The History of the Emerging Church

I think it is a very significant movement. I think we will look back on this time and see that. And so that's my goal, is just to be helpful.

And so what I thought I would do tonight, the first lecture I'm gonna do, basically the history of the emerging church in the United States, and then talk about the different streams that I see, so that you can begin to understand, you know, those different ideologies and the things that influence them. And then we'll get to some Q&A. So if any time during I'm talking, as Dr. Guthrie said, write down your question, we're gonna get to them, we're gonna make room for that, that's really important.

And a lot of this is just a discussion starter. And so hopefully we'll get there. And I'll be available during the breaks as well, if you have something you just wanna ask me personally.

Let me kind of bring myself into this story, you know a little bit about me, and then how this intersects into the history, because there is quite a few intersections. I was a binge drinking, alcoholic, almost athlete in high school. Very sexually promiscuous, just a mess.

Didn't have a dad growing up. And so I just kind of did my own thing. When I got larger than my mom physically, I just kind of stayed out as late as I wanted, and did whatever I wanted.

Didn't go to church as a kid, didn't really hear the gospel, didn't understand. I remember asking one of my friends who brought his Bible all the time, he was the little nerdy Christian that always brought his Bible to class, and I just asked him, I said, I keep seeing this sign behind the goalpost, because I watch football on Sundays, and so that's how I worshiped. And so I saw this sign behind the goalpost that said, John, and then a colon, three, no, John three colon 16.

And I said, what is that? I keep seeing that behind the goal. He said, well, that's, and he showed me in his Bible. Oh, okay, that was my, that's when I was 16 years old.

And so, long story, but Jesus met me, opened my heart. I'm absolutely a Calvinist with a capital C, because I was not looking for God at all. And he rescued me from my sin and my shame, and began to sanctify me, and my life was just absolutely changed, so much so that the summer, this was my junior year in high school, the summer before my senior year, I went to church camp, which I'd never done such a thing before, but I went to church camp, and the guy was up there speaking in a room just a little bit bigger than this, and I don't know what he was talking about, but God was talking to me.

And that is when I now know, I didn't really know it then, quite honestly, that was my call to ministry. And kind of the practical legs for that was, felt like the Lord told me to go back to my high school and start a Bible study. And so I did that.

And that Bible study grew to about 200 students. It was met on Friday nights. And out of that whole movement, pastors and missionaries and doctors and lawyers and accountants and construction workers and all kinds of people came to Christ and are still serving Christ today.

It was literally the only time in my life that I've ever witnessed revival because it hit our town, then two other towns in the same county in Southern Illinois over about a two-year period. I've never seen anything like it. I've tried to reproduce it.

It's not worked since, but it was just literally kind of a touch from God on our county with younger people. And so then, what do you do when something like that happens? Well, you become a youth pastor, right? So I become a youth pastor, and I'm way too young, I'm 19 years old and had no business being a youth pastor. I had a lot of maturing to do, but this pastor took me in and it turns out that this pastor was not so good of a guy.

He was sleeping with three women in the church. And I actually kind of overheard a conversation and kind of brought it to the attention. A lot of the people in the church knew about it and they covered it up.

And I remember driving back from that confrontation thinking if this is what ministry is, and if these are what pastors are, I'm not so sure I'm interested. I love Jesus, but I'm not so sure I love the church. And I don't think I love pastors.

And so I really wrestled with kind of chucking the whole thing, quite honestly. But I couldn't shake it. I couldn't let it go.

So I ended up going to Southwest Baptist University down in Bolivar, Missouri. And because largely because they had this biblical languages program, I was really interested in studying Greek and Hebrew and biblical backgrounds, archeology. So they had this great major.

My friend had gone there. And so I went there and started to study. And an interesting thing started happening.

I started having all of these kind of guys who really didn't fit in the church kind of pursuing me. Athletes and artists, guys who were wrestling with same-sex attraction, guys who were wrestling with, they were alcoholics, but they were pastor's kids and just all kinds of different things. I had this whole ministry to guys.

And I remember trying to take them to some of the churches down there. And there's some wonderful churches down there. Don't get me wrong, but a lot of them didn't fit in these churches.

