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 Between Traditional and EmergingFinding a third way.
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Jim Belcher's recent book Deep Church has garnered a lot of attention in ministry circles. For 2009 it was even named Best Book for the Leader's Outer Life by our sister magazine Leadership journal. BuildingChurchLeaders.com editor Drew Dyck spoke with Belcher about his book and what it means for churches. The subtitle of your book is "Finding a third way between traditional and emergent." Can you explain that? I wanted to compare traditional and emerging, and then explore a third way. That approach really took the pressure off. It took me out of the critic role, and allowed me to be the bystander while those two sides duke it out a little bit. But then I wanted to come in and say, "Well, okay, let's calm down. I like you both. But let me introduce a different way." I just thought that was a much more disarming way of doing it. I think we need a new plan for the church, a new solution. But the only way I was going to get both sides to listen is if I did this. And I think that's what's happened. Even those on the emergent side, which would put them the farthest away from the traditional, even those guys, they disagree but they're not ticked off at me. Could you describe for our readers what you mean by deep church? The term actually comes from C.S. Lewis. He's trying to describe the kind of church that he envisions. He uses two phrases. One is "deep church," and the other is "mere Christian." Of course, the "mere Christian" part goes on to be famous because the publisher takes that and puts it on the book title that's still a bestseller. But the "deep church" term is not as well known, even though he was using "deep church" synonymously with mere Christian. I needed to lay out where we could be unified before we talked about our disagreements. Lewis is a great place to go because he helps define mere Christianity. So Lewis has that great passage where he says, Mere Christianity is like the corridor of a house where we all are in the corridor together and then we go into our distinct rooms and we sit around a fireplace or we sit in our comfy chairs and we discuss and we talk and we have great fellowship, kind of amongst those who share our persuasion or our particular view. But when we're done with that, we might even go into someone else's room and enjoy the conversation. I can go in and listen to Wesleyans or Nazarenes or Pentecostals or Anabaptists or whatever. In a similar way, those from other traditions can come in and hear more about what's happening in the Reformed tradition. However, at the end of the day, we leave those rooms, and we head back into the corridor where we all share the common creeds of the faith, the Apostle's and Nicaean creeds, those core beliefs that unify us. Not only do I want us to move towards the deep church, but I want us to agree, really, on what unifies us before we talk about particulars. |        
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