“The Emergence of Insider Movements

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Identifying the elephant 

Getting underneath the skin of insider movements, moving beyond the anecdotes,  aphorisms and hype is no easy task. Shrouded in mystery, accompanied by hushed  tones, as if the very telling of its stories places real people in danger, trying to get to its  roots is a bit like Rudyard Kiplingʼs blind men trying to describe what is in fact an  elephant. It seems too big, and is too diverse for anyone to gain a coherent picture. In  part, I think this confusion is deliberate on the part of its formularies and missionary  practitioners. Insider movements grew in the dark. Most of us in the West never even  knew they existed for decades. Then, when we, the various parts of the Christian  church began to enquire, we were met with missionary success stories taking place in  unknown locations as recounted by people with pseudonyms. More fundamentally,  questions of origin or concerns regarding doctrine are generally met with assurances  that there are no real explanations worth repeating since the movement is one of the  Holy Spirit, having nothing to do with Westerners exporting ideologies and  methodologies East and South. Rather, Western missionaries were simply witnesses to  what God had already spontaneously generated in Muslim cultures. 

I disagree with these characterisations. I believe that insider movements are, despite  the barriers and more than a little obfuscation, understandable. Just as architects of IM  such as Charles Kraft have exhorted us to self-examination, wisely pointing out that we  are just as prone to religious syncretism as anyone else, I would like to take him up on  his suggestion and examine what I believe is fundamentally a Western invention. I only  say “largely” rather than “entirely” because in its application, insider methodology can, in  fact, merge with indigenous syncretism. South and East Asia; North and Sub-Saharan  African Islam all contribute these. Nevertheless, I think looking at insider movements as  extensions of Western, and in particular American evangelical expressions can help us  understand insider movements. One recent strand of contemporary evangelicalism, the  emergent church movement stands out. I believe that a good look at the emergent  church will help us also understand what insider movements are about. 

Thy say that if you wish to eat an elephant, you have to do two things. First, you have to  recognise that such an enormous meal can only be consumed one bite at a time. The  second thing to remember is that you need a plan. A bit of elephant anatomy helps. So it  is with insider movements. Many people and many ideas shaped its thinking. More  importantly, many people and many ideas shaped its thinkers. One such idea is the  emergent church. Before we can talk about the connections between these two  phenomena, however, we need to look at a few things that helped create both. Then we  can get our arms around the emergent church before relating it to insider movements. 

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Eating the elephant 

A good place to start is with a bit of prehistory. This is, to be sure, a book about  missions, but we often make big mistakes in not looking outside the box of missions to  understand what we have in the box. For example, Erich Kahler, a literary critic and  scholar noted changes in American and European world views after the Second World  War. His observations are worth quoting at length.  

We live in an era of transition, on which age-old modes of existence, and with  them old concepts and structures, are breaking up, while new ones are not as yet  clearly recognisable. In such a state of flux-more rapidly moving than ever-in the  incessant turmoil of novelty, of discoveries, inventions and experiments, in such a  state, concepts like wholeness, like coherence, like history are widely discredited  and looked upon with distrust and dislike. Not only are they felt to be  encumbering the freedom of new ventures, they are considered obsolete and  invalid. The repudiation of all these concepts implies a discarding of form, for  they all-wholeness, coherence, history-are inherent in the concept of form. They  all mean and constitute identity. Indeed, form may be plainly understood as  identity. As Richard Blackmur strikingly put it: “Form is the limiting principle by  which a thing is itself.” Accordingly, losing form is equivalent to losing identity.¹ 

He is saying that back in 1968, he noticed a growing trend among the thinkers and  shapers to discard traditions, structures, and conventions for the sake of “new ventures”  designed to avoid obsolescence and maximise freedom. People wanted to be free of  constraint and even at the risk of losing coherence, the old ways were distrusted and  then discarded. Forms were considered either unimportant or likened to prisons,  dooming people to lives of meaningless repetition.  

That was then and this is now. This sort of radical mistrust of history, tradition, structure ,  standards and constraint we now identify as postmodernism. To be postmodern is to be  “post” everything that what we think modernism stands for. Interestingly enough, the list  looks much the same as it did in 1968. The only thing that may have developed is the  level of mistrust. Zygmunt Bauman, a highly influential sociologist has made a career of  understanding postmodernism in the West and concluded that it was very much not  “post” anything. Postmodernism according to Bauman is just an accelerated version of  everything that was taking place within modernism, the world of the industrial West. He  coined a term that he believes better explains what we are all experiencing is. He calls it  “liquid modernism.” in describing the increasingly rapid rate of change, as we discard  old forms for new ones, he likens the phenomenon to the difference between solids and  liquids. In a liquid state, social forms and institutions cannot keep their shape for long.² Structures and organisations become networks for example. In order to facilitate making  what are believed to be necessary changes in liquid modernity, 

¹ Erich Kahler, The Disintegration of Form in the Arts (New York: George Braziller, 1968) 21. ² Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in An Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) 1ff.

