I'm sitting still waiting for the window to open in our family life for me to return to my academic work. In the mean time books in my field are being written and going unread, and ministry practitioners are leading new styles of ministries that I remain unaware of. I am feeling that I need to get my final project started and finished before what is left of my thousands of pages of reading dribble out my ear and my assessments and conclusions about culture and my field become stale and dated.

On the other side, when I started studying ministry in our changing culture, the answers were nebulous. Now, the field is maturing. There is disagreement, but groups of people are agreeing together on more definitive concepts. It will be easier to assess and draw from these ideas now that there is some consensus and maturity.

After all of that, my gut response remains that the ministry ideas that most emerging church models are using are a good fit to only about 1-10% of the people who live in my Midwestern community. I desire to explore and substantiate that claim. I also desire to answer the question, what then?

If the average body of Christ in Des Moines Iowa would be poorly served in trying to imitate emerging church models of ministry, is there anything they should be doing to better incarnate the body of Christ in this city's culture? I believe that there are more modest cultural changes that are significant and important, and churches would better be able to be the body of Christ to our culture were they able to understand and modify their outreach to them.

I'm not in Los Angeles anymore. I think there is an exuberance around postmodern ministry ideas that ignores the durable differences between the blue states and red states, the coasts and the middle states, the different language and ethnic groups.

I think you're hitting on the clash that happens when people try to do a ministry that addresses their immediate context and then begin to publish their ideas in the ministry book marketplace. We've been taught or sensitized to read the experts and apply what worked for them right in our time and place. It's still happening when pastors get a hold of books from megachurches.


I think the important lesson from emerging churches is that they really take a hard look at their surrounding culture, put that culture in dialogue with the gospel, and attempt to minister to the culture. If we who are attracted to their method only take their conclusions and run with them, we miss the point. We must do similar hard work by asking similar questions about culture and the assumptions that people carry around with them. If we don't we'll be left like a church I knew of in my home town that got a hold of some megachurch's material and became super excited to replicate what they did. The problem is that our town's population was only 18,000 people, which was smaller than the membership of the church whose literature they were reading. And the town was 60% Roman Catholic. Roughly speaking, the Catholic church was the megachurch of the town, at least in terms of numbers. Another megachurch would have been highly unlikely. That church was left a bit disillusioned when they saw that the megachurch's solutions didn't work in their context.

I see something similar happen with Liberation Theology. Many people want to only take the conclusions of Liberation Theology that emerges from Latin America or Africa and apply it to the US. What they miss is that Liberation Theology starts with the concept of doing theology in a specific context. Any two contexts will not identical and thus the same answers may not work in both places. I think the same goes for emerging church literature. What I read seems to both describe and work for a specific urban, Western setting. I cannot see much of the material's solutions being all that helpful in the town where I grew up without some significant reflection and translation.

As an aside, I know that the world (including the US) is only becoming more urban and much of Christian publishing rightly seeks to address this change, but I think we still need strong theologies from more rural settings.

I heard a native Iowan pastor offer the anecdote, there was once an Iowan farmer who loved his wife so much that he almost told her. He was poking fun of the Midwestern reserve. I doubt there was more than one or two farmers in the five hundred people in the congregation. Rather, they were professionals and executives living and working in a highly sophisticated financial center. Still, the story laid bare part of the fabric of this culture. Even in the largest most wealthy urban settings, Midwestern values prevail in a way that you would not find in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco or Seattle.

My quibble is with the broad pronouncement that modernism is passed, that Christendom has fallen and Postmodernity is the now and all of the future. The claims are too broad and bold. These claims coupled with the culture of disappointment we have regarding the American church fuel an angst that keeps pastors chasing a cutting edge that doesn't match their context.

My criticism is about the exuberant assessment of culture. I think it is ungrounded and needs correction. The bold claims appear to capture a young fringe of culture rather than the broader culture with its many facets.

Without more grounding we are more likely to capture what is momentarily hip with Generation Y children of white Evangelicals than paint an accurate picture of the country.

Bill, as one who has followed your path (LA to Wisconsin in my case) I totally know where your coming from. Having said that, could the divide be more "urban" "suburban" and "rural" than "red state" "blue state"? i.e. rural CA is more like rural WI; and certain urbanities in my small town of 50,000 may in some respects be more similar to people in Manhatten than the farmer, especially if they went to school or otherwise lived in the city. That's my hypothesis.

The point of this for ministry than, would be about being context specif not only for your neighborhood, but also for the demographics of your church. What I mean is, old established church, probably not going to change so much, and maybe that's ok. it's that new church down the street that will fill in gaps the the established church simply can't hit, and conversely, the established church can do things the up and comer can't.

We tend to look at one or the other of these two churches and say "o there doing it 'right'", but actually maybe leaders at both churches who have the big picture in mind are doing it right - for their specific context.

David, I don't have a thesis as to how the cultural differences could be divided. My point is that the statements about postmodernity are too monolithic. I've been in two settings now that were very different than California.

I don't deny the urban/rural difference. It just isn't enough to capture the different forms of our culture across the country.