And I remember thinking, you know, there needs to be a church for guys like this. And that's when the Lord began to talk to me about church planting. So I went up to seminary in Kansas City at Midwestern Seminary, largely because a friend of mine, a friend of mine's friend was planting a church up there.

And the seminary gave me a full ride and I'm all for free. So I went up there and I helped plant a church. It was going about eight months when I got there.

And I started the student ministry, the ministry for junior high and high school kids. And just, you know, just got in the kind of the trenches of the church plant. Meanwhile, the seminary had kind of gone through this shift that was more liberal leaning.

And then they kind of, as happens, you kind of swing the pendulum too far. And so there was some, they attracted some students and some professors who were, you know, pretty hyper Calvinistic in my opinion. They were on the cutting edge of the 1600s in their ministry methods.

And I really honestly agreed with some of their critique of what was going on in the contemporary churches, but I didn't necessarily agree with the spirit. And this is students and professors. This isn't just professors.

And, but I was just thinking, what is the church supposed to be? I'm not sure. I don't know if it's supposed to be seeker sensitive, seeker insensitive. What do I do? So I found out about this church.

This is in 1998 called Jacob's Well, which all the emerging church had the weirdest church names, right? I mean, it's like, well, Jacob's, what is, and I remember all that's in the book, Gospel of John. So that's kind of biblical. So I went, I met with this guy, Tim, and he had started a church in urban Kansas city.

And you just don't start churches in urban centers. I mean, you just didn't do that. If you wanted to start a church, you went out to the nice, safe suburbs, right? Well, this guy was in the hood in Kansas city.

And I heard about it. I said, man, I gotta meet this guy. So I started meeting with him.

He usually bought lunch, which meant I was gonna meet with him as often as I could. So I met with him and he began to talk to me about this whole idea of the church needing to emerge. And he'd been on staff at a church like me, a seeker-sensitive church, and it kind of grown a little disillusioned, thought maybe there's another option here.

So we started talking. He offered me a job. I said, no, I'm called to plant a church.

I'm hanging out with you so you can teach me. He said, well, I can help, but you need to do some reading on your own. You need to figure this thing out.

So I started, he sent me to a website called The Ooze. It's still around. And it was all about the emerging church.

He told me about Acts 29, which hadn't even started yet, actually. He said it's theologically driven and they have money for new churches. And I liked both of those things because I needed both of those.

And then he said, you should go to this church called Pathways Church in Denver. And Tim had just finished an internship there when he was going to Denver Seminary. And I'd actually met the pastor, Ron Johnson, at another event that I was at.

So I just called Ron. I said, hey, could I come? And I need one day with you. Could I stay at your house? I'll be in the mountains the rest of the time.

I just need to process this whole church planting thing. I feel called to an urban area, but I don't know what that looks like. I grew up in the sticks and now I'm in the suburbs and I'm kind of freaked out.

Would you help me? He's like, yeah, come and stay. So I get there like at one in the morning, my flight's delayed. And I get to his house, I'm knocking on the door.

Nobody's answering. He forgot that I was even coming. So he gets up, he's got his pajamas on.

I'm like, hey, I'm so-and-so. He looked at me like really, oh yeah, come on, you can sleep on the couch. So he talked to me and basically told me, pretty straight up, that I was soft and I needed just to man up and go plant a church and quit talking about it.

So after that display of gentleness, I thought, yeah, that would be great. I should really think about doing that. I said, well, where do I plant a church? I said, I live in Kansas City, but there's like four church plants in this urban area and there's not a ton of population down there yet.

He said, well, where are you from? Well, I said, well, I'm from this little town two hours south of St. Louis you've never heard of. I mean, he goes, well, what about St. Louis? And I was like, I've never thought about that. Go back, one of the girls on our staff was from St. Louis.

And she said, you know, I've heard you kind of talking about this, what you want to do in staff meetings. You should go to St. Louis. You should think about that.

So I'm driving to the mountains. I'm going back and forth, typical emerging church. You don't have linear thought.

And so I'm back in the mountains in Colorado after meeting with the guy at Pathways. I'm driving and just I'm processing what this girl said in the staff meeting. This is actually before what Ron said.

