...of all my demon spirits

Yo: The following is a pasted version of my thesis. It needs to have the correct paragraph breaks and footnotes reinserted...but i'm not doing that right now. Read on if you can endure the eye strain.

Evangelical Counter-Culture: A Historical Analysis of the Emerging Church

Objective:

To explore the ways in which the evangelical “left” has assimilated elements of popular culture into their worship, fellowship, and evangelism methodologies. I will include the opinions of both proponents and adversaries of this “cool” Christianity, and when appropriate, relate my personal experiences to relevant findings. My conclusion will include my personal decision as to whether or not the Christian counter-culture is a “flash-in-the-pan,” marginal sect, or whether it is indicative of a larger, more universal shift.

Introduction

As an undergraduate student studying Art History, I was required to fulfill a minimum requirement of studio hours. Even though my plan was simply to talk about art, I suppose those who grant degrees wanted at least minimal proof of my knowing how to “do” art as well. One memorable class period centered around the infinite “values” of black and white. We were required to mix paints in order to imitate a scale of values given to us. While the exercise was rather perfunctory in nature, one remarkable observation that I made was how a relatively tiny speck of white paint can drastically alter the appearance of a rather large blob of jet black paint (and vice versa). No matter how small the one amount and how large the other, the change was always, without exception, noticeable. In fact, as our instructor later informed us, there is thought to be no absolute or “true” whites or blacks. They are really more ideas than they are true, existent colors.

Seven years later, as I reflect on what seemed to be an elementary lesson in studio painting, I realize that this concrete example possesses several abstract applications. In so many areas of day-to-day existence, we encounter ideas or theories that are taken for granted, but whose “pure” form may not actually exist. Indeed, the words of the preacher in Ecclesiastes are never truer than when applied to the world of thought[1]. As revolutionary, original, or groundbreaking as ideas may seem, there are perhaps none that are truly “new.” The preceding insight itself is hardly unique, in fact: Solomon, Heidegger, and Hegel (to name a few) echo this sentiment in some form. It certainly seems undeniable that while we humans are capable of formulating beautiful, concise, and orderly ideas about why and how things are the way they are, we struggle to find places in the world outside the mind where these thoughts are embodied without first assimilating some arbitrary cultural element.

The path we’ve here undertaken now branches in dozens of directions. We could probably never exhaust the instances of the aforementioned phenomenon. However, my focus for the next several chapters will center on the trend of cultural assimilation in the Western Protestant church, specifically in the so-called “Emerging Church,” that I first became intimately acquainted with in the mid to late 1990s. Having been raised in a family firmly entrenched in the doctrines of conservative evangelical Christianity, I have only recently begun to explore in earnest the more “liberal” sects of the Church. What I discovered (and continue to discover) is that “liberal” and “conservative” and other monikers are commonly applied with little or no accuracy. More fairly, it seems that the definitions of these monikers are as fluid and tenuous as the cultural contexts in which they are conceived. Even the most casual student of church history can skim the pages of the past several centuries and observe how the most “radical” sects of the church, once established, soon became the arbiters of conservative doctrine and orthopraxy. A German living around 450 years ago could hardly have used the statement, “I am a conservative Lutheran,” for all Lutherans were brandished radical heretics and usually excommunicated from Christendom-at-large. However, if our German friend could step forward those 450 years into contemporary American culture, he would see that an area such as the Midwest—stereotyped as having strong, conservative values—is largely Lutheran. Meanwhile, the more “liberal” Northeast Christian population has a Catholic population that is the largest of any region of the country. If our friend decided to pull up a chair and continue observing the changes in American religious climate, he would surely notice how current elements of Western pop culture are more readily assimilated (even welcomed) into Protestant Christianity than any Luther or Calvin would have ever imagined (or desired?). He would see hordes of young people flocking to stadiums rather than stately cathedrals. Likewise, he would hear the Liturgy replaced with songs that are all but indiscernible from Top 40 radio, and preachers who have shed the austerity of the parish priest in exchange for the dynamic oratory style of a stumping politician. Surely such sea changes in worship (and sometimes doctrine) could not be taking place so rapidly, when it took Christendom centuries to produce a Luther. How can we account for such exponential acceleration concerning this trend?

My view, as we’ll come to see more clearly in the following chapters, contends that any idea or set of ideas (metaphysical or otherwise) cannot operate independently, i.e., resist any influence from its immediate cultural context. As the original “blob” of intellectual paint collides and wrestles with surrounding “specks” of culture, ideas change. Moreover, I will demonstrate that these changes—both the gradual and revolutionary—are not merely anomalies in the historical record, but inevitable products of human culture and finitude. Starting with some of the earliest importers of Christianity to North America, the Puritans, we will trace the ebb and flow of “church culture” in the United States from Great Awakenings to Jesus Freaks to modern day campus worship events which draw more young people than a NCAA football game. We will likewise explore how “counter cultures” are not merely a “secular” phenomenon, but an innate acting out of human nature regardless of context. Later we’ll see how shifts towards youth-centered worship and teaching spawned a church culture revolution whose fruits are evident in the huge majority of present-day evangelical churches. While there will be some occasional discussion concerning the “good” or “bad” effects of certain shifts, I do not aim to offer a critique of the Emerging Church in America. Rather, I believe the much more interesting conversation centers around the fascinating past and hypothetical future of America’s Christian Counter-Culture.

Prelude: Surveying the Emerging Church

A concise definition of the “Emerging Church” is elusive at best. Even the movement’s most vocal proponents concede that forming a universally accepted description of their beliefs and organization has posed somewhat of a conundrum. That is, how does one form a centralized definition for a movement that is inherently decentralized? A broad analysis that seems to come closest to universal acceptance describes the Emerging Church as “a label that has been used to refer to a particular subset of Christians who are rethinking Christianity against the backdrop of Postmodernism.”[2] Emerging Church scholar Dan Kimball lists the following characteristics as a farily accurate description of most “emergent” bodies:

Highly creative approaches to worship and spiritual reflection. This can involve everything from the use of contemporary music and films through to liturgy or other more ancient customs.
A minimalist and decentralised organisational structure.
A flexible approach to theology whereby individual differences in belief and morality are accepted within reason.
A more holistic approach to the role of the church in society. This can mean anything from greater emphasis on fellowship in the structure of the group to a higher degree of emphasis on social action, community building or Christian outreach.
A desire to reanalyize the Bible against the context into which it was written, in search of a reconstructed theology that is free from Modernist baggage. [3]
Even with this neatly put together list, however, the “minmalist structure” of the Emerging Church all but prevents analyzing this newer movement in the same manner one might go about examining the much more established sects of Christianity.

The movement’s existence is nonetheless easily recognized. The latter half of the 20th century saw isolated communities of believers forming more “contemporary” churches; however, these were almost always subsets of pre-existing, traditional churches. For example, a church body who normally holds corporate worship at 11:00 A.M on Sunday may add a 8:00 service for those wishing to engage in more “contemporary” worship. These alternative meetings often employed the aforementioned “creative approaches to worship” discussed by Kimball. Likewise, in a church community where emotionalism is typically refrained from (or even frowned upon), contemporary worship often provided a more comfortable, less inhibiting context for outward expression.
While these more modern services are still readily offered at most larger Evangelical congregations in the United States, the last two decades of the 20th century saw an acceleration in the popularity of contemporary worship that led to the establishment of hundreds of self-supporting, contemporary churches. Moreover, these churches were often the most well-represented demographic in the community of so-called “megachurches.”[4] One might expect a rather homogenous age group to found in these burgeoning “alternative churches.” And indeed, most early forms of these newer communities of faith were made of up those who are most commonly stereotyped as identifying with a more postmodern worldview, i.e., members of the so-called Gereration X. However, as small, underground contemporary chuches mushroomed into mammoth, 10,000-member megachruches (cf. Willow Creek of Chicago, Illinois), all demographics—age, race, gender, class—saw an increased representation within the fledgling Emerging Church.[5]
It is uncertain if the Emerging Church will ever solidify into a single, centralized sect. What is certain, however, is the movement’s existence and enormous influence on Protestant culture over the past 25-30 years. If we are to determine whether this movement (and it’s influence) is merely an interesting anomoly in chuch history or a much more significant trend indicative of inherent traits in human religion, we must first embark on a historical examination of the American Christian culture at-large. The depth at which this writer delves into the historical record may seem tedious (even superflous) to the reader at times; however, I feel that a proper backdrop is vital if we are to form any fundamental understanding of the present social and cultural phenomenon among the Emerging Church.

