Kester Brewin, pirates and the death of the emerging church

On this month’s show we have a chat with Kester Brewin. Kester was one of the founding members of the alternative worship community Vaux, and through his writing and speaking has become one of the leading voices in the emerging church conversation.

I thought what Kester had to say was fascinating, and raised issues I’d given little or no thought to before. In particular I was struck by Kester’s belief that while relationships should be permanent, the way we structure our communities should be temporary.

I guess for most leaders the idea of letting a church die would seem like admitting defeat. But Kester is proposing that it could be seen as simply reflecting the death and resurrection that lies at the heart of our faith. Living in a rapidly changing culture, churches need to remain flexible and adaptive; they need to be ‘animals fit for their environment’. So I guess like the process of natural selection, it may be that churches need to die so that they can be reborn in a form suitable for their cultural environment.

This was the process Kester went through at Vaux. He described reaching a point where they could no longer pretend that everything was okay. And so after celebrating all that Vaux had meant to them, they let the community die.

I can see the wisdom in all this, but it does leave us with the obvious question, when is it time to die? If we put our churches to death every time we went through hard times, for example, there’d be no churches left! Kester gave a few helpful principles when recently asked this question at Greenbelt (you can download ‘Pirates of the Charism’ here), but I guess ultimately we’d have to be clearly guided by the Spirit.

I suppose in many ways this issue isn’t really relevant in my situation, as I’m still trying to form a community. But then again, I can see the wisdom in beginning a community with the possibility of its ending already in mind. As Kester said, in order for a positive ending to be a possibility, communities must resist the temptation to invest in things like buildings and salaries, as this would make the process of dying much more traumatic.

So perhaps endings should become part of our planning for new beginnings.

Tim