by Jim Miller
Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional
Jim Belcher
IVPress (February 1, 2009)
Is American evangelicalism dead? Some pollsters think so, including the Barna Research Group, the leading evangelical pollster in the nation, who tell us that the number of Americans holding conservative evangelical beliefs has shrunk in numbers from 12% in 1992 to 9% in 2008 to just 7% today. For traditional Bible-believing Christians this is alarming and they are asking why this is happening? Is it, as some imagine, a growing pervasive disenchantment with the political militancy of right-wing evangelicals? Is it those irresolvable disagreements over abortion and homosexual issues? Is it creeping postmodernism? Is it just the swinging of the pendulum? Jim Belcher takes a look at this dilemma in his award-winning book “Deep Church”, a Christianity Today 2010 “Book of the Year’ winner.
The book begins with the words, “The evangelical church is deeply divided … in recent years this fragmentation has threatened to pull the movement apart.” The major rift is between traditional evangelicals and a group of young “emerging” thinkers unhappy with the direction the church has taken, especially that of the so-called “evangelical pragmatists,” which they see as anti-intellectual, seeker-sensitive, success-focused, and entertainment-driven. Belcher’s focus, however, is more on the rift between emerging and traditional evangelicals, each viewing the universe through different lenses. In his introduction, Belcher recounts an incident coming out of a Minneapolis meeting between traditionalist John Piper and emerging leader Tony Jones. Each came away with a totally different assessment of the meeting, demonstrating how deep the fissure is between the two camps They speak different languages and hold different values; one nation, perhaps, but two totally different tribes. Belcher proposes another alternative, “A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional” as the subtitle of the book says.
Belcher has been both an insider and an outsider to both the emerging movement and the traditional church and so brings the best insights of each side to forge a third way, which he calls Deep Church, a phrase borrowed from a C.S. Lewis letter and summed up in his classic Mere Christianity. Deep Church, as Belcher defines it, is a missional church model committed to both tradition and contemporary culture, embracing innovation in worship, arts, and community but also valuing the ancient creeds and confessions. Deep Church is Belcher’s call for traditional and emerging camps to find unity in the Great Tradition. He wants to avoid the fundamentalist error of seeing every other kind of church as suspect or heretical but he also wants to avoid the liberal error of seeing truth as something as malleable as water.
Belcher knows that churches will come down in different places relative to the creeds and contemporary society but he believes that the binding agent that holds all churches, contemporary and conventional, together is the tradition of orthodoxy.
Artist Bio
Jim Belcher (M.A., Fuller; Ph.D., Georgetown) is founding church planter and lead pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California. He is the co-founder of the Restoring Community Conference: Integrating Social Interaction, Sacred Space and Beauty in the 21st Century, an annual conference for city officials, planners, builders and architects. Jim previously led the Twenty-Something Fellowship and co-founded The Warehouse Service at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena. He has served as adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University and was cofounder of the Renaissance Project Skateboard Company. He has been published in Leadership Journal and re:generation quarterly, and he and his wife and four children live in Costa Mesa, California.
