Recent Studies in Renewal and Revitalization - Spring 2006
This issue of Revitalization surveys recent literature on renewal and revitalization, ranging from theoretical and historical discussions to more popular works. We begin with an overview of a dozen or so books that treat varying dimensions of renewal.
Methodism, Revivalism, Antirevivalism
The most significant recent book on Methodism as a movement is David Hempton’s Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale UP, 2005; 278 pp.). Hempton, an Irish historian now at Boston University, presents a nuanced global picture of the rise of Methodism. He builds the book around several polarities—showing, for example, how Methodism developed quite differently in America and England (contrasting Francis Asbury and Jabez Bunting). Dealing with “Enlightenment and Enthusiasm” (chapter 2), “Boundaries and Margins” (chapter 6), and other tension points, Hempton elucidates multiple influences, avoiding one-cause simplification. He gives attention to the holiness movement and discusses William Taylor at some length. Contrasting Methodism’s success on the American frontier with its failures among Native Americans, Hempton shows Methodist inability to understand indigenous culture. Importantly, he gives attention to the roles of women: “Methodism was without question preponderantly a women’s movement,” a fact with “enormous consequences for writing the history of Methodism as a popular religious movement” (p. 145).
Methodism’s global “empire of the spirit” is in large measure the fruit of 19th-century missions, and the key figure here is Thomas Coke (1747–1814). So the (re)publication of The Journals of Dr. Thomas Coke, edited and annotated by John A. Vickers (Kingswood, 2005; 293 pp.), is welcome.
A key figure in 20th-century Methodist missions was J. Waskom Pickett (1890–1981), long-time missionary to India. The need for a comprehensive, critical biography of Pickett has now been filled with the publication of The Road to Delhi: Bishop Pickett Remembered (Bangalore, SAIACS Press, 2005; 394 pp.), by Arthur McPhee. The book immediately becomes essential reading not only for Methodist history and the history of Christian mission in India but also for the whole development of 20th-century missiology. Pickett’s Christian Mass Movements in India (1933) was “until then the largest social survey ever done outside America and Great Britain” (p. 9) and provided the seed ideas for Donald McGavran’s church growth theories. McPhee engagingly tells the story, documenting Pickett’s interactions with such figures as Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar, John R. Mott, and E. Stanley Jones.
Two other significant studies shed light on important aspects of the holiness movement: Susie Stanley’s Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self (University of Tennessee Press, 2002, 2004; 268 pp.) and James Earl Massey’s African Americans and the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana: Aspects of a Social History (Anderson UP, 2005; 284 pp.). Using the autobiographies of women preachers in Methodism and several holiness denominations, Stanley explores the interface between Wesleyan theology and feminist and autobiographical theory. Massey documents the prominent role African Americans have played in the Church of God, focusing particularly on “the response of the Church of God . . . to the challenge raised by lines of ethnic and social differences as they related to African Americans” (p. 6).
The story of America can’t be told without addressing revivals and awakenings, however evaluated. James Bratt, historian at Calvin College, engages the subject in Antirevivalism in Antebellum America: A Collection of Religious Voices (Rutgers UP, 2006; 278 pp.). Bratt provides a fine introductory essay, placing his selections in context. Charles Finney of course figures prominently in the volume but Methodists, and particularly Methodist camp meetings, also come in for censure. “Duties of the Church––Tracts, Sunday Schools” by the prominent Methodist Stephen Olin (1835) illustrates some of the ambiguities of this volume. Olin was not really opposed to revivals, as Bratt admits, so it is misleading to identify him as “antirevivalist.” Bratt’s point is that “in his concern for child nurture” Olin was in effect counterbalancing Methodism enthusiasm and “attacking pious ignorance.”
Bratt includes a range of voices from varying perspectives. “Critiques from populist movements” jostle with those “from established traditions” and from “renegades and new departures.” So we have selections from Finney himself, Phoebe Palmer, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joseph Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Horace Bushnell, in addition to lesser known writers.
Renewal Movements and Cultural Impact
Rodney Stark has published The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005; 281 pp.) Like his One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (2001) and For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (2003), The Victory of Reason is a big-picture book, a survey of the last two thousand years of Western history. Stark’s against-the-grain argument is that Christianity’s commitment to reason and morality largely explains the global rise of the West. “Christianity created Western Civilization. . . . Without a theology committed to reason, progress, and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: A world with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists.” Modernization, “imported from the West,” requires capitalism and freedom, Stark argues—and perhaps also Christianity; the Christian faith “is becoming globalized far more rapidly than is democracy, capitalism, or modernity” (pp. 233–34). Stark is now University Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University.
