I remember sitting on a panel in the Warehouse Cafe back in C. 2005 discussing the emerging of the ’emerging church’.

Neale Fong, the host asked the question ‘do you think this emerging church thing is here to stay or is it a fad?’

Great question.

I answered with an emphatic ‘yes’. I simply couldn’t imagine a future without the richness of the conversations that had ’emerged’ in this space. To my right sat Mike – 15 years my senior and who had been around church trends a bit longer. He said ‘no – it is likely going to serve a purpose and then disappear – so I’d say a phase.’

Turns out we were both right, but in different ways. I will explain in a moment…

I have just started listening to the ‘Emerged‘ podcast, an oral history of the emerging church, from its origins in the mid 90’s as various American pastors got together to discuss how church needed to change to connect with the various sub-cultures and groups who seemed outside our reach. Up to now it sounds very American, with a sprinkling of ‘tallskinnykiwi‘ .While it charts the rise of the emerging church in the USA, so far it hasn’t given attention to those in the other parts of the world who were all on a similar trajectory.

It just made me want to share some of my own memories of this movement in Australia and the impact it had on the local church. So if that interests you then read on…

The emerging movement gathered steam in the late 90’s as younger pastors realised they could do church differently and not get fired. The mid-late nineties was also the time when the church was coming to grips with the whole ‘post-modernism’ thing. It was predominantly the youth pastors with their fingers on the cultural pulse who were engaged in the conversation around the nature and shape of church. Phyllis Tickle was oft quoted as saying “every 500 years the church has a jumble sale’ and clears out theology and practices that no longer makes sense in the current culture and then re-invents itself. She suggested we were living in one of those times.

It certainly felt like that. Everything was up for grabs – and if you didn’t have some firm foundations your whole theology could potentially unravel. Questions such as ‘what is the gospel?’ or ‘what is church?’ may seem obvious to many of us now, but back them we were unlearning one way of being and seeking to imagine how church could look in the culture we were part of rather than the culture church had been designed for.

For myself, it was reading Len Sweet’s stuff, Stanley Grenz and early Brian McClaren that roused my own curiosity. It seemed every conference was addressing ‘post-modernism’ and it’s challenge to the church. Some saw an opportunity for intelligent interaction, while others pulled the fear card and wanted nothing to do with this new phenomena that seemed to question everything.

My own first steps into the arena were in 2002 when I went to a conference at Morling College, where kiwis Mike Riddell and Mark Pierson were speaking. Essentially it was addressing the question ‘how do we create a church that our children will want to be a part of?‘ They shared a heap of stories and it was inspiring to hear from two solid practitioners who knew both successes and failures. The focus seemed to be largely on what later was called alt. worship – doing church more creatively. It was interesting and inspiring, but it was really just the tip of the iceberg.

I wanted to know more. Somehow I heard about Forge, led by Alan Hirsch, a group seeking to equip Aussies for first world mission. So my next foray into this space was a Forge conference in Lilydale, Victoria later in the year. I remember the feeling that conference left me with. It was more significant than any speaker’s content (and there was a lot of content). It was like having found my family, my tribe – the people who were looking at Australia as a mission field and asking ‘how do we step up to the plate in our own backyard?’ I had felt very alone in that question as so much of ‘mission’ as we knew it still had to do with sending people overseas. I wanted to say ‘Hey – look around you! Is there anywhere more pagan than 21stC Australia?’

In these years my life literally started to make sense – like one of those 3D images that only comes into view if you gaze at it long enough – and then when you see the image you are unable to unsee it. Around this time I had been having a rather bizarre and (I was later to discover) prophetic experience. At the time it just felt awkward and embarrassing… You see every time someone came to our church and spoke about mission or evangelism, either here in Austrtalia or overseas I would feel my eyes fill with tears and the lump in my throat growing bigger and bigger. For some reason missionaries and mission speakers made me cry. This went on for a year or so, and I often found myself squirming awkwardly thru missionary talks at church as my eyes filled with tears – even though I had no intention of ever going to Africa or China.

One day as I was praying I asked the Lord about it (I later wished I had done so sooner) and I sensed him saying to me ‘what you are feeling is what I feel . Its what I feel for my kids who haven’t found their way home yet‘ In that moment it made sense. I was feeling God’s heart for his lost kids and it was deeply pained. It was a massive catalyst in my own journey towards recognising the missionary vocation God had placed on my life.