And then I'm just thinking, okay, what do I do? How do I do this? The Rams were playing in the NFC championship. This is now 1999 when this all happened. And I was watching the Rams and just all, it was like, this is where I'm supposed to go.

So I start making trips to St. Louis. I meet with PCA pastors. I meet with EPC pastors.

I meet with Baptist pastors. I meet with vineyard pastors. I meet with any pastor that will meet with me and just basically waiting for somebody to tell me that I'm crazy and don't even try this, honestly.

And all of them said, I think what you're talking about would work if the Lord's calling you to do it. You should come. So we moved to St. Louis and I'd heard about this thing, Acts 29.

And so we went to a boot camp. Now it was not a boot camp like you would think boot camp. It was a cruise boot camp, which is really oxymoronish.

But the co-founder of Acts 29 is a PCA pastor by the name of David Nicholas in Boca Raton, Florida. And he had these connections to the cruise line and he was a pastor in Boca Raton somehow. So we're doing this cruise and that's where I met Mark Driscoll.

And when I met Mark Driscoll, it was like I'd met my long lost brother. We both grew up in kind of a blue collar home, kind of a rough background. And it was just like, man, this is my guy.

And we began to talk and then, and this was in 2001, actually we were on the Fast 40 now. We were on, we were in the Bahamas when 9-11 happened. So there, all the people from New York were on the cruise were freaking out.

They're hauling off every Middle Eastern person in handcuffs on the ship. It was chaos. We get back, Driscoll calls me up and says, hey, we want you to be in Acts 29.

And so we were one of the first churches in the Acts 29 network, which I'll talk about a little bit later. So that's kind of my introduction. And as I continue to tell the story, it'll make a little bit more sense, some of the characters.

But this whole topic of the emerging church, what's funny is it sounds like it's new. Let me show you something here. These are all books.

That one on the left was published in 1970. And the one in the middle, I think was also in the 70s. And I think the one on the right was actually in like 1980.

So the idea of this has been around for a while. In 2001, Karen Ward, who's one of the leaders in the conversational emerging church, which I'll define for you in a moment, purchased the website emergingchurch.org. Dan Kimball is another leader, purchased the website emergingchurch.net in 2001 as well. In 2001, Emergent Village purchased the website emergentvillage.org. And then in 2001 also, the emergingchurch.com was purchased by Youth Specialties.

And so this whole term started kind of coming in vogue right around this time. And then a book was published in 2003 by Dan Kimball called The Emerging Church. Now, as I said earlier, I'm gonna focus on the US side.

If you wanna get the UK side and some stuff in Europe, I suggest Tony Jones and his new book, The New Christians Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. The New Christians Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. And Andrew Jones, who is also called the Tall Skinny Kiwi, he's a New Zealander.

And he can help you with all that other stuff. And he's got a blog and he's very thorough and very smart. And I recommend those two.

I'm gonna focus on the US because I think it's easier for me to track. I've interviewed Mark Driscoll, Chris See, Rick McKinley, Tony Jones, Doug Padgett, who all of those guys I consider friends, though we have disagreements. And I've read everything I can get my hands on from Rob Bell, Dan Kimball, and Brian McLaren, who have basically listened to lectures and read their books for nine years.

And what I see is this movement began to take shape in the kind of mid-90s, early 90s, mid-90s. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kind of note the situation in life of many of these early shapers from the interviews that I've done. And I'm especially grateful to Tony Jones who helped me fill in the gaps by sending me an advance copy of that book that I mentioned, which chronicles some of the movement.

So I'm gonna do some key players and then I'm gonna do some key events. And then we'll take a break and get into some of the popular terms and then we'll do some Q&A. Sound fair? In the mid-90s, Jack Caputo hosted a conference at Villanova University on postmodern philosophy.

And he featured this guy Jacques Derrida, as well as some others. And Caputo heard that an evangelical pastor from Texas was in the crowd. And this so astounded him that from the stage, he says, I heard there's a pastor here, something Cecil.

I'd like to meet him, please come and see me. That was Brad Cecil. And Caputo could not understand why Cecil, an American married evangelical pastor, would want to hear from Derrida, a French gay atheist philosopher.