What does movement theory look like in Islam? Modern Islamic Movements: Models, Problems, and Prospects, edited by Muhammad Mumtaz Ali of the International Islamic University, Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, 2000; 205 pp.) provides some insights. The book’s fourteen chapters survey a range of movements. Walid Saif in his chapter “Human Rights and Islamic Revivalism” notes that Islamic movements “range from the militant extremist to the most moderate and enlightened” and that each is in fact “a social movement conditioned by socio-economic and political circumstances.” He outlines three principal models: (1) “The reformist moderate model” which works peacefully for gradual change; (2) “The revolutionary militant model” which sees “current oppressive regimes [as] dictated to by their Western foreign masters”; and (3) “The military camp model adopted in particular by the Al-Tahrir party in Egypt.” Saif says the first model “represents the mainstream,” despite “growing debates” as to the nature of Islamic revival. Many now believe “Islam should be the driving force for modernity, development and renaissance in all their material, social, political, cultural, technological, scientific and spiritual manifestations.” Saif says “many Muslim thinkers and activists are now responding positively to the question of human rights,” working to produce their own version rather than accepting ones born in the West (p. 192).
“Emerging Churches” and Revitalization
The best recent study here is Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures (Baker Academic, 2005; 245 pp.). The “emerging church” is all over the map (in several senses) and at this point nearly indefinable, but the term covers (1) hundreds of new church experiments attempting to reach contemporary postmoderns, especially in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and (2) a lively discussion, mostly online, about the shape of the church and Christian witness today. Gibbs and Bolger’s survey draws from interviews with fifty “emerging church” leaders in the U.S. and the UK including Todd Hunter, Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, Karen Ward, Dieter Zander, and Brian McLaren (author of A New Kind of Christian, The Story We Find Ourselves In, A Generous Orthodoxy, and other books).
Gibbs and Bolger define emerging churches as “communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures” and exhibit nine practices, beginning with (1) identifying with Jesus, (2) transforming the secular realm, and (3) living highly communal lives.
Emerging churches may be contrasted with the “New Monasticism” now getting some media attention (e.g., Rob Moll, “The New Monasticism,” Christianity Today [Sept. 2005], 38–46). The first book on this new movement is School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism, edited by The Rutba House, a Christian community in Durham, North Carolina (Cascade Books [Wipf & Stock], 2005; 172 pp.). The book is “a communal attempt to discern the marks of a new monasticism in the inner cities and forgotten landscapes of the Empire that is called America.” Scott Bessenecker of InterVarsity describes the New Monasticism as “an emerging movement of youth taking up residence in slum communities in the same spirit [found among] the Franciscans and the early Celtic orders, in the Nestorian mission, and in the Jesuits” (Moll, p. 40). The movement already networks dozens of new monastic communities across the U.S. Some points of contact between such communities and emerging churches are also developing.
George Barna has come out with Revolution (Tyndale House, 2005; 144 pp.)—yet another book about so-called “paradigm shifts” in the church. A breezy monograph written for a popular audience, Revolution gives interesting data on recent church trends in America—noting, for example, that like the larger culture, local churches have undergone “a niching process” with “churches designed for different generations, those offering divergent styles of worship music, [and] congregations that emphasize ministries of interest to specialized populations” (p. 62). Though useful, the book has flaws: (1) the revolutionary language is overblown and overworked; (2) the biblical model of the church presented is limited almost exclusively to Acts 2–5; and (3) the book lacks theological and biblical depth.
Actually the best recent book on church renewal is Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, by biblical scholars Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat (InterVarsity, 2004; 256 pp). Here is a more comprehensive vision of the church’s life and mission than one finds in most renewal literature. The authors write, “In Colossians Paul is telling a story that is an alternative to the mythology of empire. Mythology is always about salvation, peace and prosperity. Rome found salvation in the universal peace of the age after Augustus. The ‘American Empire’ finds salvation in economic progress and global control. Paul tells a story about a salvation rooted in Christ, historical sovereignty located in a victim of the empire, and prosperity that bears fruit in the whole world” (pp. 62–63).
Political and Cultural Renewal
Finally, two recent books that illuminate broader dimensions of renewal and revitalization phenomena deserve mention.
Is a new era of political and social reform in America on the horizon? Some signs of rethinking and realigning may be seen in the response to Jimmy Carter’s Our Endangered Values; America’s Moral Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2005; 212 pp.) and Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). Both have been on U.S. bestseller lists. Noting that American society “is becoming increasingly divided . . . between rich and poor” (p. 184), Carter calls for rethinking the moral basis of recent American public policy, particularly with regard to preemptive war, environmental concerns, abortion, women’s rights, and the death penalty. Carter warns that “fundamentalists have become increasingly influential in both religion and government,” turning “the nuances and subtleties of historic debate into black-and-white rigidities and the personal derogation of those who dare to disagree” (p. 3). Wallis laments the lack of serious moral discourse in American politics, critiquing the way the right has defined morality very narrowly and politicized it. Growing debate about these matters may be a hopeful sign.
-Howard A. Snyder
