Evangelical leaders say the explosion of alternative worship is watering down the gospel, writes MADELEINE COLLINS.
It's 8pm on Easter Saturday in Melbourne's Docklands. In a rough-hewn room inside the offices of the Mission to Seafarers, people have gathered to grieve.
Suspended in the centre of the room are cones of ice coated with red food colouring. They drip onto almost 120kg of crushed ice that have been ceremoniously placed underneath.
A dish of barbed wire crosses is placed on a table while black and white candles illuminate two large screens on either side of the room, showing a video loop of a person breathing condensation.
A service begins, a spoken liturgy drawing on the words of Jesus in John 16:7. People are encouraged to pick up a cross and write the names of people they know "living in the depths of hell' into the ice with the barbed wire. Prayers of confession are written on rice paper and then dropped into water.
Johnny Cash croons Hurt, and the volume is turned up and down while people get up to read meditations. The crowd is encouraged to feel the disciples' desperation when Jesus tells them he will shortly leave them.
The service concludes with U2's Wake Up Dead Man: "Jesus, Jesus help me I'm alone in this world', and people wander over to the bar next door for a wake.
The woman behind this spectacle of the senses is Cheryl Lawrie, Project Worker with the Uniting Church in Australia, Synod of Victoria and Tasmania's Alternative Worship Project.
Ms Lawrie, who refers to herself as "curator' of the service says she found "working on this worship incredibly powerful'. She has diarised the whole experience on the internet.
"We've realised for a while that people try to make meaning out of life in different ways than before. Traditional worship doesn't fill their needs," Ms Lawrie told The Age in May last year, when the church first opened.
She continued: "Instead of being given a message that tries to persuade them about a belief, we give spaces where they can interact with the story, play with it, and make connections between the story and their own life."
On the other side of the world, experimental churches with names that sound like washing detergents " Liquid, the Ooze " draw young Americans to their burgeoning ranks.
Graceway, a church in Auckland, New Zealand, encouraged its members to "pray with your hand around a cup of coffee' as a way of experiencing the Spirit "as warmth in your spirituality'. In Canada, a church called Worship Free House doesn't offer sermons " but does install art.
What do these alternative fellowships " loosely grouped as emerging churches " have in common with the fictional thriller The Da Vinci Code?
According to prominent evangelical church leaders, all are symptomatic of a dangerous protest against biblical orthodoxy. While The Da Vinci Code puts the gospel on trial, the emerging church questions established biblical teaching throughout church history by offering what they says is a more authentic expression of Christianity.
"Some believe [emerging churches] to be the greatest challenge to mainstream churches since the birth of the Charismatic movement," says Andy Peck, assistant editor of the UK's Christianity+Renewal magazine in a recent article. "As some churches struggle to grow they will welcome emerging church thinking with open arms."
Labels are useless to describe this alternative Christian movement, which has exploded out of the UK and the US and is now expanding into Australia.
Proponents like to talk in terms of "connecting', "sharing', "re-imagining'. They say the movement is not one as such but rather a "conversation' within Protestant Christianity. They say labels are unhelpful to their cause. It is perhaps easier to define what the emergent movement is not.
"This is not biblical theology," says Canon Jim Ramsay, Director of Sydney Diocese's Evangelism Ministries. "It's a shaking of Christian orthodoxy."
Canon Ramsay says the emergent movement is a reaction to the polish of the mega churches " the famous Rick Warrens and Willow Creeks of the modern American evangelical scene.
While he says there may be aspects of the movement that are helpful in understanding the postmodern mindset, the lack of solid theological criteria make it effectively "dress-up religion'.
"At the end of the day, what brings gospel growth is new birth " not because the minister wears torn jeans and quotes [Australian rock band] Powderfinger."
Essentially, the emergent phenomenon is a counter cultural, postmodern movement with a broad evangelical base that has arisen as a protest against traditional church hierarchies. The general aim is to reach post-Christian, postmodern Westerners with new ways of expressing the gospel. The churches deliberately steer away from institutional trappings of "church' or as one emergent pastor puts it, "churchianity', but retain their focus on the person of Jesus. Being relevant to the culture is highly important and planting new fellowships is often a key priority.
In Australia and Britain, emergent churches are linked with the Mission-Shaped Church, a radical strategy of church planting that is spearheaded by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. It was enthusiastically endorsed at the Australian General Synod in 2004.