It astounded him and he had to meet this person. Right around this time, Mark Driscoll, after studying communications and philosophy and epistemology at Washington State University, was planting Marcel Fellowship in Seattle. Doug Padgett was serving as a youth pastor and growing increasingly disheartened with its theology and practice.

Ron Johnson, after pioneering three churches, was planting Pathways Church in Midtown Denver. Tim Keel was finishing up Denver Seminary and interning at Ron Johnson's Pathways Church in Denver, getting ready to plant Jacob's Well in Kansas City. Brian McLaren was serving as a pastor in the suburb of Washington, D.C. and had yet to publish a book.

Donald Miller was getting sick of illegalism and lack of life in his church. Karen Ward was working for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denominational Life. Andrew Jones, the tall, skinny Kiwi, was starting a church for goth kids in Portland, Oregon.

Chris C. was planting a church for college students at Baylor University in Waco, Texas and was beginning to invest in a young, shy, insecure guitarist that you may have heard of named David Crowder. Dieter Zander had just left New Song Church in San Dimas, California, which, by all accounts, is the first emerging post-modern Gen X church, whatever you want to call it, planted in 86, to develop the Axis Ministry at Willow Creek. Dan Kimble, in his hair, was watching his youth ministry at Santa Cruz Bible Church take on a life of its own as Graceland, he's a big Elvis fan, he kinda looks like Elvis, Sunday night service.

Erwin McManus had just accepted a call to pastor the Church on Brady, which was eventually renamed to Mosaic Church in Los Angeles. Rob Bell was on staff at Calvary Church, a seeker-sensitive church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, under the leadership of Dr. Ed Dobson. Theologians Stan Grins, the late Stan Grins, and John Frank were working on a book called Beyond Foundationalism, which is an attempt at an evangelical justification for new forms of theology.

So all this stuff is happening right around this time, and all of these men realized something was wrong with the way the church was contextualizing the gospel as evidenced by the droves and droves of young people who were leaving the church. And these men were not the only ones concerned, a ministry called Leadership Network was concerned. Leadership Network is a ministry based out of Dallas, and in 1997, they asked Doug Padgett, who was a youth pastor at Wooddale Church, pastor by Leif Anderson in Minnesota, to run a new initiative.

Doug was charged with gathering the next generation of evangelical leaders, no pressure. Doug traveled around the country to find what they call innovators, and he invited them to what Leadership Network calls a learning community. And one of the first gatherings he hosted, we're gonna move to key events now, took place at the Glen Erie Mansion outside of Colorado Springs.

He had tapped a dozen young leaders to come for this first gathering to talk about ministry to Gen Xers, gotta love that term, Gen Xers. Gen X 1.0 was the name of the gathering in 1997. Now the common wisdom of the time was that the changes that were happening were based on generation, generational theory.

And so the issue was, all these people born between 1965 and 1980, they think differently than the baby boomers, so we gotta adapt ministry. The Gen X, the Busters, they need a new style of ministry. Kind of leading the charge in that was Dieter Zander and Tim Selleck, who published this book, Inside the Soul of a New Generation, in I believe 1996.

And so they were kind of leading the charge. I actually, my pastor at the time in Kansas City, I was a youth pastor, remember, I was trying to convince him of this, that this was a generational thing and that's why he didn't understand and he needed to listen to me. And so I was really passionate about this whole generational theory.

But according to Jones and others, at this first event, Brad Cecil, remember the guy that was at the Derrida Conference that the guy called him out and couldn't believe he was there, got up and he challenged this conventional wisdom of the day. The previous talk had been, let's attract Gen Xers back to the church by basically doing what Heibles and Warren did. Let's make church cool for younger people, that's the issue.

Cecil got up and went to the whiteboard and in the room and he began drawing diagrams all over the place, explaining that the shifts were much more profound than simple generational differences. He says, the Middle Ages were characterized by mysticism. This is Brad Cecil.

God was the author of all. But in the modern period, starting in the 17th century, man was seen as the author and we entered into an age of empiricism. Now, he continued, we're experiencing the postmodern turn toward an age of enlightened mysticism.

By the time Brad was done, the board was covered with a timeline stretching from Jesus to the present and littered with names like Foucault, Descartes, Rorty and Kant. Brad later turned this talk into a PowerPoint presentation which has legendary status among emergents. I think I actually viewed this in Tim Keele's office.

