Deep Church

Christian Audio is well-known for their monthly audiobook giveaways. I have already taken advantage of their generosity, having downloaded Religion Saves, The Cost of Discipleship, Desiring God, and Crazy Love. I also downloaded a book that came out in the fall of 2009 — Deep Church by Redeemer Presbyterian Church pastor, Jim Belcher (the Redeemer Church in Orange County, California, not the Tim Keller one).

So for the last few months, I have been listening to this book — a chapter here, a chapter there.

I must say that I wasn’t initially excited about another “______ Church” book. I had already read two very solid books in Total Church and The Living Church and was pretty much exhausted of books on church models. But what intrigued me about Deep Church was that it contained significant commentary on the emerging church.

Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be) is an excellent book by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck that warns of the dangers of the emerging church while also providing a sort-of apologetic for orthodox, evangelical Christianity (read my endorsement here). However, DeYoung and Kluck, despite the fact that they consider themselves “guys who should be” emergent, are still on the outside looking in when it comes to the emerging church. And, aside from reading pages upon pages of books by emerging church authors, they were involved in very little personal engagement with the key players. Belcher, on the other hand, is one who was involved with conversation at its inception and has done a significant amount of personal research, interviewing the likes of Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, and Dan Kimball.

So Deep Church has something other books don’t — an insider’s perspective.

The basic premise of the book is that Belcher is in search of the kind of church model that is more faithful to orthodox Christianity than many in the emerging church but more in tune with culture than many in the traditional camp. A third way. He wants to learn from the emerging church as much as possible while not abandoning what it means to be evangelical.

DeYoung provides his own review. In it, he summarizes each chapter in Deep Church:

1. Deep Truth – Emergents reject classic foundationalism, which is good. But while they are right to reject self-evident truth, they are wrong to embrace a postmodern “constructivist” epistemology. “Even though I reject classical foundationalism,” Belcher writes, “I am not comfortable adopting a relational hermeneutic. I believe that God’s revelation in the Word tells us what is real and provides the authority for Christian community. We build our metaphysics on divine revelation. It gives us confidence that we substantially know ‘ready-made reality’” (82). In short, deep church rejects foundationalism built on reason, but accepts foundations built on belief.

Similarly, deep church is centered-set instead of bounded-set or relational-set. This means the church focuses on drawing people to the Well (Jesus Christ) instead of guarding all the fences (like the traditional church). It also means the church knows what it should be focusing on (the center), instead of allowing the community to determine truth for itself (like in the emerging church).

2. Deep Evangelism – The traditional church insists that belief must precede belonging. This has the effect of slamming the door on spiritual seekers. The emerging church insists on belonging before belief. But every community must have some standards and everyone in the church must be challenged to repentance, faith, and obedience at some point. So is there a third way? According to Belcher the third way understands that there are two circles around Jesus. There is an outer circle of seekers and an inner circle of committed disciples. Deep church welcomes everyone into the outer circle, regardless of their beliefs, but challenges them to become a part of the inner circle.

3. Deep Gospel – The traditional church has made salvation too personalized, too much like fire insurance. The message of individual salvation is important, but it must be balanced with Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom. We must avoided reductionist gospels and remember the gospel has a public dimension. We must not shrink the gospel to the forgiveness of sins. But, Belchers adds, penal substitution and justification must form the foundation for everything else we say about the gospel. The kingdom cannot be ignored, but it must be linked to the doctrines of atonement, justification, union with Christ, and our need to be forgiven (118).

4. Deep Worship – The emerging church tries to contextualize its worship, but in so doing it sometimes becomes untethered to history and too much a product of the culture around it. What is needed is not just a sampling of tradition, but a return to the Great Tradition. Belcher’s third way looks like this: “worship that embodies a genuine encounter with God, had depth and substance, included more frequent and meaningful Communion, was participatory, read more Scripture in worship, creatively used the senses provided more time for contemplation, and focused on the transcendence and otherness of God” (124).

5. Deep Preaching – Traditional preaching is often boring and uninspired. There is little drama to it. Most sermons boil down to two things: you suck; try harder (142). The emerging church tries to suggest a better way. In practice their “sermons” sound like sermons, except with a little more interaction from the congregation. But underneath the emergent view of preaching (at least that espoused by Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones) is a radical shift, a hermeneutic of community that says nothing is privileged, not even the Bible, over the community in discovering and living out truth (145). Belcher rejects this hermeneutic, seeing that it leads to a rejection of classical orthodoxy. So neither traditional nor emergent preaching will work. We need a third way that is not deductive and legalistic like traditional preaching, nor open-ended like emergent preaching. Instead, those who belong to deep church “preach Christ in every text, laying out and analyzing the human condition through Scriptures and experience, and exposing the radical, shocking grace of God that enters our situation, transforms us and empowers us to live differently” (157).

6. Deep Ecclesiology – Traditional church gets bogged down in meetings, paperwork, and organizational bureaucracy. This is bad. So the emerging church calls for a more organic, open-source model for church. But even organic churches cannot survive long without structure and accountability. What we need is a third way that calls the church to be both institution and organism, respects the offices of elder and deacon, celebrates worship as a means of grace, and cultivates and learns from tradition.

7. Deep Culture – The third way between traditional and emerging approaches to culture accepts Abraham Kuypers distinction between the church as institution and the church as organism. The church as an institution focuses primarily on preaching, sacraments, worship, and caring for the body. The church as organism works to train secret agents who go out into the world, work for the shalom of the city, and create culture. With this institution/organism approach, our churches can have a deep culture, one that is neither a copy-cat of culture nor irrelevant to it.

Personally, I am right there with Belcher each step of the way. In fact, were I to plant a church today, it would look something like the model found within this book. I believe it is faithful to Scriptures and the Great Commission of our Lord.

My only criticism of the book is that the “third way” presented in this book is not much a third way at all. It is, as DeYoung says, “the traditional way mediated through Tim Keller.” So I’m not surprised that I agreed with much of the book. Still, there is much to glean from these pages (or mp3′s in my case), so I would highly recommend this book.

Next up: Simple Church?