Deep Church

I’ve belonged to ten evangelical churches so far, ranging from very charismatic to not-at-all (and still belong to the tenth). I’ve been hearing ‘what the Bible says’ for a long time. Studying biblical hermeneutics in an academic context made me curious about ‘how the Bible says’ for most of its readers. Eventually this led to research in a local charismatic evangelical church (‘The Fellowship’) looking at how members of that congregation came to understand the scriptures – what I’ve called ‘ordinary hermeneutics’. The chapter in the book includes a summary of ordinary hermeneutics in the Fellowship, and then draws out points of wider relevance for deep church.

The deep church issue that emerged from this case study was the role of church tradition in reading Scripture. For many evangelicals ‘tradition’ is a boo word. As a member of another congregation said to me ‘I choose scripture over tradition… we are trying to get rid of tradition here’. It doesn’t help that tradition is quite a slippery term and can mean many things. I use it in the essay to refer to a church’s body of beliefs (belief tradition) and a church’s hermeneutical characteristics (hermeneutical tradition). Continue reading »

Here are details of an imminent  WTC mini-series –  ‘Conversations in Deep Church‘

If you’re near London on any of those dates come along and join the conversation at these free events. 

If you are going to any of them would you like to write a summary to be posted here for people who couldn’t make it?

The theme is worship though that isn’t clear from the blurb.

Week 1 (19th June): Dr. Graham Tomlin – ‘Luther, the Cross and the Christian Life‘

Week 2 (26th June): Dr. Chris Joby – ‘Why do Christians worship’

Week 3 (3rd July):    Dr. Alan Spence – ‘The humanity of Christ‘

Week 4 (10th July):  Dr. Douglas Knight – ‘The people of the Spirit in the Body of Christ ‘

 Ian is Senior Pastor of Guildford Baptist Church and a contributer to the book, Remembering our future, he writes…

The relationship of theology to personal biography is a close one, no doubt. All of us are in reaction to something: in my case, a particular kind of charismatic experience which, in my opinion, consistently flouted the norms of orthodoxy. I am not talking about charismatic experience per se. What kind of Christianity would we be talking about without the charismatic?

Indeed, I have been fortunate to pastor churches that have had a healthy regard for life in the Spirit (by which I mean more than having an overhead projector). What I am talking about is a brand of Christian leadership, so called, that regards it as a virtue to pit the Spirit against the Word; or, more crudely, the Spirit against the cross.   I have had to put up with that false dichotomy for as long as I have been a Christian, and unless one has inhabited this rarefied atmosphere of charismania, as I have, it is difficult to understand the frustration that people like me have felt. Part of the anger is to do with the way the term charismatic has been hijacked over the years by a particular expression of the charismatic: namely only that which is loud and demonstrative. But the main part of the anger concerns the way this dichotomy between the Spirit and the cross plays in to the hands of the Gnostics.

The point of my essay in Remembering Our Future is to say that once you detach from the notion of mediation through the Word and the sacraments, for the sake of freedom in the Spirit, you end up with something akin to Gnosticism. In essence our religion ends up being more to do with personal light than about divine revelation.   Continue reading »

At the book launch for Remembering our Future, Ian Stackhouse gave a small talk in the Chapel at Kings College, that tied into his chapter in the book, and his experience as a charismatic evangelical, with regards to immediacy and mediation in worship, that correlated to my experiences and journey being within Vineyard Churches.

Ian outlines how within the charismatic evangelical stream of church (whose decedents birthed the emerging church), there was the move to equate immediacy as antithetical to mediation. The immediate experience of God was to be had by removing traditional practices of mediation, such as word and sacrament. The immanent experience of God came unmediated by the Spirit in our worship and prayer times, once we removed all those religious things that got in the way. Ironically it is the modern worship style that then mediates the experiences of God.

It got me thinking about how this process has continued, the project of pursuing non mediation, that culminates in the logical conclusions of self mediation, that capitulates to the post modern world, of consumer agency. If church had become about individuals gathering to/for my non-mediated experiences, then why do I even need church/others at all?
Continue reading »

We’ve set up a facebook group for Deep Church, here.

Come along and join in these free sessions.

[click on the image of the flyer for details or see here...]