His argument was this, the issue was not generational, it was epistemological. And so there was this huge kind of divide in the room. Dieter Zander, Tim Selig, guys who wrote the book, were like, no, no, no, that's not right.

It's age, it's generation, not worldview. Driscoll, Chris C., Doug Padgett basically agreed with Cecil. And Tony Jones writes, they decided that Brad was onto something and that he got it, whatever it was.

They called Brad over to the corner of the room during the next coffee break and then began pointing out others in the room. Does he get it? Does he get it? They were splitting the room between those who understood Brad's presentation and those didn't. And for their part, Doug, Chris and Mark were interested in spending time with those who got it.

Get what, Brad replied. You know, the stuff you just talked about. The four of them couldn't articulate the it, but they could feel it.

It was like the beginning of something new and the overthrow of something old. It felt like to them, the burgeoning of a whole new way of understanding who they were as Christians and what the church was supposed to look like. These guys, Chris C., Doug Padgett and Mark Driscoll, under the direction of Padgett, under the Leadership Network, formed what was called the Young Leaders Network.

They began traveling the country looking for others who got it. And this is a slide from Leadership Network in April of 2000, where the term emerging church was first used. Let me give you a little history on that.

Dan Kimball writes in Next Wave kind of a history of this. Let me read it to you. It's helpful to understand how this term came about.

He writes, since Leadership Network was hosting these events, specifically focused on younger generations and their tagline was Advanced Scouts for the Emerging Church, it slowly began being used, it slowly began being used as emerging as a substitute word for what was called Baby Busters, then Gen X, then Postmodern. Emerging was the final word. When we realized that the Gen X thing was not just an age group thing, but a cultural change, it shifted to Postmodern, which soon became totally misunderstood and equated with a style of music or ministry or worship service rather than a philosophical response to modernism.

And since most of us were not philosophers and realized we were in way over our heads even trying to explain it. So the word emerging church seems safer and more non-age specific and began being used more and more, not only for church, churches and ministries focused on younger generations, but also for churches focusing on the fact that culture was really shifting and changing. So the term moved past a generational focus to more of a cultural focus.

Then in 1987, they had Gen X 2.0 and Mark Driscoll spoke. And this was kind of Mark Driscoll's coming out party in a sense. He basically articulated that the change that was happening was not a generational issue.

And all this kind of coalesced in his mind because he had studied epistemology in college and had become a Christian in college. And he was kind of brought all this together and Mark is a brilliant communicator. And at that conference in Mount Hermon, California, really kind of set the stage for this idea that it's not a generational thing.

Another thing happened at that conference, Mark took the stage and he told me the story personally, that as he took the stage, he began to see in his mind that many of the young leaders who were at the conferences, who were at that conference were committing adultery and had done some really, had some hidden sin in their life. And he just began to pray what he was seeing in his mind. And a couple of guys actually repented, I believe at the conference, but in the coming years, it was discovered that many of these young leaders had basically disqualified themselves from ministry and God had showed Mark that from the stage, it was quite an event.

In 1998, Brian McLaren, a pastor from the Burbs of DC joined this group that was traveling around the country. And that's Brian. And Brian is a very influential guy, is very winsome, very, very nice guy, very winsome.

But that began to kind of change the tone of the group. And LN kind of saw the writing on the wall. And if you know anything about Leadership Network, they're very atheological by nature, because what they wanna do is gather pastors and ministry leaders from all across the spectrums and get them to basically learn best practices from each other.

And so they were seeing that this whole movement was becoming very theological. And they said, you know what guys, I don't think that's where we're going. And so Padgett left, who was the leader of the Young Leader Network, Under Leadership Network, and went to plant a church called Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis.

This group kind of followed Doug and they eventually became what was known as the Terra Nova Project. And in my interview with Doug, he said that the shift was apparent and very evident early on in Terra Nova, because this is a direct quote. He said, it became about rethinking everything, not just church and ministry style, but also the content of scripture.

Now it's here that Driscoll began to be a little disturbed, because the conversation seemed to be shifting from changing the church to contextualize the gospel in culture, to changing the gospel to contextualize it in culture. And things got very heated at a certain planning meeting when Tony Jones began to join the party. Tony is now the National Coordinator for Emergent Village.

