When trying to understand something, knowing its context is critical. This is true of the Bible. It is also true for leaders. Thus, as a person connected to the phenomenon of the emerging church, I would like to tell a little bit of my story and make some observations from it as a way of providing some context and insight into how one such community developed and grew.
I have a broad ecclesiological background. I grew up attending different kinds of churches and participating in various parachurch ministries: United Methodist, Southern Baptist, an Episcopal youth group, an Evangelical Presbyterian church, and an internship at a PC(USA) college ministry, Young Life, and K-Life. But it was during my senior year of high school that Christ became the primary reality I based my life around’and it was the church that ultimately fostered that. In fact, at that point in my life, the church rescued me, becoming my family when my biological family fell apart through divorce. As a result, I have a passion for the church. I love the body of Christ. It saved my life and continues to be the primary way through which I connect to and serve God. I think that's how we are meant to experience the reality of who God is’through communities who live out their faith in real ways.
As my family was dissolving, I left home to attend college at the University of Kansas. I was a brand-new Christian. Though I had grown up in church, I had been totally out of control and self-destructive. This meant that the temptations many Christian kids struggle with at college were not that tempting for me. I had done it all already and had seen the result of that kind of life. Instead, I got involved in a campus ministry called Ichthus Christian Fellowship, sponsored by a church in Kansas City. When I started attending, there were about a hundred students involved. It was completely student led, operating with a core group of peer leaders. After being involved for one year, I was asked to be the male leader of the campus ministry, which I co-led with the woman leader and a team of ten. Together, we had a profound experience of Christianity; the only problem was that we didn't know it was profound! We thought that what we were experiencing was the normal Christian life. The way we lived our lives together flowed from our understanding of the Bible and a set of practices that facilitated a way of life. We hosted a weekly gathering on Thursday nights to worship, learn, and fellowship. It also seemed that if we were Christians, we should pray together. So we met at the campus chapel three mornings a week and prayed. Once a quarter we'd have Friday night worship services and work at the Salvation Army shelter.
The University of Kansas campus is obviously a secular environment. While there, I was an art major and lived in a fraternity. This world was messy, and it was never difficult to figure out whether you had a mission. Opportunities were everywhere, and all of these experiences created opportunities to serve God and learn. None of this is all that exceptional, but critical to it was a sense that we were a community working out our faith as a way of life. It wasn't perfect, but it was deeply good. Then something terrible happened: we graduated. We left this integrated and community-oriented world and dispersed into segmented, disintegrated, suburban American life.
After graduating, I went into the ministry as a youth pastor, working part time for Young Life and part time for a church that was a Young Life partner. In some ways, that helped my transition. But I watched as many of my friends functionally began to lose their faith. They all still "believed," but increasingly their faith in God was disconnected from a way of life lived intentionally in community. As a result, faith for many became just one of a number of compartments in their lives. Even though I was in ministry, I began to feel the same way. It felt as if I were always practicing for a game I never played in. That was my experience of faith in the church. That is not to say it wasn't a great church; it just seemed that the way faith got framed took something vital away.
I continued like this for three years, deeply unsatisfied. What do you do when you're in ministry and you don't know what to do? Go to seminary! So I uprooted my family and we moved to Denver. But after four years and $30,000, I found I was even further from this profound experience of life in Christ, of experiencing the gospel in community and the mission that naturally arose from the life we shared. When we were in college, the ministry of Ichthus had exploded’people's lives had been transformed, we were a community, it was missional. But none of this happened because we were trying to do "outreach" per se. Rather, it was the overflow of a healthy community trying to faithfully abide in Christ.
Preparing to graduate from seminary, I looked back on my experience as I tried to decide what to do next. By then, I had been involved in three church plants and had restarted a Young Life campus ministry. Through those experiences and the counsel of people who knew me, we discerned an entrepreneurial pattern. As I prayed, I reached a crisis point. In prayer, I cried out to God, "I cannot believe that the best years of my life as a Christian are behind me." I decided that I could not spend the rest of my life living off the fumes of that experience. I made a commitment to do whatever it took to figure out where God was at work and to join him in it. For me, I believed that this meant being involved in the church and not a parachurch. So we decided to move back to Kansas City to plant a church. The first task of the church would be to seek out the places where we sensed God's life and work in and around us and then join God there. I decided I was not going to go through the motions anymore. If there was no life, if the Spirit was not animating something, I had no time for it.
I mentioned earlier that I grew up within the evangelical subculture and that my background is in Fine Arts. I have an intuitive, creative personality, so the life of the soul and what cultivates it is significant to me. At the beginning, our new church was looking for ways to access God's life, so we might abide in Christ as John records Jesus instructing his disciples to do (John 15). After quickly exhausting my meager devotional resources, I began to look for more spiritual formation resources within evangelicalism. First, I found Richard Foster, who in turn led me to Dallas Willard. Those men were tremendously helpful, but there had to be more. I thought that they couldn't be the extent of the treasury of life in God literature. But in my context, they were! In the Reformed tradition, there's a lot of theology, but not much else.
One of the resources I found emerged from a relationship I made while on retreat at a Benedictine monastery outside of Kansas City. When I made the decision to plant a church, this place became a haven for me to rest, pray, study, and receive direction. I connected with a monk who has since become my spiritual director and a very good friend. For over twelve years, his mentoring has made an enormous impact on me and, through me, on our community.
It's important to realize that as Christians we have access to more than one hundred years of evangelical history and four hundred fifty years of Protestant history. We have access to the thought and practices of the whole church across time and space. I think this recognition is an integral component of the emerging church phenomenon. We have a rich history and tapestry of experience, thought, and resources to help us be faithful to God and participate in his work in the world. Of course, it is important we don't cherry-pick from, misrepresent, or prostitute a tradition for our own use. But it is also important to recognize that often our experience of life in God is too limited.
One of the legacies of the Protestant tradition is that we define ourselves by who we disagree with. When we disagree, we break fellowship and treat those with whom we differ with suspicion or antagonism. I am not sure that is the way it must be. I have learned that in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the greatest sin is not heresy but rather schism’that is, breaking fellowship with one another. In the West, we have decided that heresy is the bigger sin. I don't know that I can say which one is the more damaging of the two.
Looking back at all of this, I see how the diversity of my ecclesial background and my experiences of community in college and afterwards profoundly impacted my development and formation as a leader. It also helped shape a context out of which our community could practice our faith in robust and creative ways for the glory of God. The context of today's world is one increasingly characterized by complexity, diversity, and pluralism. In order to respond well to such challenges, I believe it is critical to develop an awareness of and connection to our rich heritage’so that we might be faithful in our context in the same way that others sought to be in theirs. Such engagement may help us begin to converse with people or traditions we have been taught to view suspiciously.