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A swift and thorough forgetting of outdated information and fast ageing habits can  be more important for the next success than the memorisation of past moves and  the building of strategies on a foundation laid by previous learning 

In that brave new world of rapid change, the first “sacreds to be profaned” were  traditional loyalties, custom and obligations. Bauman noted that the power to create had  to be free of fences and barriers. Dense and intense social bonds had to be cleared  away.³ This translated into any number of different directions. The sexual revolution,  gender equality, marriage, segregation all came under the gun. So did institutional  religion. Mainline churches were in massive decline throughout most of the Twentieth  century. What filled the void was a neo-evangelicalism that both repudiated the  insularity and perceived backwardness of fundamentalism; and looked forward to a  happy engagement with the modern world. The seekers after truth among the new  evangelical tribe rebuilt the face of Christianity in the West. Impatient with the stifling  and reactionary thinking they found in denominational Christianity, movers and shakers  started and colonised new parachurch organisations, capable of mobilising people and  initiating mission faster than they could in any other venue. 

In the early days of the nascent evangelicalism, the vast majority of evangelical  leadership, the trend setters, maintained a close watch on core doctrinal commitments.  But, the engagement with the wide world outside the church doors cut both ways. It  allowed believers to really engage the world on its terms. On the other hand, it also  created a bridge to thinking in the outside world that would threaten its original core  commitments. He who builds a bridge cannot always determine the direction of the  traffic; nor the selection of the drivers. An ever-increasing gap began to grow between  different wings within evangelicalism. You could see it coming in the late 60s and 70s  with movements such as the Jesus People; Christians fiercely mono-generational,  experiential and anti-historical.⁴ Gerald McDermott, in a recent article described the two  main wings as the Meliorists and the Traditionalists.⁵ 

Reformational and “conservative” Christians align with McDermottʼs traditionalists.  Traditionalists are framed by their identity with “The Great Tradition”, the mainstream  expression of Christianity that sees itself in continuity with the early church, its attitude  toward scripture and its concern for maintaining biblical doctrine. “Forms” such as  church and office are not considered culturally conditioned options, but necessary  extensions of the whole history of Godʼs people. On the other hand, many within the  emergent church and insider movement identify with his Meliorists.  

Meliorists, according to McDermott, think that conservatives pay too much attention to  tradition. They do so for two reasons. Either they (the conservatives) are simple-minded  

³ Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) 3-14. 

⁴ Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck, Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organised  Religion (Chicago: Moody, 2009) 92. 

⁵ Gerald McDermott, “Evangelicals Divided” First Things 21.2 (April 2011) 45-50.3 

(Biblicists) or they are Paleo-orthodox (they cannot face the modern world). Creeds and  confessions are simply culturally landlocked, man-made statements that may need a  doctrinal makeover. This combines with the fact that for many, biblical inspiration means  that the authors are inspired, not necessarily the words. McDermott concludes that the  logic of the Meliorists leads them to proclaim Scriptureʼs authority while rejecting the  churchʼs historical understanding of it, making a theologian “just another culture-bound  interpreter of spiritual experience.” Out go the theologians-in come the anthropologists.  He also issues one final caution. The creeds and doctrines of the past served as  something other than a straightjacket. They were the ordinary Christianʼs only protection  against “the ingenuity of the wise and intellectual superior.” In other words, Meliorists  have created a gnostic evangelicalism, dominated not by history, tradition, or the Bible,  but by cultural or methodological experts. I believe that, if the categories of Meliorism  and Traditionalism are valid ways to describe the divide among evangelicals, then the  emergent church represents a kind of Meliorism 

But how do we describe it? What are the emergent churchʼs characteristics? Several  things come to mind. John Drane has a helpful summary. The emerging church is one of  two expressions: 

A shorthand way of describing a genuine concern among leaders of traditional  denominations to engage in a meaningful missional way with the changing  culture, and as part of that engagement to ask fundamental questions about the  nature of the church. Or...Christians who have become angry and disillusioned  with their previous experience of church and who have established their own faith  communities that-far from being accountable to any larger tradition-are fiercely  independent and often highly critical of those who remain within what they regard  as the spiritually bankrupt Establishment.⁶ 

