Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger's "Emerging Churches" is currently the seminal work on understanding the emerging church. Their work has been restricted to the UK and US context but the results speak authentically for any Western context. To quote from the introduction:

If the church does not embody its message and life within postmodern culture, it will become increasingly marginalised. Consequently, the church will continue to dwindle in numbers throughout the Western world. We share a common vision to see culturally engaged churches emerge throughout the West as well as in other parts of the world influenced by Western culture.

...this book analyses emerging church trends in the UK and the US exclusively, and we have no data to confirm or deny whether these patterns will hold up in other Western countries or those countries influenced by the West. We suspect that these patterns may be useful measures in these other locales, given our common Western orientation, but that simply remains our educated guess. Verification of that assumption must wait for another day.

...the patterns we identify are those we observed as missiologically significant (i.e. emerging church practices that engage our postmodern context with a gospel native to that same culture).

Regarding language, when we say emerging churches do such and such a practice, invariably we are saying that these activities are patterns in emerging churches. Because we are casting the net wide - a church needs to demonstrate only three [out of nine identified] core practices to be emerging - it follows that many emerging churches do not do all nine practices. We recognise that churches emerge differently. What we intend to say but do not want to qualify each time is that exemplary emerging churches participate in the particular pattern under discussion, a practice that is missiologically significant.

...We are aware of the delimitations in our study. Our research identified that many emerging churches are led by white, anglo, middle-class males. Consequently, some may judge the movement to be deficient multiculturally. At this point in time, the detractors may be right. Part fo the reason this particular culture predominates is that many of the pioneering emerging churches arose out of the evangelical charismatic subculture, which has these same characteristics. We must say, however, that in our interviews we were deeply impressed by what we found in regard to the social and cultural practices of emerging churches. Virtually all these communities support women at all levels of ministry, prioritise the urban over the suburban, speak out politically for justice, serve the poor, and practice fair trade (especially in the UK). In addition, because these emerging churches are urban in orientation, and to be urban means to be multicultural, we anticipate that as these missional groups become increasingly rooted in their context, they will increasingly represent its cultural mosaic.

So how would someone interested in researching emerging churches in a South African context go about it? Gibbs and Bolger have a helpful appendix entitled "Research Methodology" from which I'll take some things which might help us.

• they hoped to find the most vital new forms of church in the West
• they wanted to discover why these churches are so vibrant and alive and why those creatively immersed in popular culture gather at these sites, especially when there are so many options for spirituality outside the church.
• they designed their research to identify the right patterns

They first cast the net broadly looking for churches that:

• are located in the Western world (those countries that fully experienced modernity and are now embroiled in a cultural transition)
• consider themselves Christians or Christ followers
• consider themselves a congregation or a mission (did not want a small group of an existing church, rather, a group that had its own leaders and performed all the functions of a church)
• meet at least monthly and are still meeting
• their group or movement is less that twenty years old (wanted groups connected to contemporary culture with a fresh vision)

They then focussed on the communities that:

• maintain a strong corporate expression outside the church walls through the forms of popular culture (club culture with DJs, dance, imagery, pub culture, artistic communities, or youth culture). Wanted to identify the groups that are strongly committed to engaging the outside culture rather than confining themselves to evangelical, contemporary Christian subcultures.
• their gatherings employ a multisensory communication approach, utilising visual arts, movement, symbols, incense, icons, candles, DJ music etc.

Initially, finding the churches was done online using search terms like postmodern and church; postmodern and worship; Gen-X and church; Gen-X and worship; buster and church; buster and worship. They searched on spirituality, alternative worship, and postmodern religion...and that was just the start! They compiled a huge list of churches which slotted into the above categories, and then started trimming them down based on their criteria, which left around 40-50 US churches and 40-50 from the UK. They then interviewed people at Spring Harvest in the UK, the Ooze annual gathering and Emergent/Youth Specialties event in the States. These interviews were face-to-face and recorded on video, later transcribed and similarities catalogued. This was the main material they worked from. At the end of this process, once they'd identified the 9 characteristics that seemed to capture the missiological insights of emerging churches, they went back to interviewing to receive fresh stories and insights based on these categories. They interviewed over 50 key leaders from 1 - 6 hours via telephone or up to 5 extensive emails.

The questions were as follows:

• When and where were you born and raised?
• What is your faith journey? Were you raised in the church, or did you come to faith later? Did it become more real at some point?
• What led you to start this service/ministry? What was it about church that made it no longer satisfying for you? Was there a particular event that marked this transition?
• Do you see yourself as postevangelical, post-Protestant? Are those categorisations a help or a hinderance?
• Do you see yourself as missional? Do you stress living in the kingdom of God, living like Jesus, in terms of your faith being a way of life as opposed to a set of meetings?
• Is church equated with a meeting, a place, or a way of life? How so?
• Do the members of your group have any sort of commitment to one another?
• How do you interact with other faiths, religions? What role does evangelism play? Does apologetics play a role?
• What role does social service play in your group?
• What does participation look like in your group? Do all participate at the meeting?
• How important is creativity to what you do? Do you embrace material forms of culture? Why?
• How does leadership work in your community?
• What do you think of vision/mission statements?
• What historic (eg. ancient) aspects of spirituality does your group participate in, both in and out of the worship service?
• What are your greatest realisations that have occurred since you began ministry in this way?

I'll explore where to from now in a subsequent post.

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