Book One: A Brief Survey of American Christianity

Part One: The Puritans

Puritanism was a movement arising within the Church of England in the latter part of the 16th century that sought to purify, or reform, that church and establish a middle course between Roman Catholicism and the ideas of the Protestant reformers[6]. It had a continuous life within the church until the Stuart Restoration (1660). Puritanism reached North America with the English settlers who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620 where it remained the dominant religious force in New England throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
The term Puritanism is also used in a broader sense to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristic of the Puritans. Thus, the Separatists in the 16th century, the Quakers in the 17th century, and Nonconformists after the Restoration may be called Puritans, although they were no longer part of the established church[7]. The founders of New England, for whom immigration to America constituted withdrawal from the mother church, are also commonly called Puritans. The word puritanism has often been used as a term of abuse in a way that does scant justice to historical Puritanism—for instance, when a rigid moralism, the condemnation of innocent pleasure, or religious narrowness is stigmatized as “puritanical.” The Puritans, as we shall see, are not alone in having suffered the plight of fighting misnomers. Words such as “reformed,” “liberal,” and “fundamentalist” shall likewise find their way from their original intended definitions to contexts where they ascribe inaccurate (and often unworthy) praise or disdain.
Even within the Church of England, a precise definition of Puritanism is elusive. The leading Puritan clergyman during the reign of Elizabeth I was Thomas Cartwright, who denied he was one. Cartwright advocated a presbyterian form of church government that gave control to committees of ministers and lay members. His purpose was to free the church from the control of bishops appointed by the monarchy, which was hostile to Puritanism. Puritanism, however, cannot be identified with presbyterianism because a major segment of the movement eventually adopted congregationalism, in which there is no church hierarchy and each individual congregation is self-governing. Already the most casual observer can note the similarities between “old” Puritanism and the new brand being developed in colonial America. Whether the fledgling democracy shaped the ideas of Puritan church politics or vice versa is uncertain; nevertheless, we see an undeniable change not only in one religious sect, but in a “Christian” country’s most populous denomination. The essence of Puritanism is an intense commitment to a morality, a form of worship, and a civil society strictly conforming to God's commandments. Certain nuances (e.g. congregationalism), however, were unique products of Puritanism’s interaction with the burgeoning American Revolution.
Puritan theology is a version of Calvinism. It asserts the basic sinfulness of humankind; but it also declares that by an eternal decree God has determined that some will be saved through the righteousness of Christ despite their sins. No one can be certain in this life what his or her eternal destiny will be. Nevertheless, the experience of conversion, in which the soul is touched by the Holy Spirit, so that the inward bias of the heart is turned from sinfulness to holiness, is at least some indication that one is of the elect.
The experience of conversion was therefore central to Puritan spirituality. Much of Puritan preaching was concerned with it. This concern was evident in questions such as how conversion comes about—whether in a blinding flash as with Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, or following well-defined stages of preparation; how one can distinguish actual conversion from the counterfeit; and why not everyone will be converted. Puritan spiritual life stressed self-discipline and introspection, through which one sought to determine whether particular spiritual strivings were genuine marks of sainthood. Although full assurance might never be attained, the conviction of having been chosen by God fortified the Puritans to contend with what they regarded as wantonness in society and faithfulness in the church, and to endure the hardships involved in trying to create a Christian commonwealth in America. However, as the founding fathers sought less and less to establish a borderline theocracy, and more and more to give birth to a uniquely secular nation, the hard-line Calvinism of the Puritans would gradually cede ground to more “open” brands of Christianity.
Puritanism was not static and unchanging. At first it simply stood for further reform of worship, but soon it began to attack episcopacy—church government by bishops, as in the Church of England—as unscriptural. Again, we see the tenuous nature of where the left and right are in Protestant politics. More clearly, what is today the penultimate stereotype of dogmatism (Puritanism) was once actually the fierce opponent of the most established church in the English-speaking world. At times the difference between the Puritans and the Anglicans (members of the Church of England) seems to have been as much a matter of differing cultural values as one of differing theological opinions. For example, their Sabbatarianism (insistence on strict observance of the Sabbath) came into conflict with a defense of sports and games on Sunday by King James I. Puritanism became a political as well as a religious movement during the English Revolution (1640-1660, also called the Puritan Revolution), when Parliament rebelled against the despotism of Stuart king Charles I. This rebellion gave the Puritans a chance to demand the abolition of bishops in the Church of England. Both in England during the Commonwealth (government established by Parliament, from 1649-1660) and in 17th-century New England, Puritanism meant the direction and control of civil authority.
Nor was Puritanism a wholly cohesive movement. In the 1580s the Separatists were bitterly condemned by other Puritans. When the Westminster Assembly (1643) sought to define doctrine and polity, the differences between Presbyterians and Independents (congregationalists) were manifest. In the turbulence of the 1640s, a number of small sects appeared, emphasizing that part of Puritan doctrine that acknowledges the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul of the believer to the neglect of that part that stands for social order and authority. With the restoration of the Stuart monarchs in 1660, many Puritans accepted the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and rule by bishops; others were forced into permanent nonconformity. In one sense, therefore, Puritanism failed. Its influence has persisted, however.
When the Puritans failed in their efforts to reform the Church of England, a minority urged separatism—the establishment of separate independent congregations free of bishops. Some of these separatist groups immigrated to Holland. In 1620 one of the separatist congregations sailed for New England on the Mayflower. In New England the colonists established independent congregations, each congregation having the right to choose its own leaders and discipline its members. While church and state supported each other, neither one was allowed to interfere in the affairs of the other. This line between the two establishments during colonial times was blurry, however, as manifested in the untimely deaths of dozens of suspected “witches.” Not until the United States Constitution explicitly delegated a legal separation of Church and State could non-Christians even begin to assimilate into most American communities.
In America, Puritan moralism and its sense of an elect people in covenant with God deeply affected the national character. The Puritan belief that communities were formed by covenants produced America’s first democratic institution, the town meeting. At the town meeting every church member had the right to speak, and decisions were made by majority rule. The Puritan emphasis on simplicity of worship, its asceticism (austerity and self-denial), and its Sabbatarianism remained influential into the 20th century. The Puritan devotion to popular education, high standards of morality, and many, if not all, democratic principles had an important (to say the least) effect on American life.
In one of Western Civilization’s more ironic twists, the Puritans fled a mother country whose church had become (to them) an unwelcome imitation of the ways and means of the English monarchy (i.e. the masses being ruled by a few), only to found a “new” group of churches whose Congregationalist approach bore strong resemblances to the new democracy which emerged in 1776. The Puritans, however, were not the first (nor hardly the last) to demonstrate the inseparability of shifts in popular culture and religious trends. As an infant America looked towards a looming revolution, it would witness the Christianity so evident in its character drift towards irrelevancy—only to rebound with an intensity that reflected the sentiments and tendencies of the time.