It led me to begin exploring local mission more intentionally and into the ‘conversation’ that was at that point becoming known as the ’emerging church’. If you listen to the Emergent podcast, you may or may not hear much about other parts of the world, but there as definitely a buzz in Australia and in the early 2000’s a number of blogs kicked off creating an international conversation about this thing we call church. Mine started in 2003 – which means it has now been going over 20 years. (I feel that calls for some sort of celebration!)

This new paradigm of thinking came at a most unfortunate time. I had moved from youth pastor to senior pastor in the church we were part of and I was sent to the Arrow course for emerging leaders. It would be fair to say that Arrow and Forge operated on very different paradigms and it meant I was being torn between two very different ‘operating systems’ (think Windows and Apple) I was beyond sold on the Forge tribe – they were my people – and the missionary thinking that undergirded their teaching resonated so much more than the more business like and pragmatic CEO style of Arrow. What followed was 2 years of learning how to lead like a CEO while also learning how to lead like a missionary. I should add that the Arrow course was right on the money for the type of leader it was seeking to train but I began to realise that I wasn’t one of those people.

When wasn’t learning how to be a CEO I was off pondering sub-cultures to plant churches amongst.

With Al Hirsch and Mike Frost leading the way with their incendiary book ‘The Shaping of Things to Come’, a tribe began to form in Australia and the internet came alive with Aussie bloggers seeking to interact around the church / mission question.

Perhaps the greatest difference between Forge Australia and Emergent was that we had a laser clear focus on the advancement of mission as the goal, whereas Emergent seemed to see mission as a part ot the conversation but not central. It was also concerned with de-constructing theological paradigms and forming new expressions of church. We were somewhat aligned, but more like cousins than brothers. Our commitment to a statement of faith (Lausanne Covenant) meant that we had some theological anchors, whereas some of the US leaders appeared to be pulling anchor and seeing where the current led.

In the early 2000’s Andrew Jones started his www.tallskinnykiwi.com blog and was quickly followed by Aussie church planter and now ‘problogger‘, Darren Rouse (who would have guessed there was megabucks to be made in the blogosphere?!) Phil & Dan McCredden were writing about their experiences over at the Signposts blog and across the ditch Steve Taylor was sharing similar thoughts. His blog is now called Sustain: if – able Kiwi, but has retained the emergent domain. I’m sure there others but given it was 20 years ago I can’t bring many more to mind.

Around Australia people were trying new ways of doing church. Glenn and Ruth Powell kicked off Cafe church in Glebe, Sydney, an idea that seemed amazingly innovative in its time, but that we look at now and say ‘yeah… ok… nice…’ Al & Deb Hirsch had been leading South Melbourne Restoration Community in a missional direction for many years and in the early days Mike Frost also kicked off the church that was known as ‘Small Boat Big Sea’. Third Place Communities in Tasmania was another model of church and mission being done differently.

I committed to attending all 3 Forge intensives in 2002 and the resultant impact of new paradigm thinking was both disturbing and disorienting but also deeply life giving. It saw me grow increasingly frustrated with leading a nice middle class church in a well heeled suburb, but not seeing any significant missionary results for our efforts. I know my frustration spilt over into my leadership and rather than patiently seeking to equip and empower these people for mission in a new context I grew impatient and disappointed at our church’s meagre evangelistic efforts (as I perceived them). I regret this – my leadership was too immature to handle the new knowledge and the challenge of leading people towards it at a pace the could manage.

After a year of learning – conferences, books, blogs, networking I was champing at the bit to plant a church and show people how it was done. (Yes – that does sound arrogant – but yes, I did really think it…) By late 2002 I had resigned from my new senior pastor role after sensing a calling to go and plant a church in the far northern suburbs of Perth. Was it a calling or just a culmination of ambition, education and frustration? Maybe that is how calling happens some time?…

The early days of this blog describes some of that missionary adventure, so feel free to go back and poke around 2003-2009 and you will find plenty of ‘deconstruction’ going on as I sought to question everything, strip it right back and then re-invent it again.

It was the era of online ’emerging church chats’, where various people who had never met face to face came together online to share learning, ask questions and reflect on how curious it was to be living in this time. Aussies, Canadians, Kiwis, Americans and Brits were all chatting at the same time and it felt like God was doing something amongst us, with different nuances in different contexts. I still remember meeting Phil McCredden for the first time in person and realising his co-blogger ‘Dan’ wasn’t another bloke as I had envisaged in my mind’s eye, but was in fact his wife Danielle…

Continued in Part 2