Sam Storms has a list of emergent distinctives. These include: 

1. Journey vs. Destination 

2. Belonging then believing vs believing then belonging 

3. Inclusion vs exclusion 

4. Corporate vs individual 

5. Incarnational vs attractional 

6. Fluid ecclesiology vs fixed ecclesiology⁷ 

The list is helpful in seeing the conceptual overlaps between emergents and insiders.  Take the first distinctive. Is it not analogous to the definition of insider movements as  “movements to Christ” rather than as movements in Christ? This allows for the rest of  the distinctives to take place. Someone can, in the insider milieu, remain a Muslim  

⁶ John Drane, “What is the Emerging Church? Editorial International Journal for the Study of the  Christian Church 6.1 (2006). 

⁷ Sam Storms, “The Emerging/Emergent Church: Observations and Analysis” www.samstorms.com. 4 

member of the mosque because he or she is on the way to Jesus, not the church. This  person is being included in the insider Muslim movement that encourages its followers  to remain within their original faith systems, thereby incarnating Christ, rather than being  extracted into the Church. It allows people to bypass doctrinal standards, membership  accountability, and perceived institutional barriers. So it is with insiders.⁸ So it is with  emergents. Emergents and insiders alike view cultures as essentially insurmountable  barriers, regardless of what people like David Bosch said. He and others warn of  syncretism, but both insiders and emergents seem to pay little attention. It is as though  the culture is the ultimate, irreducible reality.  

It is vital that these multiform people and subcultures encounter Jesus from  within their own cultures and from within their own communities, for only there  can they truly comprehend him. It is now critical for the sake of the gospel itself  that these people experience salvation in a way that does not dislocate them  from their organic groups but rather allows them to encounter Jesus in a way that  is seamlessly connected with life as they have come to understand it through  their own histories and experiences.⁹ 

Leonard Sweet, an emergent guru, talks about doing church in a way that is biblically  absolute but culturally relative. He employs what he calls an EPIC model to describe  emergent priorities. EPIC stands for Experiential, Participatory, Image-Driven (as  opposed to orally driven), and Connected. In his mind, when you put all of that together,  you do not have religion. Speaking for postmodern believers, he states that  “Postmoderns have had it with religion. They want no part of obedience to sets of  propositions and rules required by some ʻofficialdomʼ somewhereʼ.”¹⁰ David Wells calls  this the “disappearing trick” of postmodern Christians, the process of considering faith  in Jesus as outside the historical church.¹¹ 

Like the liquid modernity Bauman describes, emergents descry institutions such as the  traditional church. They also focus almost exclusively on an understanding of  incarnational theology as contextualisation. This engenders moving within the social  fabric of culture, so as to incarnate Christ within it. Rob Bell, an emergent rock star,  explains:  

Jesus is supracultural. He is present within all cultures, and yet outside of all  cultures. He is for all people, and yet he refuses to be co-opted or owned by any  

⁸ Rebecca Lewis, “Promoting Movements to Christ Within Natural Communities” IJFM 24.2 (Summer  2007).  

⁹ Chad Richard Bresson, “Th Emerging Church: What They Are Saying” II. www.clearcreakchapel.org.  ¹⁰ Leonard Sweet, Post-Modern Pilgrims (Nashville: B&H, 2000) 112. 

¹¹ David Wells, The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the  Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008) 10f.

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one culture.¹²That includes the Christian culture. Any denomination. Any church.  Any theological system.  

The point that Bell, Brian McLaren and insiders make is that Christ is not owned by the  church, so it is completely appropriate to find him embraced by Muslims, Hindus etc.  Emergents tend to see the organised church as hopelessly corrupt; far better to focus  the believersʼ energy on building the kingdom and bypassing the institutions.¹³ The  emergent leader, Erwin McManus, in fact, stated that his goal is to “destroy Christianity  as a world religion and be a recatalyst for the movement of Jesus Christ.”¹⁴ That goes a  long way to explaining why, if George Barnaʼs 2006 statistics are to be believed, that  while 45% of the Americans he surveyed claimed to be born again, 21% of these were  unchurched.¹⁵ This must, however, go hand in hand with a minimalist view of doctrine  and theology.¹⁶ Spending time scrubbing theology is considered a waste of time and  wrong-headed since doctrine is really only one cultural Christianity attempting to force  its view on others.¹⁷ 

Both movements are broadly open to other religions.¹⁸ Few are exclusivists that think  that Jesus must be proclaimed Lord personally and within the context of the historic  church. Semir Selmanovic, pastor of Church of the Advent Hope in Manhattan, and  member of the Emergent Village, notes approvingly that many emergents have  eschewed the Christian identity, moving beyond it in order to live a “Christ-like life” as  

¹² The prevailing way of understanding religion for Emergents and the insider movement is as an  expression of culture. 

