Deep Church

Deep Church means a church that is trying to hard to be deep.

Deep church?

I don’t even know what they talk about with ‘emergents’ and the like. I purposely let it go over my head.

To me, church is a group of believers coming together as family, loving God, worshipping God with their whole lives (or at least that’s the aim).

Deep Church?

Well it is a label - but for a deeper understanding of what church is and how to do the christian life on a deeper level, a more intimate level. I actually think the centre of Deep Church at its best might be the heart of the real culture we look to build as Christians, certainly in a church context, and that includes taking the best from the church of the past and bringing it into today’s church in a modern context.

Not just asking what sort of church Jesus calls us to serve and build, but the underlying theology and culture behind it all.

How does it link to the emerging church? Well, simply, the emerging conversation is about how to be a christian today, and deep church links in as a conversation about how to do church today, while retaining the best of the church of the past, building a whole new church. The emerging church and deep church are linked.

However, I try not to use labels, especially on myself. I believe in a church which preaches and lives out how Jesus lived, loving, serving, giving, supporting each other and which pursues social action as part of its dna. Which isn’t afriad to engage with the Bible and ask challenging and difficult questions of it and of our faith, and looks at the Bible in the original cultural context it was written and applies it in a modern context. One which looks at the heart of what Jesus was really living and preaching and what He was really getting at, rather than being stuck and trapped by legalism and tradition. A church that is honest with itself and with the people it serves about our weaknesses and the challenges we face, and isn’t afraid to confront and engage with pain and suffering. A church that welcolmes and accepts people as they are with all their weaknesses and doesn’t judge or condemn. A safe place. Finally, a church which is constantly engaging with today’s culture and discussing how the church can help people deal with living in today’s world and what it means to do church now and what things of the past are now past, and which things remain and how they fit in.

I know that sounds long winded, but that’s the sort of church and faith I beleive in - whether that’s emerging or deep church I don’t know. But that’s what church and being a christian means to me.

What I’ve been reading here reminds me much of Robert Webber’s work and also the writings of Marva Dawn in the US. As we move towards post-modernity, yes I’d suggest we’re not there yet, we need to recover some of pre-modernity as a regulatory influence on the response to modernity. As someone on the cusp between the liturgical, evangelical and charismatic I am very interested in balanced dialogue, counter, and juxta positions.

I hope to get my hands on a copy of Remembering Our Future and delve in deeper. Keep up the good thought provoking work.

Well, I tell you what, it has become the prevalent “buzz word” in my vocabulary when it comes to explaining the “emerging/organic” church that I am planting within the United Methodist Denomination. It is a term and explanation that I can express that allows everyone to see that what I am doing is not to be understood as an attack on the current state of affairs to the existing UM churches, but just another expression of Kingdom and mission with-in “deep church”. I am also enjoying that deep church not only spans across multiple expressions on Kingdom with worship, but also over time, and that brings into mind the ancient/future kinds of thoughts into the mix. just very interesting stuff in my mind, and VERY helpful in explaining Kingdom to multiple generations. Thanks to Jason a year ago in Seattle for bringing my mind into the conversation.

I still have no idea.

It seems to be basically generous orthodoxy renamed - or the idea of avoiding the tendency to throw out our past as we move forward into the future - but i’ve been told that’s not quite “it” so I’m clearly missing something.

Paul,

You, Mak and I had this conversation on her blog. I think it is a good idea to look back for the sake of creativity and reinvention. I’m was an art director for 8 years in the 90’s in Silicon Valley and we often used other people’s works for inspiration. But we rarely copied them. We used them to create what was right for today.

So my question is, “Is deep church about seeking inspiration from our past to create what is right for today?”

Probably the more interesting question might be - does what deep church means to me connect with what deep church means to you? I don’t know enough about the contours and details of your Deep Church movement to answer that well.

But I love the suggestive nature of the term Deep Church and I resonate with it because the practice of Deep Green Ecology has been part of my consciousness for a long time. To that end I’m drafting some ideas, though I’ll probably post them to my blog, given my near total lack of the gift of concision.

To be honest to me…it seems to be just talk, theory, speculation and convbersation which is ok but can get a little stale.