Part Two: The First Great Awakening

While the American Colonies were still undoubtedly Christian in their religious identity, religiosity was declining by the 1740s. The Salem Witch Trials were not too distant a memory, and with the booming growth in exports, meeting the rigid demands of Puritan doctrine was gradually being usurped by an interest in what this year’s tobacco harvest would yield.[8] As the collective American interest drifted away from religion and toward the appeals of commerce, several men determined to spark revival and reaffirm Christianity’s centrality in day-to-day life.
The Great Awakening was a watershed event in the life of the American people. Before it was over, it had swept the colonies of the Eastern seaboard, transforming the social and religious life of land. Although the name is slightly misleading--the Great Awakening was not one continuous revival, rather it was several revivals in a variety of locations--it says a great deal about the state of religion in the colonies. For the simple reality is that one cannot be awakened unless you have fallen asleep.
Neither the Anglicans who came to dominate religious life in Virginia after royal control was established over Jamestown, nor the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, were terribly successful in putting down roots. The reality was that on the frontier, the settled parish system of England-- which was employed by Puritan and Anglican alike--proved difficult to transplant. Unlike the compact communities of the old world, the small farms and plantations of the new spread out into the wilderness, making both communication and ecclesiastical discipline difficult. Because people often lived great distances from a parish church, membership and participation suffered. In addition, on the frontier concern for theological issues faded before the concern for survival and wrestling a living from a hard and difficult land. Because the individual was largely on his own, and depended on himself for survival, authoritarian structures of any sort--be they governmental or ecclesiastical--met with great resistance. As a result, by the second and third generations, the vast majority of the population was outside the membership of the church. Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the landscape was littered with the dry tinder of the unchurched. All that was required was a spark of revival to set the landscape afire with religious enthusiasm. And when that spark ignited, those who led the revival were so surprised by what was taking place, that they "attributed it entirely to God's inscrutable grace."[9]
The sparks of revival were struck in New England. Solomon Stoddard's sermons in Northampton, Massachusetts had led to revivals breaking out as early as 1679. And after that, periodic revivals would occur and then die out. One of the reasons they would be extinguished was the smothering influence of the Enlightenment. With the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in the 17th century, traditional religious formulations had been under pressure. That is because implicit in the work of Newton and others was the assumption that human beings had the ability to discover the secrets of the universe and thereby exert some control over their own destiny. If human beings could in fact think the thoughts of God--if they could discover and read the blueprints whereby God had made and ordered the world--the result was a lessening of the gulf between God and man. This tended to undercut traditional Calvinism which held that the gap between the Deity and his creatures was quite large. This affirmation of human ability and reason had an extremely corrosive effect on the reigning orthodoxy which held that one's destiny was solely in God's hands. The result was a growing emphasis on man and his morality, with religion becoming more rational and less emotional.
One of those who attacked this growing rationality, and who was also one of the principle figures in the Great Awakening was Jonathan Edwards. Edwards has received bad press for his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In that sermon he used the image of a spider dangling by a web over a hot fire to describe the human predicament. His point was that at any moment, our hold on life could break and we'd be plunged into fires of eternal damnation. But if you read his sermons, you will find that he spoke quietly, reasonably, and logically. Indeed, he was dry and even a bit boring. But he began to experience a harvest of conversions that were accompanied by exaggerated behavior. People would bark, shout, and run when they were converted.
Why did people listen to Edwards? Why did his preaching provoke such a response? For one thing, he was speaking about a matter they were vitally interested in. If I were to tell you I heard on the radio on the way over that someone had found a cure for cancer, you would want to know the details. And so it was for the Puritans who were growing deeply concerned by what they perceived to be a striking decline in piety. The youth of the second and third generation were given to mirth and frivolity and would spend the greater part of night in co-ed parties. They would go riding in wagons under layers of quilts and blankets. Edwards and others were deeply concerned about these excursions and the impact they might have on the state of their morals. And there is reason to believe that Edwards had cause to be concerned about these activities. Evidently something was taking place under these quilts because there was a striking rise in the number of children conceived out of wedlock which confirmed in the Puritan's mind that a general decline in piety was occurring. The new generation had inherited the Puritan theocracy, but had begun to forget it, and the older generation was gravely concerned about this development. They had come to this country to found a biblical commonwealth, but their vision did not seem to be shared by community's youth.
Yet another problem weighing on Puritan consciences for a long time was that of election. As they studied this issue, the question was raised as to why should anyone preach? Certainly not to elicit a decision for Christ. Such decisions had been made before the foundation of the world according to Calvinist orthodoxy. If preaching were simply for the edification of the Saints, then it was like preaching to the choir, in that you were preaching to the already converted. The result was a decline in worship attendance.
And then quite by surprise there was a tremendous outpouring of response to the preaching of Edwards. This movement of the Spirit surprised people because it produced something unexpected: people professing conversion. What Edwards said in these sermons was pure Calvinism. "You can't control salvation." But Puritans heard him say, "if you try, God will aid your salvation." Here's one example. Jonathan Edwards talked about "Pressing into the Kingdom". "It was," he said, "not a thing impossible." By that, Edwards was referred to God's power to save whomever he pleases. But what the Puritans heard was there was a chance they could achieve election. Phrases like "It is in your power to use means of grace" and "One can strive against corruption" were similarly misunderstood. Edwards wanted to make the point that salvation ultimately is in the hands of God, and that he empowers the elect to resist evil. But people heard something else. And they responded to what they viewed as an invitation to seek after salvation.
Was it Edwards’ failure to communicate, however, that led some of his listeners down paths he did not intend? While I will certainly admit to the slippery slope of speculation here, does it not seem slightly more than coincidental that these men and women who so desperately desired to rid themselves of a tyrannical monarch who was an ocean away (and whose new laws reflected his ignorance) also sought a way to have more of a hand in their eternal destination? While Edwards was (according to some) simply trying to rephrase age-old teachings, perhaps the masses were starting to suspect that their God had been made in the image of man. If the converse were actually true, then wouldn’t these seemingly inherent feelings of independence have some significance? Surely the God of the universe didn’t rule his kingdom in the same arbitrary fashion as George.
While we cannot be certain if these things played a hand in the responses of colonists to Edwards’ preaching, we can be certain of a few things regarding the Great Awakening. While men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield may have snatched the young American church from the brink of mediocrity, they certainly didn’t solidify it. The defining characteristic of the Awakening was factionism; and these factions, like their predecessors, would each incorporate cultural elements into their worship and set the stage for the next great series of American revivals.

