On Being an Emerging Church
in the Christian and Missionary Alliance
By David Fitch

In the spring of 2000, my wife and I (with the help of friends) discerned that God was calling us to plant a missional church. Immediately I began to look for a place we could ally ourselves with for support and accountability. The first place I went was to the denomination of my roots: the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). I did not want to “shop around” for the best deal on a denominational home for our new church. Instead, I believe God calls us to start with where we are born and go from there. Several months later, God led us, along with ten other equally unlikely people, to plant a church with this small holiness/ missions-oriented denomination. We called it “Life on the Vine Christian Community.”

Back then I was not interested in starting a church as a “lone-ranger” entrepreneur (I still am not); yet I knew most evangelical church denominations would struggle to understand the new forms of church I had recently been experiencing. In my thirties, I lived and worked in the city of Chicago while completing a PhD in theology at Northwestern University. During this time, I helped lead an intentional Christian community that changed the way we all thought about church. Much of what we learned there resembled what is now labeled “emerging church” or “missional church,” and this was the kind of church we desired to start. Yet I disliked the idea of a church being just one person’s idea. I wanted a sense of history and the accountability and dialogue that came from being within a larger church movement. The Christian and Missionary Alliance became this kind of place for us and our church plant in 2002. They welcomed us, came alongside us, and encouraged us in our desire to be the visible Body of Christ living incarnationally in the very hostile context of northwest suburban Chicago.

Many have asked us how an “emerging church” like ours could fit in with a traditional evangelical denomination like the C&MA—a question I think overestimates the differences our “emerging” values have with traditional evangelicalism. It also underestimates many of the traditional evangelical denominations and their desire to minister the gospel in what have become decidedly post-Christendom contexts. We found that the three main aspects of our vision for Life on the Vine—community, transformation, and mission—possess strong synergies with the historical emphases of our denomination. Indeed, the specific ways we sought to carry out these three commitments represent, in some way, a renewal of some incredibly potent impulses found at the earliest origins of our denominational heritage. We therefore found resources already present in our heritage to draw on. I suspect this might be true of many evangelical denominations.

In order to illustrate how these synergies happened, I will briefly sketch the three emerging church-like values of Life on the Vine Community.

First, we saw community as an essential part of our identity. Most of us were tired of manufactured corporate church. We longed to join with people on a relational journey to be Christ in the world. We worked hard at community, and that work continues to this day.

Secondly, we saw transformational practices as important to our very existence, given American cultural forces of consumerism, busyness, idolatry of career and even family, and the proliferation of every imaginable addiction (not just sex and drugs). We recognized a dire necessity for spiritual formation practices in our community and developed liturgical practices, both corporate and in small groups, which became a defining element of who we are as the body of Christ. To this day, art, symbol, candles, silence, and ancient prayers are part of our services, and regular spiritual formation groups gather to confess their sins and work out their faith with fear and trembling.

Lastly, we saw mission as essential to our calling as a Christian community. By mission, we meant much more than an evangelism program. Instead we sought to make hospi-tality to strangers central to our community. We preached engaging the hurting neighbor and being present with help when injustice became visible in our neighborhoods and workplaces. When the hurting poor became visible among us we aimed to minister in a relational way. We actively preached seeking out the poor in body and spirit in the suburbs. We preached mission as a commitment to a way of life.

These three elements together defined Life on the Vine as an “emerging church” before we knew what that term meant, yet these values never caused a problem with our denomination. We certainly carried these values out differently from most of our fellow churches in the denomination; nonetheless, we found that these were core gospel values that could be found, if we digged hard enough, within our own denominational history.

We discovered, for instance, that many of our denominational leaders were already concerned with the loss of community that has occurred with modern-day efforts to mega-size churches. Who could be against community? Our re-emphasis on church as community was welcomed. We also discovered amidst our denomination a growing discontent with the failure of discipleship in the evangelical church. When transformational liturgies and spiritual disciplines were presented in these terms (even those associated with high church liturgy or even the desert fathers), our denominational leaders welcomed the conversation. In terms of our missional emphasis, the C&MA could not have had a founder who was more “missional” and holistic than A. B. Simpson in the 1890s. Simpson left his upper-class New York church to start a tabernacle that would open its doors to the poor in the rough sections of lower Manhattan. He opened orphanages and houses of healing. While it is true that our church does not resemble a typical C&MA church (if there is such a thing), we found much in this great heritage for us to connect with.

