Kester Brewin, author of the upcoming emergent book Signs of Emergence, is a writer and pioneering church planter based in London, England. In emerging church circles he is best known for working with a collective of artists and city lovers to create the experimental, alternative worship group Vaux. Brewin has worked in an advisory role at Fuller Theological Seminary, helping them to think about new ways of training Emerging leaders.
With the forthcoming release in the US of Signs of Emergence, Baker and Emergent have asked me to write a couple of posts about who I am and what the book is about.
So a brief outline: I’m mid-thirties, and I live and work in London. By the time you read this I’ll have two kids. One’s just turning three. The other’s just turning around and around. I teach math and religion, which is a nice summary in itself. My dad was a math teacher who turned minister. I’ll stick with the day job for now ;-)
I have been involved in ‘"leadership" in various ways. Mostly with a group called Vaux. Nearly ten years ago I was part of a very large, successful church of bright young things in central London. But, even though there were writers and film-makers and dancers and actors and designers and artists everywhere, because they didn’t preach or play the guitar or sing, they were redundant. It seemed to a few of us that these "church practices" were accommodations to a society that no longer existed as Ryan Bolger would put it.
So Vaux was an attempt at getting the church to exist for the society that hosted it, not one that died fifty years back; we played with the boundaries of what faith and worship would look like in a context that took the urban experience seriously. And like all such projects it was exciting, dangerous, failing, dysfunctional and inspirational in equal measure.
It was a desire to put something of the Vaux journey on paper that inspired me to start the book. We had covered themes such as gift, dirt, self-organization, waiting, Christ in the city--and I didn’t want to lose those things when Vaux had run its course.
Vaux did run its course. It too became a practice to accommodate a society that didn’t exist. We had no choice: we deconstructed it. We stopped meeting. And just now we’re starting again. Small. Gentle. Evolving something new that fits. Jubilee style.
This was easier for us than many other groups because Vaux very much lives within its means. No one works for it. We never borrow or ask for money. We’ve never had a building.
These things are important to me: if you read the book, you’re not reading something by someone paid to be a Christian. You’re not reading something by an academic stuck in a dark library. I teach math in high schools in London. I make short films. I read Pynchon and Eggers. But I’m also passionate about practical, dirty theology forged in the everyday.
So I hope you’ll find the book one you can connect with. It was not sent down from on high with impossible demands, nor written in some theological laboratory. It’s just the thoughts from a group of normal people, living busy lives in a wonderfully crazy city and trying to work out, beyond the conventions and national dramas and high-level church politics, what being a Christian is about.
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