Part Three: The Second Great Awakening
Transformations in American economics, politics and intellectual culture found their parallel in a transformation of American religion in the decades following independence, as the United States underwent a widespread flowering of religious sentiment and unprecedented expansion of church membership known as the Second Great Awakening. Definitions of the term and assessments of the causes, contours, and effects of the Awakening are in dispute, but a number of basic features are generally agreed upon. The Awakening lasted some 50 years, from the 1790s to the 1840s, and spanned the entire United States. The religious revitalization that the Awakening represented manifested itself in different ways according to the local population and church establishment, but was definitely a Protestant phenomenon. Methodist and Baptist denominations experienced a surge of membership, often at the expense of other denominations, prompting a move toward liberalization and competitiveness on the part of the Anglican, Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches[10]. The numerical success of the Methodists and Baptists lay primarily in their reliance on itinerant preachers who actively brought the message of the church to the people, converting great numbers through emotionally charged revivals. These revivals occurred on a scale and with a frequency previously unseen in the United States, and (as was often the case during the First Great Awakening) usually struck more conservative clergymen as excessive emotionalism masquerading as religion. The same sentiments are often echoed within the body of the present day Church, as more “contemorary,” experience-centered worship services are dismissed by conservative clergypersons as rampant emotionalism that will die as surely as other fads that accompany youth. With the maturation of revivalism and the evolution of a distinct revivalist methodology aimed at converting people en masse, the age of evangelicalism had arrived, with the Protestants leading the charge.
Nathan Hatch, in The Democratization of American Christianity, set out to revise the "social control interpretation" of the Second Great Awakening by exploring its role in galvanizing the nation's religious culture of insurgent populist preachers and of the tremendous numbers of common people who hearkened to their message. Hatch wrote:
...we have ignored the most dynamic and characteristic elements of Christianity during this time: the displacement from power of the religious people of ideas by those who leaned toward popular culture; the powerful centrifugal forces that drove churches apart and gave new significance to local and grass-roots endeavors; and the stark emotionalism, disorder, extremism, and crudeness that accompanied expressions of the faith fed by the passions of ordinary people. [11]
In tracing the siphoning of religious power away from the established churches and into the hands of local preachers and their flocks, Hatch posited an organic relationship between political and religious liberty. The success of the Revolution, he argues, created an atmosphere where resistance to authority and orthodoxy formed the ascendant ethos in the religious sphere as well as the secular.
The first stirrings of the Awakening occurred in the South and sparsely populated old Southwest, with its predominantly rural economy and poorly developed infrastructure and institutions, where religious organization served the critical function of providing social stability for the populace. Here the two clearly dominant groups were the Methodists and Baptists, although other active sects included the Presbyterians, the Christians and the Disciples (the last two formed by followers of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell). The South did not produce, in Martin Marty's words, "first-rate theological minds" on the order of Jonathan Edwards, but in the decades after independence Evangelical Protestantism spread like wildfire through the region, with preachers fanning the flames at camp-meetings.[12] Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright, in his autobiography, describes a typical revival:
They would ... erect a shed, sufficiently large to protect five thousand people from wind and rain, and cover it with boards or shingles; build a large stand, seat the shed, and here they would collect together from forty to fifty miles around, sometimes further than that. Ten, twenty, and sometimes thirty ministers, of different denominations, would come together and preach night and day, four or five days together; and, indeed, I have known these camp-meetings to last three or four weeks, and great good resulted from them. I have seen more than a hundred sinners fall like dead men under one powerful sermon, and I have seen and heard more than five hundred Christians all shouting aloud the high praises of God at once; and I will venture to assert that many happy thousands were awakened and converted to God at these camp-meetings. [13]
Cartwright’s description of this early tent meeting bears striking resemblance to events such as “One Day” (organized by Louis Giglio’s “Passion” organization), where literally hundreds of thousands of young people meet for 24 hours of uninterrupted worship, usually consisting of marathon sets of vocal praise choruses. We will examine events such as these more closely in later chapters .
Precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, but Donald Mathews estimates that approximately 83 percent of Southern church members in 1792 were Evangelicals, and this percentage would climb in the decades to follow.[14]
The picture was much the same in the Midwest. Here, Protestantism achieved steady gains as evangelical methodology received greater definition under the influence of Charles Grandison Finney, who turned revivalism into a virtual science. In an 1834 lecture to his Presbyterian church in New York, entitled "What a Revival of Religion Is," Finney went further than anyone else had to date in setting out the precise methods and objectives of revivalist Evangelicalism. First, he stressed the importance of emotion:
Men are so sluggish, there are so many things to lead their minds off from religion, and to oppose the influence of the gospel, that it is necessary to raise an excitement among them, till the tide rises so high as to sweep away the opposing obstacles.[15]
While emotionalism had long been the practice of revivalists, Finney was the first major religious figure to give the technique a calculated turn. His approach was revolutionary in that it abandoned the traditional notion that only God, through miracles, could induce the intense religious fervor that characterized a revival. As Finney saw it, "[a]ll the laws of matter and mind remain in force" at a revival, which "consists entirely in the right exercise of the powers of nature" and is a "purely philosophical [scientific] result of the right use of the constituted means."[16] With the restrictive dogma and uninspiring style of Calvinism pushed aside, then, revivalists could make deep inroads into both the non-practicing population and other denominations.
In New England, these revivalist activities represented a challenge to the Anglican and Congregationalist establishments, which, gripped by a kind of siege mentality, sought to make their own churches more vital and competitive. Again, we observe a parallel with the more modern trend of more “traditional” churches striving to seem relevant through various amendments and adaptations. The traditional establishments in early 19th century New England did so in large measure by loosening several of the major theological doctrines of Calvinism, principally that of predestination.[17] Paradoxically, in their efforts to stem the Second Great Awakening's tide of Arminianism and revivalism, the New England Calvinists ended up participating in the Awakening. Together, these "New Light" Calvinists subverted the orthodox heritage of "hyper-Calvinism," and in so doing managed to save New England Calvinism from total obliteration.
Three principal architects of the new Calvinism were Yale President Timothy Dwight and two of his students, Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher and the brilliant theologian Nathaniel Taylor. In subtle ways, these men tried to revise Calvinism to appeal to a younger generation that had grown weary of the faith's rather grim doctrines. They incorporated a degree of proactive evangelism into their churches and began to organize reform societies in an effort to become more socially relevant. Theologically, their critical modifications involved free will, divine benevolence, and the preacher's role of moral suasion in bringing people to God. Beecher, in an apparent affirmation of the evangelical method, declared in his sermon "The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints" that the original Christian sect spread because of revivalism:
It was under the preaching of the word, that men were pricked in their hearts, and cried out, 'Men and brethren, what shall we do to be saved?' And it was by the moral transformation which attended the apostolic answer to this question, and not by the power of miracles, that the Gospel defied opposition, and spread during the first three hundred years.[18]
Like Beecher, Taylor also stressed the power of preaching in his contributions to New Light Calvinism. He undercut the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards and his modern descendants, the "neo-Edwardseans," in his efforts to reconcile Calvinism with Enlightenment ideas of free will. Where Edwards maintained that human will operates almost exclusively in the service of self-interest, Taylor held that the soul retained a longing for spiritual connection and satisfaction, and that it was the role of the spoken word to draw out and encourage this longing. Consistent with Calvinism, nonetheless, in Taylor's theological position God acted as kind of moral governor whose grace depended on the observance of his moral laws. Salvation was achievable but required both the influence of a preacher to spark one's realization of God's laws and the conscious avoidance of sin after conversion.
Across the country, then, the revivalists of the Second Great Awakening brought Evangelical Protestantism to the people and through their reorientation of Calvinist theology and practice irreversibly changed the religious landscape of the United States. However, the next several decades would witness burgeoning immigration, the stirring of Unitarian sentiments, and new intellectualism in New England that would welcome and incorporate many of the ideas brought over by the aforementioned immigrants. It was when the Second Great Awakening had attained maturity, in the late 1820s and 1830s, that an awakening of similar intensity, albeit of a strikingly different character, flowered in Boston under the name "Transcendentalism."
Part Three: A Move Towards Secularism
The emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy extended much farther back into American religious history. Transcendentalism and evangelical Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from American Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In exploring their respective departures from Calvinism we can begin to map out the common ground the two movements shared.
