Greg Warner, editor of Associated Baptist Press and FaithWorks magazine, presents a workshop on the emergent church at the 2004 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Generation Xers are accustomed to many modern-day conveniences that their predecessors didn’t have. They text message each other on cell phones that are as tiny and as prevalent as gnats in summer and pay bills and play games via the Internet. It’s a generation that is shaped by technology and technological advancements. With all of that technology, the church itself is trying to make an advancement of sorts: the postmodern church.

More amenable to coffee shops and sensory worship than to potluck suppers and high church, the postmodern church is the answer for the 18- to 35-year-old crowd, composed of Generation X members and “millennials” (also known as Generation Y). And it’s an answer that’s sorely needed, said Greg Warner in a workshop titled “The Emerging Church: Its Values and Forms” at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s General Assembly, June 24-26 in Birmingham, Ala.

Generating a generational church

“In the postmodern, emerging church, 50 percent of the population is younger than age 35,” Warner said. “We just don’t have the ability to reach that younger generation in our more traditional churches.”

Warner, the editor of Associated Baptist Press and FaithWorks magazine and a member of Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., has spent some years with his magazine trying to understand the emerging church and help readers understand it.

He pointed out that the emerging, postmodern church shouldn’t be confused with the megachurches that sprang up in abandoned warehouses and roller skating rinks in the 1990s. Whereas these evangelical churches were attempting to be user-friendly and innocuous, fitting in with popular culture through praise bands and the elimination of imposing religious symbols in their sanctuaries, the focus of the postmodern church is centered more around the idea of community, and the practices in their manner of worship hark back to the days of the early, ancient church.

Holding tightly to the idea of community, the postmodern church’s members have a different view of what a community actually is.

“We used to define community as homogenous, but now we define community as diversity,” Warner said. “It’s multi-cultural and multi-racial. If there’s only one slice of white, middle-class America, it won’t feel like an authentic community to some people.”

A new worship experience

But beyond just the demographics of the congregation, the postmodern church is changing the way things are done. It eschews names with denominations indicated in the titles, opting instead for monikers like Sandals (Riverside, Calif.), The Bridge (Pontiac, Mich.), Bluer (Minneapolis, Minn.) or Threads (Kalamazoo, Mich.).

“The emerging church is reacting more to the contemporary megachurch – not the traditional model,” Warner said.

This reaction takes place in a variety of ways. For example, a postmodern church often focuses on the sacred space, the house of worship and its components.

“The place where they worship is important again. While the contemporary church went out of the way to take out the symbols [of religion], where we practice that faith will define that faith, to some measure,” Warner said.

The postmodern ethos, and thus the fashion in which worship is conducted, has been given an acronym by Leonard Sweet, noted author and E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew University in Madison, N.J. He writes that this ethos is “E.P.I.C.: Experienced, Participatory, Image-centered and Connected.” These four components have come to shape the idea of postmodern worship, which differs to a certain degree from both traditional and contemporary worship.

In the postmodern worship experience, emphasis is often placed on the feel of worship, incorporating the five senses into a service. Things like incense burning, long associated with the Greek Orthodox church, stimulate the sense of smell, while artistic expressions stimulate the sight sense.

“In a community-based church, how you express your faith experience becomes part of your community,” said Warner. “Many churches have a focus on bringing art back into the community – so