¹³ DeYoung and Kluck 17. See Jonathan Bonk, “Salvation, Other Religions, and Asian Mission” Asian  Missiology 2.1 (2008) 112. Bonk seems to believe that insider movements are the best way to preserve  biblical faith, as opposed to visible churches. See Stuart Caldwell, “Jesus in Samaria: A Paradigm for  Church Planting Among Muslims” IJFM 17.1 (Spring 2000) 29f for his promotion of kingdom over  institutional church. 

¹⁴ Quoted in Richard Bennett, “Hazards Unfolded By Emerging Church Leaders” www.bereanbeacon.org.  ¹⁵ Wells 42f. 

¹⁶ Wells 17. 

¹⁷ David Greenlee, “New Faith, Renewed Identity: How Some Muslims are Becoming Followers of Jesus”  www.edinburgh2010.org. The author examines the validity of insider “conversions” by examining the  phenomena through seven different lenses (psychological, behavioural etc), none of which include a  theological or doctrinal lens. 

¹⁸ See Abdul Asad, “Rethinking the Insider movement Debate: Global Historical Insights Toward an  Appropriate Transitional Model of C5” St Francis Magazine 5.4 (August 2009) 151. Asad, a pen name for  an American missionary, proposes turning insider movements into a sect of Sufi Islam. Kevin Higgins,  “Muhammad, Islam, and the Qurʼan” (October 2007).

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Hindus and Native Americans.¹⁹ The irony in this is that two things are considered  worthy of perpetuation and one is not. Both insiders and emergents think that Jesus is  here to stay and so are the religions of the world. The only one that has to go is world  Christianity. Lloyd Chia recounts a night out together, as he was doing his doctoral  research on the emergent church, with four people: Eliacin, Raul, Felipe, and Brian  McLaren.²⁰ McLaren had been at a conference where he advocated dual-identity in  religion. Felipe was perplexed. “How can I be a Christian if I canʼt draw a clear line  between myself and a non-Christian?” He also found it difficult to believe that he could  learn anything profitable from other religions. McLaren explained that there were two  typical choices. One could either set up absolute boundaries, maintaining a strong  Christian identity or have no boundaries and a weak identity. McLaren then knocked  over both straw men. He offered a third alternative. Felipe could maintain a deep  commitment to his faith without having any insider/outsider boundaries. He then told  stories of people that had come through other religions to Jesus. Eliacin recounted that  he had listened to a minister tell him recently that the minister had been studying the  Qurʼan, concluding that “I think Islam is making me a better Christian.” In terms of a  theology of religions, one can clearly see the overlapping perspectives of insiders and  Emergents.²¹ 

Another feature of emergents relates to how they interact with other people and ideas.  According to Scott Clark, both liquid modernity and the emergent Church find critique  fairly unwelcome. Arguing over truth claims is considered an especially unwelcome  intrusion. It is old-speak after all.²² Lloyd Chia made a careful study of how emergents  interact with ideas, both theirs and othersʼ.²³ He observed how the Emergent Village  blog moderator policed his site. The moderator distinguished between those interested  in genuine dialogue and “trolls” who excluded themselves by being antagonistic. Rules  

¹⁹ Tyson Dauer and Cecilia Pick, “Re-Emerging Pietism: The Emerging Church as Postmodern Pietism”  Journal of Undergraduate Research 8 (1 September 2008) 32. Compare Kevin Higgins, “Beyond  Christianity: Insider Movements and the Place of the Bible and the Body of Christ in New Movements to  Jesus” Mission Frontiers (July-August 2010). 

²⁰ Lloyd Chia, “Emerging Faith Boundaries: Bridge-building, Inclusion, and the Emerging Church  Movement in America” Ph.D. Dissertation (December 2010) 263ff. 

²¹ See Bernard Dutch, “Should Muslims Become ʻChristiansʼ?” IJFM 17.1 (Spring 2000), Joseph  Cumming, “Muslim Followers of Jesus?” www.christianitytoday.com. Rebecca Lewis, “The Integrity of the  Gospel and Insider Movements” IJFM 27.1 (Spring 2010). Rebecca Lewis, “Insider Movements:  Honouring God-Given Identity and Community” IJFM 26.1 (Spring 2009). Kevin Higgins, “Identity, Integrity  and Insider Movements” IJFM 23.3 (Fall 2006). John J. Travis and J. Dudley Woodberry, “When Godʼs  Kingdom Grows Like Yeast: Frequently-Asked Questions About Jesus Movements Within Muslim  Communities” Mission Frontiers (July-August 2010) 27. 