Tony at a Mexican restaurant writes this, he said, I ended up sitting across from Brad Cecil, two of us got to talking and I can't remember the exact trajectory of the conversation, but I do remember saying at a somewhat inopportune time in a far too loud a voice, the Bible is propaganda. It came out, even though I didn't believe it and I'd never really thought about it, but to be honest, I was a bit amazed that I'd even said it. Everyone else at the table looked at me, their face betraying the thought, who's the new guy? As one does in these situations, I began to feverishly defend my position, even in the face of Brad's face and cries of, you gotta be kidding me, that's crazy.

Propaganda has a point and a purpose, I retorted, it doesn't claim to be objective. It's trying to convince someone of something. It's trying to get people to join a cause, a movement.

Isn't that what the Bible is about? And Tony writes, particularly torqued at this assertion was Mark Driscoll, who let me know how much he disagreed with me. Would love to know exactly what was said there. Later on in 1999, there was a regional conference event for this group, and it was there that Driscoll drew the line theologically, saying that he was reformed, that he believed that only men should be elders, and that that's where he was theologically.

And so what happened was this group of men who had covenanted together to be friends, this group of men who had shared meals together with their families, this group of men who had began to talk about theology and focus on that, not best practices, would now be separated by theology. Mark writes, Mark Driscoll writes, I eventually had to distance myself from the emergent stream of the network because friends like Brian McLaren and Doug Padgett began pushing a theological agenda that greatly troubled me. Examples include referring to God as a chick, questioning God's sovereignty over and knowledge of the future, denial of the substitutionary atonement at the cross, a low view of scripture, and a denial of hell, which is one hell of a mistake.

Tony Jones and Doug Padgett and Chris See have a little different take on that. They say that Mark was divisive and harsh with his language, and despite attempts to ask Mark to tone down and submit to the group, he refused. So in late 2000, David Nicholas from Spanish River Church and Boca Raton and Mark Driscoll formed the Acts 29 Network with a mission of churches planting churches, male elders, reformed soteriology, church planting churches.

2001, Emergent Village was formed with a mission of being a growing generative friendship among missional Christians seeking to love our world in the spirit of Jesus Christ. No mission statement, I mean, no statement of faith for Emergent Village. Now, as I see it, these two movements are the most influential in the emerging church.

Acts 29 to the right, Emergent Village to the left, theologically. And so what I wanna do is actually add another stream to this because this is, in the last couple of years, as I said, the conversation has gotten very nuanced. And you have to understand that the emerging church cannot be separated from the postmodern situation in which it finds itself.

And so it's been notoriously slippery. Classification is a very un-postmodern thing to do. And the point with my taxonomy is that emerging churches are not monolithic.

And that's what I really wanna hope to help you understand. So I actually see three streams and everybody has given their streams and their thoughts. And so I'll just add mine to the pile.

But since I'm here, I'll give them to you. The first one I'll classify as emerging conversational. The emerging conversational stream, their main focus, in my view, is theological revision.

They are interested in the missio Dei, the mission of God, which we will actually talk about in the second lecture and how that's a little different than the other side. A lot of bloggers in this conversation. Driscoll refers to some of these guys as those who blog in their pajamas while living in their mom's basement.

So those are his words, those aren't mine. A lot of bloggers. And a lot of bivocational pastors.

So a lot of pastors who actually make their living traveling, speaking, and then are in this conversation. A lot of seminary students. A lot from mainline seminaries are in this conversation that would be classified emerging conversational.

Theologians that the emerging conversational, you know, they look at Scott McKnight, who is a professor at Park, I believe. The late Stan Grins, Nancy Murphy, Miroslav Volf, Croatian theologian, Walter Brueggemann, and many others. I could name a ton, but those are some of them.

Some of the people that I would put in this group, Doug Padgett, Tim Keel, a pastor in Kansas City, Karen Ward, who's a pastor of Apostles Church out in Seattle, Rob Bell, pastor of Mars Hill Church, Bible Church, Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, and Brian McLaren, who used to be a pastor and now travels and speaks. And what I see from the emerging conversational group is that they really are about challenging evangelical theology and reframing it. Brian's new book, Brian McLaren's new book is called Everything Must Change, and I've not read, I've read excerpts and reviews, and a couple of my good friends have read the book, and they say that what he hinted at in some of his other books, he has now completely, in their opinion, left evangelicalism.