Transcendentalism cannot be properly understood outside the context of Unitarianism, the dominant religion in Boston during the early nineteenth century. Unitarianism had developed during the late eighteenth century as a branch of the liberal wing of Christianity, which had separated from Orthodox Christianity during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s. That Awakening, along with its successor, revolved around the questions of divine election and original sin, and saw a brief period of revivalism. The Liberals tended to reject both the persistent Orthodox belief in inherent depravity and the emotionalism of the revivalists; on one side stood dogma, on the other stood pernicious "enthusiasm." Again we can observe a parallel of these past phenomena in the present-day Christian church. That is, both the “small-minded” dogmatism of the ultra-orthodox and the unbridled emotionalism of the more charismatic sects seem to equally disinterest many younger, postmodern Christians.[19] The Liberals, in a kind of amalgamation of Enlightenment principles with American Christianity, began to stress the value of intellectual reason as the path to divine wisdom. The Unitarians descended as the Boston contingent of this tradition, while making their own unique theological contribution in rejecting the doctrine of divine trinity.
Unitarians placed a premium on stability, harmony, rational thought, progressive morality, classical learning, and other hallmarks of Enlightenment Christianity. Instead of the dogma of Calvinism intended to compel obedience, the Unitarians offered a philosophy stressing the importance of voluntary ethical conduct and the ability of the intellect to discern what constituted ethical conduct. Theirs was a "natural theology" in which the individual could, through empirical investigation or the exercise of reason, discover the ordered and benevolent nature of the universe and of God's laws. Divine "revelation," which took its highest form in the Bible, was an external event or process that would confirm the findings of reason. William Ellery Channing, in his landmark sermon "Unitarian Christianity" (1819) sounded the characteristic theme of optimistic rationality:
Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.... With these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer, his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining what is difficult, and for discovering new truths.[20]
The intellectual marrow of Unitarianism had its counterbalance in a strain of sentimentalism: while the rational mind could light the way, the emotions provided the drive to translate ethical knowledge into ethical conduct. Still, the Unitarians deplored the kind of excessive emotionalism that took place at revivals, regarding it as a temporary burst of religious feeling that would soon dissipate. Since they conceived of revelation as an external favor granted by God to assure the mind of its spiritual progress, they doubted that inner "revelation" without prior conscious effort really represented a spiritual transformation.
Nonetheless, even in New England Evangelical Protestants were making many converts through their revivalist activities, especially in the 1820s and 1830s. The accelerating diversification of Boston increased the number of denominations that could compete for the loyalties of the population, even as urbanization and industrialization pushed many Bostonians in a secular direction. In an effort to become more relevant, and to instill their values of sobriety and order in a modernizing city, the Unitarians themselves adopted certain evangelical techniques. Through founding and participating in missionary and benevolent societies, they sought both to spread the Unitarian message and to bind people together in an increasingly fragmented social climate. Ezra Stiles Gannett, for example, a minister at the Federal Street Church, supplemented his regular pastoral duties with membership in the Colonization, Peace and Temperance societies, while Henry Ware Jr. helped found the Boston Philanthropic Society. Simultaneously, Unitarians tried to appeal more to the heart in their sermons, a trend reflected in the new Harvard professorship of Pastoral Theology and Pulpit Eloquence. Such Unitarian preachers as Joseph Stevens Buckminster and Edward Everett "set the model for a minister who could be literate rather than pedantic, who could quote poetry rather than eschatology, who could be a stylist and scorn controversy."[21] But they came nowhere near the emotionalism of the rural Evangelical Protestants. Unitarianism was a religion for upright, respectable, wealthy Boston citizens, not for the rough jostle of the streets or the backwoods. The liberalism Unitarians displayed in their embrace of Enlightenment philosophy was stabilized by a solid conservatism they retained in matters of social conduct and status.
The Transcendentalists felt that something was lacking in Unitarianism. Sobriety, mildness and calm rationalism failed to satisfy that side of the Transcendentalists which yearned for a more intense spiritual experience. The source of the discontent that prompted Emerson to renounce the "corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College" is suggested by the bland job description that Harvard issued for the new Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. The professor's duties were to
... demonstrate the existence of a Deity or first cause, to prove and illustrate his essential attributes, both natural and moral; to evince and explain his providence and government, together with the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments; also to deduce and enforce the obligations which man is under to his Maker .... together with the most important duties of social life, resulting from the several relations which men mutually bear to each other; .... interspersing the whole with remarks, shewing the coincidence between the doctrines of revelation and the dictates of reason in these important points; and lastly, notwithstanding this coincidence, to state the absolute necessity and vast utility of a divine revelation.[22]
Perry Miller has argued persuasively that the Transcendentalists still retained in their characters certain vestiges of New England Puritanism, and that in their reaction against the "pale negations" of Unitarianism, they tapped into the grittier pietistic side of Calvinism in which New England culture had been steeped. The Calvinists, after all, conceived of their religion in part as man's quest to discover his place in the divine scheme and the possibility of spiritual regeneration, and though their view of humanity was pessimistic to a high degree, their pietism could give rise to such early, heretical expressions of inner spirituality as those of the Quakers and Anne Hutchinson. Miller saw that the Unitarians acted as crucial intermediaries between the Calvinists and the Transcendentalists by abandoning the notion of original sin and human imperfectability:
The ecstasy and the vision which Calvinists knew only in the moment of vocation, the passing of which left them agonizingly aware of depravity and sin, could become the permanent joy of those who had put aside the conception of depravity, and the moments between could be filled no longer with self-accusation but with praise and wonder.[23]
For the Transcendentalists, then, the critical realization, or conviction, was that finding God depended on neither orthodox creedalism nor the Unitarians' sensible exercise of virtue, but on one's inner striving toward spiritual communion with the divine spirit. From this wellspring of belief would flow all the rest of their religious philosophy.
Transcendentalism was not a purely native movement, however. The Transcendentalists received inspiration from overseas in the form of English and German romanticism, particularly the literature of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the post-Kantian idealism of Thomas Carlyle and Victor Cousin. Under the influence of these writers (which was not a determinative influence, but rather an introduction to the cutting edge of Continental philosophy), the Transcendentalists developed their ideas of human "Reason," or what we today would call intuition. For the Transcendentalists, as for the Romantics, subjective intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth as empirical investigation, which underlay both deism and the natural theology of the Unitarians. Kant had written skeptically of the ability of scientific methods to discover the true nature of the universe; now the rebels at Harvard college (the very institution which had exposed them to such modern notions!) would turn the ammuntion against their elders. In an 1833 article in The Christian Examiner entitled simply "Coleridge," Frederic Henry Hedge, once professor of logic at Harvard and now minister in West Cambridge, explained and defended the Romantic/Kantian philosophy, positing a correspondence between internal human reality and external spiritual reality. He wrote:
The method [of Kantian philosophy] is synthetical, proceeding from a given point, the lowest that can be found in our consciousness, and deducing from that point 'the whole world of intelligences, with the whole system of their representations' .... The last step in the process, the keystone of the fabric, is the deduction of time, space, and variety, or, in other words (as time, space, and variety include the elements of all empiric knowledge), the establishing of a coincidence between the facts of ordinary experience and those which we have discovered within ourselves ...[24]
Although written in a highly intellectual style, as many of the Transcendentalist tracts were, Hedge's argument was typical of the movement's philosophical emphasis on non-rational, intuitive feeling. The role of the Continental Romantics in this regard was to provide the sort of intellectual validation we may suppose a fledgling movement of comparative youngsters would want in their rebellion against the Harvard establishment.
For Transcendentalism was entering theological realms which struck the elder generation of Unitarians as heretical apostasy or, at the very least, as ingratitude. The immediate controversy surrounded the question of miracles, or whether God communicated his existence to humanity through miracles as performed by Jesus Christ. The Transcendentalists thought, and declared, that this position alienated humanity from divinity. Emerson leveled the charge forcefully in his scandalous Divinity School Address (1838), asserting that "the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain."[25] The same year, in a bold critique of Harvard professor Andrews Norton's magnum opus The Evidence of the Genuineness of the Four Gospels , Orestes Brownson identified what he regarded as the odious implications of the Unitarian position: "there is no revelation made from God to the human soul; we can know nothing of religion but what is taught us from abroad, by an individual raised up and specially endowed with wisdom from on high to be our instructor."[26] For Brownson and the other Transcendentalists, God displayed his presence in every aspect of the natural world, not just at isolated times. In a sharp rhetorical move, Brownson proceeded to identify the spirituality of the Transcendentalists with liberty and democracy:
...truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man's soul, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of this inner light, and on the fact, that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive the storms of human passions.[27]
To Norton, such a rejection of the existence of divine miracles, and the assertion of an intuitive communion with God, amounted to a rejection of Christianity itself. In his reply to the Transcendentalists, "A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity," Norton wrote that their position "strikes at root of faith in Christianity," and he reiterated the "orthodox" Unitarian belief that inner revelation was inherently unreliable and a potential lure away from the truths of religion.
The religion of which they speak, therefore, exists merely, if it exists at all, in undefined and unintelligible feelings, having reference perhaps to certain imaginations, the result of impressions communicated in childhood, or produced by the visible signs of religious belief existing around us, or awakened by the beautiful and magnificent spectacles which nature presents.[28]