²² R.Scott Clark, “Whosoever Will Be Saved: Emerging Church, Meet Christian Dogma” Reforming or  Conforming: Post-Conservative Evangelicals and the Emerging Church (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008)  115. 

²³ Lloyd Chia, 200f.

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were established that governed who was admitted to and who was excluded from  conversations. Name-calling (“you are a heretic”) and condemnation (“believe that and  you are going to hell”) got you excluded. Mutual openness got you included. Chia made  an interesting observation. “Instead of an exclusion defined by identity (who you are), or  positionality (what you believe), exclusion I defined by how one chooses to interact.”²⁴ 

An emergent response to D.A. Carsonʼs Reclaiming the Centre proposed establishing  rules of engagement. Some of these “rules” included: 

1. Respect for boundaries and difference: “You do it one way, we do it another.” 2. A commitment to dialogic engagement instead of “one-way” criticism. 3. Responsible critique that includes not perpetuating second-hand critique. 4. The necessity of personal encounters, or “get to know us.” 

5. Establishing a realistic sense of “scope”: “We ask our critics to remember that we  cannot be held responsible for everything said and done by people using the  terms ʻemergentʼ or emerging church,ʼ anymore than our critics would like to be  held responsible for everything said or done by those claiming to be ʻevangelicalʼ 

or ʻborn-againʼ.”²⁵ 

 We see the same pattern of inclusion and exclusion occurring today with regard to  conversations about insider movements. If you are going to interact, you will have to  play by their rules. Anything else will be deemed an occasion for conflict resolution.  

For emergents, as for insiders, diversity is prized far more than is unity or conformity.  This may, in fact, be linked to their need to defend their own turf. Individuals within the  camp can say virtually anything, hold to any idea or practice, while the movement as a  whole denies that any particular point applies to them as a whole. The “all-purpose”  reply to critics by emergents, is “not everyone in the movement believes like that.” Many  insiders could mirror these words perfectly. The consequences are significant. Phil  Johnson, for example, notes that emergents “percolate” all sorts of heresies and false  doctrines, but this defence mechanism of broad diversity and plausible deniability  shields them from confrontation.²⁶ It is a rope-a-dope approach that renders emergents  and insiders virtually immune from serious and consequential critique. Every criticism is  deemed to be painted with too broad a brush.²⁷ 

Both emergents and insiders share intellectuals and some celebrities. On the popular  side, Brian McLaren is quoted and feted by both movements. More seriously, both share  

²⁴ Chia 201. 

²⁵ Chia 290ff. Joshua Massey, “Godʼs Amazing Diversity in Drawing Muslims to Christ” IJFM 17.1 (Spring  2000) 11, exhorts both proponents and critics of insider movements to “accept Godʼs diversity in drawing  Muslims to Christ.” See also Kevin Higgins, “Speaking the Truth about Insider Movements” St. Francis  Magazine 5.6 (December 2009) for an insider parallel. 

²⁶ Phil Johnson, “Joyriding on the Downgrade at Breakneck Speed: The Dark Side of Diversity”  Reforming or Conforming 213f. 

²⁷ Johnson 223.

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some of the same influential thinkers, who, while not either insiders or emergents,  shape the thinking of both. Principle among these are the missiologist David Bosch, a  champion of incarnational contextualisation and the missionary historian Andrew Walls,  an important architect for encouraging the development of local theology in the place of  historic creeds and confessions.²⁸ Miroslav Volf, the Yale Scholar, author of Allah: A  Christian Response, editor of A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving  God and Neighbour, and co-sponsor of the Yale Response to A Common Word  Between Us and You, Loving God and Neighbour Together, along with another  insider advocate, Joseph Cumming, also serve as influential shapers of both  communities. 

How do the emergent church and insider movements relate or overlap? There are  different ways to look at it. There is the direct method. Do the two communities quote  one another or hang out for example? They do on occasion. Indirectly, do they share  similar ideas or philosophies? How do they reflect liquid modernity? What are their  reactions to institutional Christianity as a form? If doctrines generate rules for living, how  do they each react to doctrine? I believe that a careful examination of the two leaves  little room for doubt. Both emergents and insider proponents have been nourished from  the same spring. I just wish it had not been contaminated.