That book's coming out. Heavy on critique, and then kind of, instead of just alluding to things, actually it's kind of moving in a new direction. Hence the title of the book, Everything Must Change.

The second group I'll highlight is what I call emerging attractional. I'll explain that in a second. They are after mainly revision in methods.

And I say attractional because they highlight large group worship, as opposed to the last group that I'll mention, the incarnational guys who downplay large group worship. But there's two streams within this one. They're the reformed, the neo-reformed, the neo-Calvinist that has been written about so much.

Some of the theologians they look to, Piper, Graham Goldsworthy, Chris Wright, Wayne Grudem, Tim Keller, classic theologians like Calvin and Luther. Some of the guys in this group, Matt Carter, is a pastor in Austin Stone Church in Austin, Texas. Chris Tomlin is his worship leader, a very large church, doing some great things in Austin.

Matt Chandler, pastor of the Village Church in Dallas, Texas. Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Daniel Montgomery, pastor of Sojourn Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

And David Fairchild, pastor of Caleo Church in San Diego. I would put myself in that group as well. There's also a group of non-reformed, kind of the neo-seeker guys, guys like Andy Stanley.

Not sure where to put Dan Campbell. I'll put him here. I'm sure he'll disagree with me, but he can do that.

John Burke is a pastor also in Austin. He was on the leadership team at Willow Creek before he planted. Perry Noble, this is a guy who planted a church in the middle of the sticks in Anderson, South Carolina, wherever that is.

Church has grown to like 9,000 people. Just amazing. Erwin McManus.

And another guy that I'll throw in because he's local and he's doing some great things is Greg Holder at Windsor Crossing Community Church, which is a church about 15 minutes from here in the Chesterfield Valley. And what you have here, though, there's differences between a reformed soteriology and more in our many in soteriology is both the reformed guys and the emerging guys and the emerging attractional guy, both the reformed guys and the non-reformed guys in this emerging attractional crowd are creative. They take risks.

They're not afraid to use different methods to reach people. And so the highlight for them is that they're trying to create an environment and a large group worship time that is accessible for people. And there's varying degrees of that.

The reformed guys tend to do it with Bible exposition, verse by verse, book by book, preaching of the Bible. The non-reformed guys tend to do it through topics and things of that nature. Last group that we'll hit is the emerging incarnational.

These guys are mainly after structural revision in the church. They tend to downplay large corporate worship time. And they are the house church guys for the most part.

Now, I need to say this because it's important. There's sometimes a bifurcation between attractional and incarnational, and I actually think that's wrong. I think you can be attractional and incarnational.

And so just because you have a, you know, you kind of emphasize your corporate worship experience doesn't mean you can be incarnational. But the reason I label these guys this way is because they really think that simple structures in the church, that's really what they're passionate about. That's what they're after.

And actually, sometimes they float more on the right or to the left theologically. They kind of go in between. I think the right is the emerging attractional guys.

The left is the emerging conversational guys. And these incarnational guys, these house church guys kind of float in between depending on who they are. Guys like Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford, who's actually from St. Louis, who have formed this ministry called Shapevine, which is a resource ministry for pastors.

And they're planting house churches all over the place. Bob Hyatt, who's a pastor in Portland, Oregon. Neil Cole, who's written a ton of books on this kind of stuff.

Another guy who I think is really brilliant, Jonathan Stewart Campbell. He wrote a book called The Way of Jesus. And another guy, Rob Turner, who's got a mega church that he's trying to turn into a house church in Dayton, Ohio.

Good luck to you, Rob. Praying for you, buddy. So, clarify once again.

To the left, we have the emerging conversational crowd. To the right, we have the emerging attractional crowd. And then the emerging incarnational guys kind of fluctuate.

And I hope that's helpful. It just in kind of giving you kind of the lay of the land of regarding where these groups are at. And in your Q and A, you can flesh that out a little bit more and maybe ask specific questions about that.