Title:
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An initial assessment of the Evangelical church planting community in the USA between 2000 and 2010
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The US contemporary Evangelical church planting community is large and influential. The movement
has a global international reach through books alongside video, sermons and resources that can be
downloaded from the internet. This thesis investigates that body of work, which it calls the scape,
from the perspective of an international user. Using a hermeneutical spiral, it engages in four tasks.
The Descriptive Task provides morphology for the movement, which it calls the Second Generation,
describing it as five streams. It takes two, the Neo-Reformed and Neo-Seeker streams, as
representative of the movement as a whole. Their missiology and ecclesiology are then described. The
Interpretive Task then considers the movement's history within American Protestantism alongside
their origins in the Church Growth, megachurch, and Emerging movements. It analyses the influences
of personal background, the US political scene, and American culture. It posits that these influence
the movement in ways of which they are not aware. The Normative Task then enters Second
Generation missiology and ecclesiology, as described, into a conversation with a dialogue partner, the
Fresh Expressions of Church movement, bringing what is seen as important theological normative
understandings, followed by evaluation that proceeds from the process. The evaluation follows a
stated thesis, that the movement stresses a truncated missiology over ecclesiology to such an extent
that their original missional intentions could be subverted by other factors . It argues that Second
Generation praxis thus tends towards the individualistic, and the thesis argues that consumerism and
homogeneity are consequences. For the international scape user, it is suggested that these factors will
be difficult to discern. The thesis moves to the Pragmatic Task where new praxis is provided that may
aid the movement to counter the problems posited. Directions for further research are suggested and
the future of the movement is predicted.
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