Featured in: Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Culture
By: Eddie Gibbs & Ryan K. Bolger
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Researchers Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, of Fuller Seminary, invested years into the study of some of the most innovative churches and leaders through the USA, Canada, & the UK in the avant-church movement that eventually became known as the “emerging church.” Organizations like: Emergent Village, TheOoze, Fresh Expressions, and others helped this movement find it legs. Today, that movement is less identifiable as a thing in itself, yet many of its values like: ecumenical & multi-faith collaboration, online presence, creative worship, practical local missional expression, embodiment & local context, and conversational engagement continue to play a vital role in the church’s movement toward its de-Christendom future.
Dwight and the church he pioneered in Cascadia were featured in Gibbs & Bolger’s research. Quest-A Christ Commons was a network of neighborhood rooted simple churches in Seattle and on Seattle’s Eastside. Quest and Dwight, along with roughly 50 innovative church leaders and 17 avant-churches were featured in their 2005 book, Emerging Churches.
Many of the ideas expressed in the quotes attributed to Dwight in this book, and in the interview at the end of the book, reveal the ecclesial experiments that eventually found their way into his own book, Thy Kingdom Connected.
In some respects the emerging church movement plays an important role in the Western churches’ ongoing pivot from the apex of the Christendom church – expressed through the attractional model of the mega-church – to a de-Christendom church. While anti-Christendom church is still coming into focus, one can already see that it is not only post-modern, anti-colonialism, post-denominational, and anti-racist it is also showing signs of being more humble, communal, human-scaled, and simultaneously rooted locally & linked globally.
It’s hard to tell now, but when the emerging church was in its heyday much of the church establishment was fearful of it, often labeling it and its key leaders as heretics.
“The ’emerging church’ movement is perhaps the most significant church trend of our day. The emerging church offers and encourages a new way of doing and being the church. While it largely resonates with an eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old audience–the first fully postmodern generation–it is also gaining popularity with older Christians and encompasses a broad array of traditional and contemporary churches. Emerging Churches explores this movement and provides insight into its success.”
From The back Cover of the book
Dwight is often invited to speak, provide interviews, or write about the church emerging after Christendom… connect!
• Published by Baker Academic & Brazos Press 2005
What others are saying about Emerging Churches
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“If you want to be truly conversant with emerging churches, this is the book to read. It’s locally specific and globally aware–as are emerging churches themselves. It respectfully presents the voices of a wide variety of reflective practitioners–not just one person or a few authors not just Americans, and not just males. It doesn’t reduce the ethos of emerging churches to one concept but insightfully identifies nine practices they share. It recognizes the essential theological emphases of emerging churches, and it is base on actual conversations with over fifty people. It encourages readers from more traditional churches to listen and to seek to understand before passing judgment. It provides not only the best available overview of the emerging church phenomenon but also an example of charitable and reflective rather suspicious and reactive–scholarly analysis.
Brian D. McLaren
“Emerging is just wrought-iron candlesticks and prayer stations, right? Think again. Gibbs, and Bolger have given us invaluable insight into the deeper values shaping ministries for postmoderns. If you’re serious about mission in today’s much-altered Western world, you can’t miss this book.”
Sally Morgenthaler
“Quite simply the best book yet on the emerging church.”
Andrew Jones, Tall Skinny Kiwi
“Gibbs and Bolger spent five years collecting data in both the U.S. and U.K. and interviewing 50 leaders–most under the age of 40–to uncover important patterns among emerging churches. . . . The authors paint emerging churches as attractive, hopeful and ever-evolving, populated by some of the most vibrant, open-minded and service-oriented young Christians. Readers who attached to ‘church business as usual’ will be shaken up by this book, while those ready for a change will find it energizing.”
Publishers Weekly
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