Despite its dismissive intent and tone, Norton's blast against Transcendentalism is an excellent recapitulation of their religious philosophy. The crucial difference consisted in the respect accorded to "undefined and unintelligible feelings."
The miracles controversy revealed how far removed the Harvard rebels had grown from their theological upbringing. It opened a window onto the fundamental dispute between the Transcendentalists and the Unitarians, which centered around the relationship between God, nature and humanity. The heresy of the Transcendentalists (for which the early Puritans had hanged people) was to countenance mysticism and pantheism, or the beliefs in the potential of the human mind to commune with God and in a God who is present in all of nature, rather than unequivocally distinct from it. Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists continued to think of themselves as Christians and to articulate their philosophy within a Christian theological framework, although some eventually moved past Christianity (as Emerson did in evolving his idea of an "oversoul") or abandoned organized religion altogether.
While it certainly did not act alone, the increasing gravity of the Transcendentalist movement helped to usher in the now inevitable tide of what came to be labeled “liberalism.” Younger Christians (especially in the Northeast U.S.) were becoming less interested in the letter of the Law and more enthusiastic about civil do-gooding. The growth of organization such as the Student Volunteer Movement helped solidify an ever-centralizing contingent of the American Protestant church; and the work of influential scholars such as Adolph von Harnack seemed to suggest that the best minds in American Christianity were being pulled inexorably left.[29]
Nevertheless, the staunch conservatives within the church would not stand idly by. Rather, another sect of “intellectuals” would fire back at the likes of Harnack, claiming that Jesus’ message certainly did not center around a general reconciliation of Christian culture with the modern world, but instead around a strict set of “fundamentals.” However, it would be the same emotionalism and “backwoods” Christianity decried by the Boston intellectuals that would eventually galvanize the now-marginalized Evangelicals and send them headlong into a whole new revival.
Part Four: Countering the Liberal Shift
As the United States witnessed the dawn of the 20th century, the American Protestant church faced a variety of watershed decisions. To many fearful conservatives (particularly in the South), the advancing tide of liberal sentiments seemed all but destined to overshadow their traditions by reshaping American Christianity into a deeds first/theology second brand of civil religion. And their more liberal brothers and sisters were hardly feeling complacent. With the explosive popularity of the ideas offered by Charles Darwin, the opponents of biblical literalism (and thus, in many cases, ultra-orthodox Christianity) had the intellectual community firmly entrenched on their side of the battle line. Stinging sermons such as Henry Fosdick’s Shall the Fundamentalist Win seemed to adequately dismiss the exclusionist theology of the new (self-named) Fundamentalist sect of Protestant Christianity. It would be, however, a strange synthesis of Old World theology and uniquely American emotionalism that brought stasis (and eventually reversal) to the conflict.
Despite the oft-maligned outward enthusiasm displayed during the great revival meetings of the 19th century, the majority of American in the early 20th century were not Boston intellectuals, but an amalgamation of farmers, West-bound opportunists, and impoverished immigrants searching for work in the booming mill towns of the North and Midwest.[30] That is, while the likes of Adolph von Harnack may have the consensus of the intellectual community (past and present) on his side, a significant portion of the men and women living in the industrial cities near his home couldn’t read what he published. Emotion, however, requires no ability to read or decode high-browed syllogisms. And it was a small church in Los Angeles that would set into motion a new phenomenon that not only dismissed the cold intellectualism of the Northern Christians, but renewed interest in those supernatural occurrences which (seemingly) could not be explained away.
In the Spring of 1906, William Seymour began preaching to the parishioners of the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles. Central to his message was that the gift of “tongues,” or other languages (often indiscernible), was the primary evidence of ones being “filled with the Holy Spirit.” This teaching was met with opposition by many, but an equally significant number gave credence to Seymour’s words and his meetings began to grow in size and zealous intensity. As notable as the numbers drawn by Seymour was the heterogeneous nature of his followers. An April 18, 1906 story by the Los Angeles Times noted that, “Colored people and a sprinkling of whites compose the congregation, and night is made hideous in the neighborhood by the howlings of the worshippers who spend hours swaying forth and back in a nerve-racking attitude of prayer and supplication.”[31]
Azusa Street Mission ultimately failed to conquer the racist attitudes of its heyday, and the church splintered off into several (largely homogenous) sects. The influence, however, of the revival born at Azusa Street was felt (quite literally) worldwide. Seymour’s employment of modern means of mass communication played no small role in the exponential spread of what came to be termed “charismatic” Christianity. Seymour’s newsletter was sent to over 50,000 subscribers free-of-charge and was subscribed to by followers as far away as China. In later chapters we’ll see how successful movements (including the Emergent Church) similarly employed mass “advertisement” to spread their respective messages.
The largely emotional appeal of the charismatic movement succeeded in winning droves of converts. The Church of God in Christ (C.O.G.I.C) was born of direct association with Azusa Street, and is today the United States’ largest black Protestant denomination.[32] Emotion alone, however, would not suffice if the tide of liberalism were to be successfully stemmed. Empirical and logical proof still held sway with a large contingent of American Christians, and the more conservative sects of the church had thus far failed to produce a mind that could counter the ideas of liberal scholars with any significant degree of success. The issues were: the Social Gospel, a liberalizing and secularizing trend within Protestantism that tried to weaken the Christian message, making it a merely social and political agenda; the embrace of Darwinism, which seemed to call into question the reliability of Scripture; and the higher criticism of the Bible that originated in Germany. A loosely organized party of ultra-conservative Christians did eventually band together and organize a counterpunch to the more liberal agenda. They published a series of volumes on what they considered to be the indispensable facets of the Christian faith: the “fundamentals” of the faith.
The basic elements of Fundamentalism were formulated almost exactly a century ago at the Presbyterian theological seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, by B. B. Warfield and Charles Hodge, among others. What they produced became known as Princeton theology, and it appealed to conservative Protestants who were concerned with the liberalizing trends of the Social Gospel movement, which was gaining steam at about the same time. In 1909 the brothers Milton and Lyman Stewart, whose wealth came from the oil industry, were responsible for underwriting a series of twelve volumes entitled The Fundamentals. There were 64 contributors, including scholars such as James Orr, W. J. Eerdman, H. C. G. Moule, James M. Gray, and Warfield himself, as well as Episcopalian bishops, Presbyterian ministers, Methodist evangelists, and even an Egyptologist. As Edward Dobson, an associate pastor at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, summarized the collaboration, "They were certainly not anti-intellectual, snake-handling, cultic, obscurantist fanatics."[33] The preface to the volumes explained their purpose: "In 1909 God moved two Christian laymen to set aside a large sum of money for issuing twelve volumes that would set forth the fundamentals of the Christian faith, and which were to be sent free of charge to ministers of the gospel, missionaries, Sunday school superintendents, and others engaged in aggressive Christian work throughout the English speaking world." Three million copies of the series were distributed. Harry Fosdick, a theological liberal, wrote an article in The Christian Century called "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" He used the title of the books to designate the people he was opposing, and the label he originated became commonly used to designate those who adhered to The Fundamentals. The fundamental doctrines identified in the series can be reduced to five: (I) the inspiration and what the writers call infallibility of Scripture, (2) the deity of Christ (including his virgin birth), (3) the substitutionary atonement of his death, (4) his literal resurrection from the dead, and (5) his literal return at the Second Coming.
While the new Fundamentalist movement moved many volumes of their hard-lined rhetoric, they still lacked the well-roundedness sought after by those who wished to be consistent in their faith without sacrificing their intellectual integrity. Ironically, the community of “higher criticism” based in Germany which many conservatives feared as a key component of the maligned liberalism they so earnestly fought would produce an unlikely savior for their cause.
While not every conservative believed that every letter of Scripture should be taken literally and not every liberal believed the Bible to be completely allegorical, the difference in opinion concerning the importance of Scripture between conservatives and liberals can’t possibly be overstated. In the eyes of conservatives, the mandates of the Bible were being sacrificed on the altar of the “social gospel” which emphasized social do-gooding and not much else. Enter Swiss theologian Karl Barth.
For Barth, modern theology with its assent to science, immanent philosophy, and general culture with its stress on feeling, was marked by indifference to the word of God and to the revelation of God in Jesus, which he thought should be the central concern of theology. In the confrontation between humanity and God, which was Barth’s fundamental concern, the word of God and God’s revelation in Jesus are the only means God has for Self-revelation; Barth argued that people must listen in an attitude of awe, trust, and obedience. For Barth, the question “Is the Bible the Word of God?” is incomplete. Barth stated that the Bible becomes the Word of God to the reader when God chooses to use the Bible as a means of revelation. Thus, the Bible isn’t necessarily inspired, but inspiring. While this new middle-ground offered by Barth still caused many conservatives to flinch, history attests that conservatives owe a Barth a huge debt for essentially “bailing out” the Bible on an intellectual level.[34] And with this bailing out, the stage was set for a new stasis in American Protestant Christianity. In generations to come conservative Christians would recognize the need for appealing to newcomers on intellectual and emotional levels. Likewise, they would adapt to culture and technology with surprising aptitude so that many churches began to resemble concert arenas rather than stately houses of worship.