Alarm bells should be ringing for CMS UK and the British arm of Church Army who have lent support to a website called Emergingchurch.info, which is set up to promote new expressions of church.
This alternative worship is not confined to one denomination, although some are linked to mainstream Christian churches. In Victoria, the Baptists and Uniting Churches have put money behind some of the projects. The Church of England is seriously investigating how it can formalise links with some of the fellowships in Britain.
The churches have a deliberate decentralised leadership structure, emphasising the "spiritual journey' but certainly not the religion. Intimate gatherings surrounded by pagan and Christian symbolism " candles, incense, poetry, technology and art " are valued as adding to the worship experience.
Canon Ramsay warns that there are evangelical churches in Sydney that are "picking up on the harmonics' of the movement in trying to understand the postmodern mindset. However, he says in the process they are allowing it to change what they believe, and so are in danger of moving away from a word-based ministry.
"The commandment "no idols' should be reiterated today," he says. "People are going back to the sensual, using incense and candles. [But] we live by faith, not by sight. There is a great danger in emphasising those aids. They are flawed tools and not the engine that drives us."
Brian McLaren is the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland and widely viewed as the leader of the movement. Last year he was voted one of TIME magazine's 25 most influential evangelicals.
He describes himself as a "missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/calvinist + anabaptist/anglican + methodist + catholic + green +incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished Christian'.
Brian McLaren is the author of A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan, 2004) and spoke at sold out sessions in Sydney and Melbourne in February. His work attempts to find a "third way' between the conservative and liberal camps to better engage with postmodernism.
He told Southern Cross that he is enthusiastic about the Mission-Shaped Church and says care for social issues like the environment and poverty is one of the strengths of the emergent movement.
In an open letter to one of his critics, the US prison evangelist Chuck Colson, he writes: "when some people use the word truth, I think they mean a feeling of certainty, security, and rest that means they no longer have to think or ask questions. In other words, truth means "case closed'.
Others are not so sure.
In his recent book Being Conversant with the Emerging Church (Zondervan, 2005) theologian Don Carson says he is critical of the movement because he worries about "unwitting drift from Scripture'.
Quoted in the Baptist Press, Dr Carson said some of the movement's leaders are "painfully reductionistic about modernism and the confessional Christianity' and appear to be "dismissing Christianity', shying away from asserting that Christianity is true and authoritative.
In response, Brian McLaren told the Baptist Press: "Dr Carson doesn't understand us'.
Another critic, Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said the movement "represents a significant challenge to biblical Christianity'.
Writing in Crosswalk.com, Dr Mohler asserts: "Unwilling to affirm that the Bible contains propositional truths that form the framework for Christian belief, this movement argues that we can have Christian symbolism and substance without those thorny questions of truthfulness that have so vexed the modern mind."
Darren Rowse is a former youth minister in what he calls a "normal' church with the Baptist Union of Victoria. He is now the coordinator of Living Room in Melbourne's northern suburbs.
At Living Room, people meet for church weekly around a dinner table or at a cafe. Every six weeks or so they conduct a program called Everyday Spirituality, where church that week comprises visiting a member's workplace.
Mr Rowse has been commissioned by the Uniting, Baptist and Churches of Christ in Victoria to research the emerging church phenomenon. He says his ministry within the Baptist Church taught him that Christians were increasingly speaking a different language to the non-believers around them.
The crunch came when he toured with a Christian band around Australia and met young people interested in Christianity, but who felt unable to connect with their local churches.
"They told us "they make us take our hats off and not speak during the service and not ask questions'," he said.
"[These kids] were interested in Jesus but just couldn't get past the culture.
"There is an awareness that a lot of churches are struggling… a lot of churches are closing and not connecting with mainstream Australia," Mr Rowse said.
"I wonder if we won't be left behind [if we don't move] as fast as we can."
When asked if he considered the emergent movement a danger to Bible-based Christianity, the Bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth, replied: "Of course it's dangerous".
"All change is dangerous" but to say its dangerous doesn't end the debate," he said.
Bishop Forsyth calls for patient, not panicked, responses.
"If God had meant us to have the new, he wouldn't have given the old," he said.
"It might mean looking with some interest and being a little more relaxed about trying something new.
"The task of good leadership is to discern those breaks that are ultimately destructive and misleading, and to discern those breaks that lead to an even more authentic form of Christian worship for this time and age. It's not always easy to see that."
