The Anchor Fellowship is a nondenominational church in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. Its members practice and promote a theology that is explicitly inclusive, valuing the spiritual gifts, needs, and potential for ministry of all Christians, regardless of their backgrounds, professions, or subcultural affiliations. Worship and live music are integral components of the Anchor’s services, in which aesthetics of charismatic praxis and rock club concerts often overlap. The Anchor was formerly a Vineyard church, and many of its priorities reflect members’ previous church experiences as well as their participation in underground music subcultures. Dick Hebdige (1979) links subcultures to an ideology of resistance, which is present in the Anchor’s origin story; its congregants were united in their disenfranchisement from mainstream churches and in their resistance to dominant ideas about church growth, congregational participation, and interchurch accountability. In its blending of evangelical and charismatic theologies and practices, the Anchor joins other Third Wave and neocharismatic congregations that resist dominant Protestant typologies in which Pentecostal-charismatic renewal and conservative evangelicalism are often separated.1 This case study of renewal-oriented worship, theology, and ministry at the Anchor Fellowship thus highlights and further nuances the increasingly blurred boundaries between the charismatic and evangelical worlds in the United States.
On a typical Sunday morning at 10:30 A.M., the Anchor Fellowship is as loud as a rock concert. The worship band is better than good: they sound well rehearsed, professional, balanced, and confident, and their music more than fills the 150-year-old sanctuary. The guitars and keyboard outline the chord changes, layering nicely in different registers; the vocalists trade melody and harmony easily; and the rhythm section maintains a steady beat and propels the band through dynamic shifts.2 The band transitions easily from song to song almost without pause, vamping when the worship leader prays to invite God’s presence into the church. The leader might repeat a chorus or extend a verse to heighten the congregation’s engagement with the Holy Spirit, and the band members easily follow her cues. As a first-time visitor in late 2009, I was impressed by the music; the Anchor’s congregants, however, almost take the band’s musical proficiency for granted. The band is always this good. Churchgoers do not attend the Anchor to marvel at the music; rather, they come to worship and encounter God in a community of believers. Worshippers are charismatic: some stand and sing, faces turned upward and arms outstretched, bodily embracing the Holy Spirit; others sit and observe in quiet contemplation; still others kneel and pray; and all are caught up in an experiential spirituality that is simultaneously private and public, intimate and communal.
The Anchor Fellowship’s website quotes a passage attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, founder of Catholicism’s Franciscan order. It reads, “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.”3 As the Anchor’s unofficial mission statement, this quotation indicates that the church’s pastors and congregation take seriously their ministry to Christians who have been peripheralized or made to feel unwelcome in other churches. The Anchor originated as an informal meeting of subcultural Christians dissatisfied with and disengaged from previous church experiences.4 Members come from a variety of denominational backgrounds; many have never felt comfortable in traditional churches, while others have felt rejected by former churches. Church leaders encourage individuals to participate in the church’s ministries—for example, by welcoming new members to the worship team, empowering new leaders without requiring formal seminary training, and affiliating with like-minded congregations through the Anchor Mission U.S.A. network. That churchgoers here experience spiritual moments in a corporate worship environment at all reflects the Anchor’s history of resistance, ideology of inclusion, and theology of renewal. At the Anchor, ideology and theology are co-constitutive and born from these histories; resistance and renewal are part of this church’s heritage and can be seen in both its congregation’s worship practices and its pastors’ theological orientation toward pursuing God’s calling regardless of any hurdles they might face.
Although the Anchor may feel to some like a refuge for countercultural and subcultural Christians, its pastors and members nonetheless closely follow biblical doctrine. The church’s statement of faith, available on its website, is based on the Nicene Creed and contains elements common to most Christian churches: belief in the sovereign Christian God, the Holy Trinity, the resurrected Christ, and the divinely inspired, inerrant Bible. Additional elements link the Anchor to a history of charismatic renewal: belief in the active and transformative presence of the Holy Spirit, the importance of spiritual gifts and miracles, and the strength of God’s grace, which enables believers to rise above their ability in order to accomplish God’s will. The Anchor’s statement of faith lays the foundation for some of its ministries and programs. Members are given the opportunity to learn about the faith cooperatively through the Alpha Course, a nondenominational exploration of the basics of Christianity, originally developed in an English charismatic Anglican church, that takes place over several weeks. The Anchor School of Ministry offers in-depth, full-time discipleship training in a ten-week term. I attended a formal prayer training at the Anchor, where we practiced calling on the Holy Spirit and listening to God’s voice; it is mandatory for congregants who want to serve on the church’s lay ministry team.5
The preamble to the Anchor’s statement of faith is perhaps its most unique part: it recognizes the diversity of the theological and denominational backgrounds of church members, and it emphasizes the unity found in their common salvation.6 Over time, the Anchor’s diversity has grown; the congregation includes Christians of different ages, backgrounds, and theological orientations. According to former associate pastor George Brooks, many churchgoers “have come from much more conservative churches, or much less charismatic churches, however you want to call it. We have Baptists, we have Pentecostals, we have Church of Christ people... people from totally different theological backgrounds, all coming together because something real [spiritually] is happening despite us.”7 While this diversity clearly reflects the Anchor’s inclusive theology, at a macro level it also indicates that boundaries around charismatic worship praxis—subverted here in favor of “something real”—are contested continually in local congregations, church networks and denominations, and the scholarly literature at large (see, for example, Nathan and Wilson 1995; Miller 1997; Sweeney 2005; Versteeg 2010; Luhrmann 2012).