With our historical groundwork now laid, we can begin to examine more closely the movements and leaders who ushered in what is now termed the Emerging Church. Many (if not most) of these leaders were influenced by “Christian counter-cultures” of the past forty years. And nearly all the important figures dealt to some extent with youth-specialized ministry. Again, in each of these precursors to the Emergent Church we will observe how shifts in popular culture and church culture are inexorably tied, and how this association makes this new “emergence” of post-modern congregations a predictable phenomenon.
First let us look at some of the immediate precursors to the Emergent Church. Our study shall be far less scrutinizing than our above trek through American Church history, but is nonetheless a necessary step if we are to have a proper conceptual context for our discussion.
Book Two: Youth and the Spiritual Counter Culture of the Late 20th Century
Part One: The move towards youth specialization
Dean Borgman, in The Complete Book of Youth Ministry (p. 62), wrote that modern American youth ministry was born out of the “social evolution of modern adolescence and the view of that development taken by church and society.” By that, he meant that “adolescence” is a modern western phenomenon and youth ministry is the church’s response to this phenomenon. So how did youth ministry begin? As institutions, youth ministries originated in the 19th century. When young people began to migrate to cities during the Industrial Revolution, some Protestant leaders began to worry about the effects of urbanization on Christian young people. The YMCA and YWCA movements were the earliest answers to that worry, and the Ys quickly spawned dozens of other organizations, such as Christian Endeavor, the Epworth League, and many more.youth ministries were what historian Joseph Kett has called “purity” programs. That is, they sought to keep young people untainted by worldly influences, which meant essentially avoiding taverns, brothels, and Christians of different denominations, ethnicities, and (sometimes) genders. Most early youth ministry programs were intended to be purer ecclesiastical equivalents of armies and navies—ways to marshal and contain the energies of young people. As any contemporary youth minister could have predicted, of course, preserving purity proved difficult to accomplish with a voluntary program. Young Christians under the influence of faith simply weren’t subject to the kind of regimentation the military can impose. Believers found their ways to the worst neighborhoods in the city and somehow still remained Christians. Sometimes, out of their experiences in the cities, they even changed their traditions and broke down some of the boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and creed that were dividing other Christians. The broad sweep of youth ministry history thus conveys that the faith of young people can’t be programmed. Likewise, the reader will note that we have revisited one of the driving ideas in our discussion, i.e., that shifts in church methodology nearly always mirror some similar shift in society-at-large. Just as the seeds for the nascent civil rights movement were being planted, a similar incorporation of colors, creeds, and ethnicities was occurring within the walls of American Christianity. While the casual observer may say, “Look, here is a revolutionary shift in ideas,” the more careful student of history will see the cyclical, predictable patterns with which the church acts in regards to its immediate social/cultural context.
By the mid-20th century, several Protestant organizations specializing in youth ministry were thriving in nearly every corner of the U.S. While this helped move the church as a whole towards an ecclesiastical restructuring which created jobs for “Youth Pastors” and other similarly named positions, it likewise (intentionally or not) sparked a larger spiritual “awakening” of sorts. That is, the younger generation in America has historically been the arbiter of what is “in” in terms of popular culture. And when spirituality was incorporated into the lives and minds of a significant portion of American youth, a broader (albeit less centralized) trend was inevitable.
Part Two: Spirituality and Counter-culture
I should establish that in speaking of counter-culture I will occasionally employ “pop-culture” as a synonym. While this seems a bit contradictory, close examination reveals that within the context of young adults (18-30 years of age) the most popular things can often be those which are initially labeled as “counter culture” (cf. clothing trends, hairstyles, music, political affiliations, etc).
As the 1960s dawned and “baby-boomers” blossomed into adulthood, the suburban ideals of the older generation began to appear shallow and hypocritical among a significant portion of young people. Racial and sexual inequality along with an unjust war made the quasi-Puritanical values of suburban America sound like an insult to anyone’s intelligence. Moreover, the seemingly purely material goals these teenagers and 20-somethings were supposed to aspire to seemed to offer little in the way of reconciliation and peacemaking. Many saw the Christian church as just another cog in the “man’s” machine, and thus shed themselves of any religious association. However, an equally important percentage judged that the problem was not within the teachings of Jesus, but the shortcomings of his followers. Many of these Christian young people did leave the institution of the church, but retained the spiritual thirst and curiosity. Some found peace in a synthesis of their beliefs with the Eastern thought that was gaining popularity at an exponential rate within the Western world (thanks in no small part to the endorsement of rock groups like the Beatles). And still some sought out a way in which to maintain the “purity” of the Christian faith while also shrugging off the oppressiveness and hypocrisy of the ecclesiastical establishment.
By the late-1960's, the youth counter-culture had reached its peak. Drug use flourished,"hippies" were the center of the media's attention, and most striking of all, significant numbers of these youth were becoming Christians. Onlookers knew these young people by various names: "Jesus Freaks," "Jesus People," and "Street Christians." A large proportion of these youthful evangelists for Jesus were only a short while removed from drugs, "free love," and alienation from "straight society." They spoke of a "Jesus Revolution" and believed that the end-times were near (Enroth:12).
Most adhered to the aforementioned "fundamentals of the faith," doctrines outlining a faith of biblical inerrancy, and affirmed fundamental Christian views. On the whole, the primary focus of the Movement centered on salvation through an "experience of faith in Jesus Christ." But there were other elements that made this movement difficult for the uninitiated to grasp including the wide-spread influence of Pentecostalism, speaking in tongues, and "second blessing" baptisms. Although the "Jesus Movement" was not entirely self-conscious as a movement, they felt as though they were participants in a genuine awakening, comparing themselves to the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century.
It is difficult to trace the beginnings of the movement as the "Jesus People" were not a centralized front but, rather, many individual groups, often geographically isolated from the others. Most scholars point to the 1967 opening of the First Street Christianity locus, "The Living Room" in southern California, as the beginning of evangelical outreach to the youth counter-culture. This outreach of countercultural-oriented missionary groups spread quickly. By 1971, the National Institute of Health estimated over three thousand communal groups in the U.S., and over 800 were deemed to be part of the Jesus People Movement. By embracing the countercultural phenomena of communal living, these groups were able to capture the sentiments of "anti-establishment" while still adhering to Christian traditions.
This is the context in which the organization now known as "Jesus People USA" was born. Jon Trott, a long-time member, editor of Cornerstone magazine, and resident historian of the group traces the beginning to early 1971. Jim and Sue Palosaari, with the help of Linda Meissner -- founder of Seattle-based the "Jesus People Army" traveled to the midwest searching for a location to start a Jesus ministry. Finding Milwaukee hospitable, the couple, launched a ministry with an initial "march" through Milwaukee. From this initial effort, they gained 25 members and named themselves "Jesus People Milwaukee" (JPM). The group attracted members of the counter-culture: young persons who were on drugs, outcasts, runaways, and gays -- all people who "needed Jesus."
In October 1971, John Wiley Herrin, a southern pastor with a history of alcohol abuse and marital infidelity, visited JPM with his wife and children. The family was attracted to the communal lifestyle, dedicating "your entire life, every aspect, to following Jesus Christ," and shortly thereafter, joined the group. By November 1971, JPM numbered 100. Three months later, the group boasted a following of nearly 200 members.
By April 1972, JPM splintered off into several groups in order to evangelize in Europe. Herrin formed a small group, consisting of a "Jesus Rock" band, the "Resurrection," and thirty others to "share the gospel," dubbing themselves the Jesus People USA (JPUSA). Traveling in an old bus and a few cars throughout the summer of 1971, they became one foci of media attention -- long-haired, hippy evangelists who had set out to "evangelize the United States." In late 1971 the group left the "home base" behind in Milwaukee and traveled south to Gainsville, Florida, where musical performances were made for the college crowd at the University of Florida at Gainsville. They found little positive response in Gainsville, and felt they were also being confused with another highly publicized group, the “Children of God.” Discouraged by their lack of success, the group returned to Duluth, Minnesota in hopes of forming a permanent community. Shortly thereafter, they felt “burdened by the need of the city,” and relocated in Chicago, Illinois. Here, they found hospitable residence in the local Faith Tabernacle Church.
By 1975, JPUSA recognized their need for a permanent residence and, after much consideration, purchased a six-flat residence at 4431-33 Paulina Street. Lofts were built, and the large rooms were converted to men’s and women’s dorms, some housing as many as 20 people.
During this time, JPUSA established Cornerstone magazine, which would become a well-respected national religious publication. The group also sought more stable finances than could be provided for by charity or money pooling, and so established several small companies, focusing on home repairs, painting, roofing, and carpentry, known as the “tent-making ministries.”
In 1978, JPUSA merged with a parallel, black urban Christian communal group, settling into a former hotel found in a run-down neighborhood off Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. As the early 1980’s began, the members made attempts to become more socially involved, a dinner program was started, and homeless sheltering increased. In order to increase outreach on a larger scale, the first Cornerstone Festival, a Woodstock-type music festival, was planned for June of 1984. After witnessing the success of the festival, it was made an annual event.
Part Three: The “Birth” and Essence of the Emerging Church
I would invite the reader at this point to stop and revisit the section of this paper entitled “Prelude” so that he or she may reacquaint themselves with some of the fundamental traits of the Emerging Church already discussed herein. This sub-chapter proposes to discuss the “birth” of the Emerging movement. However, we’ve already seen how pinpointing the birth of any decentralized movement (especially the one presently discussed) is all but futile. Moreover, if we consider the aforementioned “rainforest” illustration, we see that the Emerging church views itself more as an evolving continuation of other movements. Nevertheless, for the sake of the reader who simply must have concrete historical context, we shall consider discussion of “emerging” or “emergent” churches to be contained within 1990-present Western Christian churches. Now that we have a bare-bones idea concerning the traits of the Emerging Church, and a thorough (though certainly not exhaustive) picture of the culture from which it emerged, we can begin to discuss in more detail the specific history of this contemporary Christian community.
First, the choice of the word “emerging” (or often “emergent”) should be explored. It is widely agreed upon that Christian thinker Brian McLaren first coined the term while working with a ministry called Young Leader Networks. McLaren recalls the logic behind the naming thusly:
Some time later my friend Stephen Freed called with added meaning for the name. Stephen…spends a lot of time on airplanes, and on a recent flight met an expert in forestry. His specialty was rainforest ecology, specifically emergents—small saplings that grow up in the shadow of the mature forest canopy…They seem stunted by the mature trees, but in truth they are waiting. Whenever one of the mature trees dies, the emergents…soar up and fill the gap…”[35]
The metaphor is rather transparent: the leading figures in the Emerging community choose not to see this newest manifestation of the Christian faith as a revolutionary “improvement;” but rather as something that is (more than anything else) new. It did not arise of its own accord, but was nurtured, and yes, even spawned from the various and sundry forms of life in its midst.
Of course this sunny point of view is not without opposition. Emergents have met with their share of opposition, both within and outside of the Church. Most often, the label of “pluralistic relativism” is the chosen epithet of scholars wishing to dismiss the Emerging Church movement. Ken Wilber has this to say:
It claims that all truth is culturally situated (except its own truth, which is true for all cultures); it claims there are no transcendental truths (except its own pronouncements, which transcend specific contexts); it claims that all hierarchies or value rankings are oppressive and marginalizing (except its own value rankings, which is superior to alternatives); it claimed that there are no universal truths (except its own pluralism, which is universally true for all people).[36]
Members of the Emerging Church have countered, saying that while they certainly don’t hold to such a no-holds-barred universalism, they do acknowledge that past formulations may have been limited or distorted. The emergent scholar who has probably lent the most to consolidating the “fundamentals” of the Emerging Church is the aforementioned Mr. McLaren. He has proposed what he calls a “generous orthodoxy” as a means for formulating some approximation of what it is exactly that emergents hold to. In helping others discern between relativism and the “generous orthodoxy” McLaren holds to, he offers these thoughts:
…nearly all orthodoxies of Christian history have shown a pervasive disdain for other religions of the world…A generous orthodoxy…,while never pitching its tent in the valley of relativism, nevertheless seeks to see members of other religions and non-religions not as enemies but as beloved neighbors…It seeks to remove splinters from the eyes of other religions only after removing its own planks…[37]
While the inclusiveness of its doctrine may spark disdain among the Emerging Church’s opponents, its members’ worship is still markedly Christ-centered. One will struggle to find the traditional hymnal, organ, or even (at times) church building; but the lyrics being sung, sermons preaches, and evangelism methodology taught still centers around a Christ-centered world. Nevertheless, the absence of so many of Christendom’s trappings has raised the eyebrows (and invoked the scorn) of more than one Christian writer. While it is certainly a matter of importance, this writer cannot help but chuckle at the remarkably short memory of many Christian nay-sayers. The Bible’s translation into English, the inclusion of musical instruments in worship, lay people preaching—all of these (and so many more) were at one time thought of as scandalous, and are now everyday elements of nearly every Christian community.
Louie Giglio’s “Passion” movement is, without a doubt, the quintessential manifestation of an “emerging” style of Christian worship. The mid-20th century had already witnessed popular music artists incorporating gospel elements into their music, often with commercial success. However, never had any one group or individual invested the money or time needed to produce a “Woodstock”-like event that centered around Christian worship.[38] It wasn’t until 1995, when a Texan pastor named Louie Giglio began to organize with some other youth leaders in his area that the seeds for such an event came into being. According to Giglio’s website:
On January 1, 1997, two thousand college students converged on Austin, TX, to seek God for a radical change in their lives and their world. It was during these four days that the vision for the 268 Generation was unleashed. Based on Isaiah 26:8, God was, and still is, calling out a generation of students dedicated to saying "Yes Lord," responding fully to Him and His purposes among the nations. The following year, over 5,000 students attended Passion '98 and in 1999, 11,500 students filled the Fort Worth Convention Center for four days of worship and renewal as a part of Passion '99. They came to Fort Worth from six continents to reaffirm their desire to live for His renown. Students were challenged by Bill Bright, John Piper, Louie Giglio, Gregg Matte, Voddie Baucham, Beth Moore and others as they extended the challenge to live wholeheartedly for the glory of Christ.
Thus the mammoth “Passion” movement was born. Fueled by its gigantic worship meetings, Passion includes evangelism training, weekend workshops for youth leaders, and various other resources and events which center (mostly) around reaching young adults. While Giglio doesn’t formally associate himself with any denomination, the stunning diversity which comprises his staff (ranging from ultra-reformed John Piper to several “leftist” worship leaders) certainly harkens to the inclusiveness we have already attributed to the emergent movement. And while “Passion” can’t be described as “decentralized,” (it’s a multi-million dollar empire whose publishing rights alone are worth a fortune), it has spawned countless copycat groups within innumerable sects of the Christian faith.
Overall, what Emergents are trying (in my opinion) to make clear is that they believe there is something above and beyond the current alternatives of modern fundamentalism and pluralistic relativism. This “above and beyond,” they believe, is the way of Jesus: it integrates what has gone before so that something new can emerge. It is, they believe, what is meant by the “kingdom of God,” a reality into which the Church has been emerging through the centuries which is bigger than whatever we generally mean by “Christianity” but at the same time is what “generously orthodox” Christianity is truly all about.
Conclusion:
The reader may find themselves stunned to have just read the word “conclusion” at the head of this paragraph. How, one asks, after so much discussion about the events leading up to this phenomenon of “emerging” churches have we spent so little time discussing Emergents themselves? I invite the reader to once again revisit our rainforest metaphor concerning the Emerging Church. The rainforest is full of centuries-old trees. These trees are full of history and wonderful stories. And though they are deeply rooted in the past, it is still their image which the forest most strongly bears. The nascent “tree” of the Emerging Church has only begun to tell its story. Many of its leaders and founders are not yet Senior Citizens. Moreover, because the Emerging Church (and, as previously discussed, every movement) is but a product of all that has come before, our discussion of Church history was, in fact, an analysis of the Emerging Church’s “DNA”—if the reader will allow the analogy.
And, it is because of its undeniable link to the past that the Emerging Church will likewise find itself mentioned among the watershed moments in the Christian church. Far from being a “flash-in-the-pan” anomaly of postmodern religious thought, the Emerging Church is the inevitable offspring of all the strivings, failings, successes, misapprehensions, and glorious epiphanies endured by the Christian church to date. Even if this writer’s words are insufficient to convince anyone of this reality, the testimony of history doubtless will.

