I am a devoted member of the Brethren in Christ Church. Many of you know that I was converted and baptized under the grace-laden spiritual guidance of an old, pious, and wise BIC pastor. I am now a pastor and church planter within the Brethren in Christ. The BIC is my spiritual home. I’m also conversant with the Emerging Church. The fusion of the emerging conversation and classic BIC expression works well because it’s a combination that offers plenty of opportunities for practical and relevant congruence. The Emerging Conversation resonates with very, very important aspects of classic BIC theology, expression, and praxis. Some say the Emerging Church reflects the principles and theology inherent to Anabaptist expressions of Christianity, of which the BIC is a part. I tend to agree.
The following excerpt, lifted from Quest for Piety and Obedience: The Story of the Brethren in Christ, offers us a historical glimpse into what the BIC looked like, classically.
The Brethren in Christ began as a “house church,” holding services - worship, love feast, communion, harvest praise, and council - in homes and barns. As members migrated to new localities, they carried this house-church concept with them, and it was a distinctive feature of their movement for seventy-five years … To describe them in modern terms, the Brethren were preoccupied with group dynamics rather than “churchly” atmosphere. For them the “church” was the visible people of God assembled in Christ’s name in loving face-to-face fellowship to gain inspiration, spiritual enlightenment, and mutual support needed to endeavor to perfect obedience in their personal and corporate living. To implement this theology of the church, any space in a home or farm building large enough for the group to gather was as appropriate as any other (77).
The seeming contemporary penchant in the BIC for a “modern, traditionless, cut-off-from-the past, mega-church evangelicalism,” as Tim Keller refers to it, seems so far removed from the classic BIC expression and theology of church. I wonder, what can the emerging conversation teach us today in the BIC Church? I think the emerging conversation points us back to where we began as a denomination; it points us back towards the basics of our unique and distinct expression. It also challenges us to engage postmodern culture in relevant ways that do not require us to foolishly discard our most important classic distinctives for a thin expression that can only be characterized as “modern, traditionless, cut-off-from-the past, mega-church evangelicalism.”