I would quite like to see some sort of action or outworking of all this talk.

It seems to me that the’deep church conversation’ is in danger of running a mile wide and an inch deep. I appreciate the reticence of the major protagonists (Andrew Walker, Luke Bretherton et al.)in being identified with a particular agenda. However, Remembering Our Future - which really excited me - did seem to point towards an agenda. As the blurb says, “Deep Church is spiritual reality down in the depths - the foundations and deep structures of the Christian faith - which feed, sustain, and equip us to be disciples of Christ.” Andrew Walker wrote “What a deep church most needs today…is for a theology of Christian basics.” (p.14) I’d love to this to be explored more - not just by theologians, but also by church leaders.

what I like about the term ‘deep church’ is that it seems to suggest that there is more to the understanding of ‘church’ than what is on the surface. Most people in our culture have a view of church as they recall or experienced it in their youth… however, there is something deeper that needs to emerge.

A second aspect of ‘deep church’ as I understand it from reading your blogs, is that there is an ancient traditional aspect of faith via Christian worship, ecclesiology, reading scripture, missions etc… that has currently been lost in modernity, or at least fragments of it are lost.

Deep church, like the emerging movement, speaks of reclaiming a rich heritage and bringing it to the surface. Of perceptually experiencing a different ancient + future aspect of how Church is understood.

I don’t claim to know what that looks like, but am very interested in the road ahead.

vapor

For me, taken from the other writings on the site and the Facebook engagements Deep Church means recognising and re-evaluating those aspects of liturgy, theology and spiritual practice which form the basis of our traditions. So, appreciating how marking festivals in the year helps us to move through our day/year/life with God or actually how powerful and unusual the experience of communal singing is and what difference or purpose it might serve for connecting us with God, all of these might be Deep Church. But I also think it is about exploring deeply into what it means to be Church in our culture and how we live out our Christianity through our Church. Why is it important?

For me, taken from the other writings on the site and the Facebook engagements Deep Church means recognising and re-evaluating those aspects of liturgy, theology and spiritual practice which form the basis of our traditions. So, appreciating how marking festivals in the year helps us to move through our day/year/life with God or actually how powerful and unusual the experience of communal singing is and what difference or purpose it might serve for connecting us with God, all of these might be Deep Church. But I also think it is about exploring deeply into what it means to be Church in our culture and how we live out our Christianity through our Church.

This is a fascinating and very suggestive conversation about what is deep church and how does it link with the debates about emerging church. Many have articulated the basic vision/sensibility really well. This vision, as I understand, is that the broad and ancient tradition needs to mould and form the ground out of which the emerging shape of church, mission and discipleship comes and this ground provides a counter to being blown every which way by modernity/postmodernity, while at the same time the contemporary context can be generative and fecund for exploring what it means to follow Jesus Christ.

There can be no set pattern or blueprint but I do think the deep church vision is taking concrete form in all sorts of places - what it might mean in youth work will be different to what it means in running a local parish church. What it means in the Uk will be different to what it means in South Africa. It is more a question of orientation - do you take the Christian tradition seriously? While at the same time are you open to new work of Christ and the Spirit in creation? So it involves a kind of in-tensional living between past and future as one works out in particular settings what faithful witness consists of.

I wonder if Deep church is going to help us rediscover the traditions in a way that is fruitful. It reminds me of a boy who doesn’t want to do something the way his dad does it, simply because he wants to make it his own. But in testing all the potential options over time he comes to the same conclusion as his father and thus makes it his own.

Sometimes I think there is a danger we can spend too much time discussing, and not enough taking action. Its important to debate stuff like this and work out solutions and formulate principles for deep church, but we then need to put them into practice. Church needs to be an instrument of action, a group of people that is known what it stands for and does something about it, not for what its against.

Deep Church is a way of figuring out how we can do church and live out our faith in a way that is relevant now, that takes the best of what was and reinterprets it, but also finds a way to put it into practice.

Lets make sure we don’t ignore that.

Hello,
I’m Gerry.

Just saying hi - I’m new.

Hi

Just stopping in to say hi to y’all as a new member.

Aaron