culturally alien and unable to speak to them, and are about to leave the church or have recently done so. Others, however, have connected with people who are further from church, and these have tended to put less emphasis on worship as a way to serve people. Especially in the US, emerging churches are generally outside the denominations, are often highly critical of them and in many cases would be suspicious of ‘fresh expressions of church’, which are emerging in the denominations.
Language within the movement has evolved. In 2011, two observers could write that:
emergence was a word used to communicate the movement as a whole . . . Emergent currently tends to reflect churches inclusive in character of all sorts of conditions of people; emerging is more representative of churches that are evangelical and conservative in nature (Gray-Reeves and Perham, 2011, p. 3).
Doug Gay has asked whether we may be near the end of ‘emerging’ as a useful term for the church (Gay, 2011, p. xi).
Fresh expressions of church
The third tributary consists of fresh expressions of church. The term was first used in print in the Church of England’s 2004 report, Mission-shaped Church, which has been highly influential. The term deliberately echoes the Preface to the Declaration of Assent, which Church of England ministers make at their licensing and which states:
The Church of England . . . professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation.
The term ‘fresh expressions’, the report proposed, ‘suggests something new or enlivened is happening, but also suggests connection to history and the developing story of God’s work in the Church’ (Mission-shaped Church, 2004, p. 34).
Since