[1ntro] emerging then, emerging now: Barton Stone and the post-restorationists

08Jul08

the man, the exile, the forerunner

If you’re an emerging underling like me, you do what missiologists/anthropologists with PhD’s from Fuller tell you. So the next few posts will be pieces from a paper I wrote that started with some research I did in graduate school as Chris Flanders’ graduate assistant. Initially, he had me heading down to a remote part of basement of the ACU library blowing the dust off of Barton Warren Stone’s volumes of The Christian Messenger. I poured through all 14 volumes reading Stone through the lens of church planting and missional behavior. It was tedious, eye-reddening and paper-cutting work, but I hashed through all 14 volumes because the pay was really good because the research began to pique my curiosity, similar to Brian McLaren’s experience in his pursuit of a new kind of Christianity:

I began to feel like one of those rumpled detectives on TV who finds a clue that opens up a whole new twist in the plot. Or better, I began to feel like a scientist in a movie, doing a routine run of experiments. I’m looking over my data and this icy feeling starts back between my shoulder blades and crawls up my neck, and I think, “Something’s not right here. This pattern in the data just doesn’t make sense.”

(A New Kind of Christian, Jossey Bass, 2001, p. xii)

In my exploration I stumbled across some pretty interesting stuff, but at the time nothing that seemed to substantiate material for an academic journal paper that Chris had in mind. At this point, there were significant dots, but none of them were connected. My research, it seemed, availed a rather paltry bit.

The next year I enrolled in Doug Foster’s much-spoken-of (and feared) Restoration History class. It was then that I began to connect the dots. What if the stuff that I had mined from Barton Stone’s life could inform church planters from the Churches of Christ tradition today? And then a light bulb seemed to go off. What if there are church plants from within this tradition that already embody Stoneite impulses? Sure enough, I began to see that Stone’s recessive DNA was resurfacing in a handful of church planters and new communities I had come to know. And my excitement grew.

These church planters (Greg Newton, Kester Smith, Jared Looney, and Ben Cheek among a growing list of others) represent a re/emergence of new/old school missional theology and ecclesiology that seemed to lay dormant in the One True Church heritage for a couple of centuries. It is now my thesis that these kinds of theologies/ecclesiologies—what I label as post-restorationist—are the glimmer of hope beyond the dead-end fork in the road: either the bland melding into the “pool of anonymous evangelicals” (HT Nic Acosta) in the suburbs , or the circling of the wagons and eventual death of the rural church.

So in the next few posts, I’ll essentially be re-posting my paper into smaller pieces. We’ll consider Barton Stone’s life as a stateside missionary and church planter. Then we’ll consider new expressions of Barton Stone’s impulses as seen in the post-restorationists. And somewhere down the road, we’ll make some conjectures about the future. (Aside: Isn’t that what Lectureship is all about, anyway? A time where we get all panicky about “the future of the brotherhood” and the “identity crisis” among our fellowship. And then we end up looking backwards to the glory days. Yeah, you know what I’m spittin.)

Well, here’s to beginning/continuing a new conversation that is forward-looking, missionally hopeful, theologically informed, and historically broader than the paths we’ve once known. Feel free to offer your reflections along the way.

Filed under: ecclesia   |  
Tags: barton stone, Ben Cheek, Brian McLaren, Chris Flanders, church planting, Doug Foster, emerging church, Greg Newton, Jared Looney, Kester Smith, missional, Nic Acosta, post-restorationist, restoration movement, stone-campbell movement