I’m a firm believer in a broader understanding of the atonement than just the penal substitutionary view that has occupied so much of evangelicalism. As a result, at Life on the Vine, a Christus Victor transformational soteriology pulsates through our preaching and vision as a gospel people. I have found the C&MA’s emphasis on divine healing for the body reflects this wider view of the atonement. It paved the way for a more holistic gospel in our church—a gospel for the body as well as the eternal soul, a gospel for the social ills that plague our alienated suburban communities.

We have found that the C&MA’s global missions efforts have made our church instantaneous partners with humanitarian efforts all over the world. This blessed our little community with immediate global connections, with an ability to participate in relief efforts with people we actually knew. In addition, our denomination’s commitment to the sanctified life has provided theological fodder for us to call our congregation into a more missional life in the neighborhoods.

All of the above, I believe, makes the C&MA an unusual place for emerging forms of church. Surely our denomination holds on to many of the modernist impediments that plague so many evangelical denominations. Yet if one knows how to navigate its history, there lies within it the resources for a missional renewal to the new postmodern, post-Christendom contexts we face in North America.

Lest I paint a too-perfect picture, there are definitely challenges working within any denominational structure—there certainly have been with the C&MA. One of the most difficult things I have had to do is overcome the prejudices that come from being labeled “emerging church” within certain sectors of my church denomination. I suggest it might be good for church planters to avoid this label for as long as you can in many evangelical denominations. I have also struggled to navigate some arcane doctrines peculiar to the C&MA. There are doctrines within the C&MA that are held dear by the elder sectors of our denomination. Yet people outside of Christianity have no way of connecting to or making sense of them. There are simpler ways of talking about the authority of Scripture in our lives or the importance of the second coming of Christ than the ones my denomination holds on to. These doctrinal distinctives often become unnecessary roadblocks to new believers growing up and taking on ministerial leadership within the church.

I have also navigated my share of issues with the archaic holiness codes of my denomination that forbid all alcohol and tobacco in a legalistic fashion. The things these “codes” communicate to young Christian leaders are incredibly debilitating. And believe it or not (and I get plenty of counter-arguments on this stuff), these codes work against us being a missional people in several unexpected ways.

The issue of women in ministerial authority has been very difficult to navigate in a denomination like ours. Theological issues like these are so crucial to our church’s representation of Christ to our community. Yet in a denomination like ours, there are not places yet for serious theological and communal conversations over these matters. For us, we have decided to work from below, submitting yet engaging these issues with gentleness at every level with the presentation of Scripture and prayer.

The C&MA has many of the problems associated with being an established evangelical denomination. It is attached to many doctrinal distinctives born over a hundred years ago, which make little sense in much of postmodern, post-Christendom North America. It is a child of the Christendom mindset of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America. We therefore still carry a mindset that we are a “sending country” doing mission overseas despite the fact that there are several countries overseas twice/three times the size of the U.S. church. We give lip service acknowledging that North America is a mission field, yet the C&MA largely operates as an organization built to promote and raise funds for its overseas programs. Meanwhile we are barely treading water here in the postmodern West. As a result, we fund missionary efforts overseas for 20, 30, 40, or more years at a time while we fund church plants in North America as if they were entrepreneurial start-ups with a three-year time window to survive. To me, this is Christendom thinking.

In spite of these issues, I see no reason why the C&MA could not foster a reemergence of the church in post-Christendom North America. No doubt there are pockets in the C&MA that are resistant to change and/or rethinking traditional ways of church. This is true in every church. If we seek, however, to connect with the early missional impulses of our founders, if we engage our disagreements scripturally with humility from below, and if we set proper long-term horizons for our new missional church plants and speak about them as missionary endeavors, I believe the C&MA will welcome this emerging missional movement as a breath of fresh air. This is what a few of us have experienced already with the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

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Theology News & Notes, Fall 2008 — Vol. 55, No. 3

Theology, News & Notes (ISSN 1529-899X) is published for the alumni/ae and friends of Fuller Theological Seminary. It is published three times a year, in winter, spring, and fall.

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©2008 by Fuller Theological Seminary. Produced in limited quantities for alumni/æ and friends.