Are there any new emerging proposals for what church is all about?  Jim Belcher, in Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional examines the emerging criticisms of the traditional and the traditional criticisms of the emerging.

The issue is this: how can the church become more “shepherding” in how church works? (As I mentioned in my own post Tuesday, part of this is shaped by how we construct what the pastor does and partly what the church understands itself to be doing.) Belcher’s own approach began with John Miller, Outgrowing the Ingrown Church : organic, team-led and spiritual. And Belcher discovered that unstructured was not completely acceptable.

So, more structure; growth; some didn’t like the structure. He examines Pete Ward’s well-known, prototypical (in some people’s view) book and proposal called: Liquid Church : church is connection and relationships, not gathering. It’s a web, not a building. No regular meetings but constant communication. This taps into the house church movement which, too, eschews the traditional structure of churches.