We can’t keep doing what hasn’t worked – Bruce Sanguin’s new book, The Emerging Church, offers a model for change and a map for renewal

by Tim Scorer, insight editor

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The best expression of an alternative attitude I can come up with right now is something I first heard from a futurist, Edward Lindaman, in 1980: “There are three ways of dealing with the future: avoid it, adapt to it, or create it. The first two are cop outs.”

In a recent conversation about clergy stress and burnout, a friend made the observation that people in ministry leadership today often find themselves ministering to two apparently incompatible communities: the community of those who would rather go down with the church than change, and the community of those who feel energized by the possibility of creating a new future for their church. Both communities are authentic, and both need spiritual care and accompaniment. Most clergy were not trained at any point in their ministry education to deal with this kind of challenge and so they are making it up as they go along. Fortunately, there is a growing body of literature and an amazing array of continuing education offerings that address this 21st-century reality within our faith communities.

In his new book, The Emerging Church, Bruce Sanguin names what many have experienced:

Many congregations are struggling to find the abundant life that Christ offers. Over the years, we have formed some bad habits that now get in the way of divine abundance. We have become overly bureaucratic – too many meetings and not enough ministry happening. We have substituted busyness for the real business of the church – helping people to come alive in Christ. Clergy have exhausted themselves being personal chaplains for far too many families, rather than being exemplars of abundant life. In the mainline church, we have lost the practice of prayer and have replaced it with programs that aren’t necessarily related to clear mission and vision. We have made being warm and friendly with newcomers our primary purpose, when in fact they are looking for the Holy Spirit. We have associated the Christian life with “being good” forgetting that it is about being in God. We have developed cultures of superficiality. We have learned to be civil and courteous with the person sitting beside us in church, but we don’t take the opportunity to hold them in their brokenness and dance with them in their joy. Somewhere along the line, we have forgotten our own sacred story found in scripture and so have become susceptible to the dominant cultural narratives competing for our allegiance.

That kind of clarity and honesty is characteristic of Bruce Sanguin’s writing. This is his second book for CopperHouse, an imprint of Wood Lake Publishing. His first book, Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos, introduced us to an ecological Christianity based on an understanding of the evolving universe in which we live. Humans are a manifestation of an ongoing process of evolution, which will go on long past our existence. When we recognize that this evolutionary dynamic moves through us, not around us, then our whole relationship with the cosmos changes; we see ourselves as part of the unfolding divine energy of creation. We recognize the particular gifts we can offer from the perspective of self-conscious, Spirit-aware beings.

Variations on the word “emerge” are common in Christian writing and teaching today. Thus we speak of the emerging church, the spirit of emergence, and an emergent paradigm, to mention a few. Bruce Sanguin uses the terms emerging and emergent in this narrow sense, but also in the context of a wider appreciation of a universe that operates on principles of emergence. And it’s the application of this principle to the life of faith communities that is so refreshing and helpful in the literature of church growth and congregational renewal and change.

We can’t keep doing what hasn’t worked. Okay, so what will we do and how will we do it? In addition to being a practical introduction to principles of emergence, The Emerging Church is an inspired handbook for making change. You get the paradigm shift, but you also get the “how to” guide. And it’s all founded on Sanguin’s years of experience in congregational ministry, where he has collected not only the wisdom of leadership, but also the stories of the people. Get your hands on it!