Emerging evangelicals: An ethnographic study of a Christian community house in Tauranga, New Zealand

Abstract

Contemporary global evangelical Christianity, as exemplified by the Emerging Church movement, is a phenomenon which has many established and emergent trends. This is a study of how the young Christian residents of the Upper Room community house in Tauranga, New Zealand, and their wider institutional and socio-religious contexts, think about and live out this new style of evangelical Christianity across a range of contexts. This emergent religiosity differs markedly from what is typically thought to make up the evangelical style of Christianity, and is starting to take hold globally. My investigation explores how the residents embody contemporary global evangelical trends including non-denominationalism, community, small groups, and relational discipling and outreach. I investigate how these trends are of significance to the ways that the residents interact with one another, as well as others outside of the household. This research contributes to anthropological research on evangelical Christianity, with this new style of evangelicalism only just beginning to be acknowledged within the field. I also add to previous discussions in anthropology of the contemporary global evangelical aspects of megachurches and non-denominationalism. I argue that evangelism is an internal and external process, with my inclusion of the discipling of Christians challenging analyses based only on evangelisation of non-Christians.