[1]
[2] Wikipedia, 2004
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2004.

[7] Ibid
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11] Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, p. 222.
[12] From the foreword to Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South, p. x.
[13] William McLoughlin, The American Evangelicals, p. 47.
[14] Mathews, Religion in the Old South, p. 47.
[15] McLoughlin, The American Evangelicals, p. 87.
[16] Ibid, p. 90
[17] As William McLoughlin put it, the Calvinists had to "concede that God was benevolent and not wrathful, merciful not stern, reasonable not mysterious ... that man was active not passive in his salvation, that grace was not arbitrarily or capriciously dispensed like the royal prerogative of a sovereign but offered freely to all men as the gift of a loving Father to his children" (The American Evangelicals, p. 4).

[18] Ibid, p. 82
[19] A Generous Orthodoxy
[20] Channing,
[21]
[22]
[23]
[24]
[25]
[26]
[27]
[28]
[29] Harnack, What is Christianity? (1900)
[30]
[31] Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street (South Plainfield, N.J.: Bridge Publishing, 1980), xviii.
[32]
[33]
[34]
[35]
[36] A Theory of Everything (Boston: Shambala, 2001), p.37
[37]
[38] The reader will recall the discussion of the “Cornerstone” music festival as resembling Woodstock. However, Cornerstone was (and still is) more centered around performance rather than corporate worship.

...of all my demon spirits

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Ok, for real this time...

Friday, April 15, 2005

James' Thesis

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