The Anchor’s staff learned their positions organically: while founding pastor Joshua Stump, current lead pastor Brian Ban, and current worship leader and associate pastor David Lim all have substantial postsecondary education, none has completed a college degree or attended seminary for pastoral training. They have all learned to pastor and disciple their congregants on the job, following God’s calling and will. Indeed, Pastor Ban finds the idea that a degree or certification alone might qualify someone for pastorship laughable. Instead, the Anchor’s pastors believe that anyone can be called to ministry, regardless of his or her personal background or training. Renewing disenfranchised Christians, respecting their diverse theological backgrounds, training and empowering them to hear God’s voice and minister—all of these practices both reflect and produce ideals and goals of a participatory Christian faith among the Anchor’s congregation. Privileging divine accountability over human qualifications is another feature of the Anchor’s experiential spirituality, and it further illustrates the ways in which resistance, renewal, and worship have evolved both ethically and stylistically.
While the Anchor Fellowship’s theology and worship practices clearly align it with the Association of Vineyard Churches, its former denominational home, church leaders and members grew increasingly frustrated with Vineyard bureaucracy and eventually unaffiliated only a few years after the church officially joined the Vineyard in 2006. Vineyard U.S.A. originally emerged as a coherent network of thirty-two churches that separated from the Calvary Chapel movement in 1982 (Miller 1997, 46–50; Burgess 2002, 1177; Versteeg 2010, chap. 2). In contrast to the “mildly charismatic and completely evangelical” Calvary, Vineyard “favored a freer use of special, supernatural gifts in worship and evangelism” (Sweeney 2005, 151). Under the leadership of John Wimber, Vineyard churches emphasized worship, experiential spirituality, kingdom theology, and church planting; within fifteen years, the movement grew to comprise more than eight hundred churches (Jackson 1999, 340). Pastor Ban characterized the early Vineyard movement as one in which “individual communities were coming together, pursuing the Lord, and it didn’t matter what qualifications you had.... There was no formal guidelines, necessarily, for what the church was supposed to look like.”8 Contemporary worship music—Vineyard pastor Bill Jackson describes prioritizing “culture-current music” and “a common mission to rock ’n’ roll culture” (1999, 105, 107)—remains important at many Vineyard churches, featuring often in ethnographic accounts (see, for example, Labanow 2009; Monteith 2010; Versteeg 2010; Luhrmann 2012).
The Anchor’s affiliation with Vineyard seemed like a good match. Many of the Anchor’s founding members and pastors had attended Vineyard churches, including Stump, Ban, former worship leader Ben Crist, and former associate pastor Christy Brooks.9 The Anchor has much in common with other Vineyard churches, especially in its strong focus on worship music, experiential spirituality, and congregational ministry time at the end of the service. The Anchor’s pastors benefitted from the community and fellowship with other Vineyard congregations throughout the southeastern United States. This formal network helped newcomers to Nashville find the Anchor; for example, members of Ban’s previous church, Trinity Vineyard in Atlanta, encouraged him to join the Anchor when his family first moved to Nashville in August 2006. Additionally, Anchor pastors valued the Vineyard’s regional conferences, where church leaders gathered to meet and share resources and expertise. Finally, the Anchor’s affiliation with the Vineyard provided a visible system of accountability for the church, demonstrating that the congregation’s beliefs and faith practices had been approved by an outside authority.
Despite these benefits, Pastor Stump and the Anchor’s staff had become uncomfortable with the Vineyard affiliation as early as 2007. Although these pastors had witnessed significant growth, emotional healing, and spiritual renewal throughout their church’s early years—which they saw as proof that God was working through them and had ordained them to lead their congregants—they felt that other area Vineyard pastors were condescending toward them. As Ban put it, “We were seen [by other pastors] as a glorified youth group... as radical and rebellious.” This tension was most apparent when other Vineyard pastors counseled the Anchor’s staff. For example, Stump quit his job to pastor the Anchor full-time only a few years after its founding against the advice of other Vineyard pastors: according to George Brooks, other pastors warned that “it takes at least ten years before [your church] can be self-supporting.” Despite these challenges, the Anchor’s staff resolved to maintain the Vineyard affiliation at the time. As Ban explained, they “never felt comfortable with leaving because we were angry, or because we weren’t getting what we wanted”—a mature perspective that contrasts greatly with the Anchor’s resistant “glorified youth group” identity.
Stump and others began to feel God calling them to start new churches that would serve a similar purpose to the Anchor: ministering to the needs of Christians who “were falling in the cracks and didn’t have a place,” according to Ban. The Anchor’s pastors and congregation networked with other peripheralized Christians and ministries around the country, often meeting them at Christian music festivals, such as Cornerstone in Illinois.10 According to Brooks, they found “a huge cultural cross-section within the underground music scene that has rejected church but desires a relationship with God, desires a community. So what we want to do is show them, say, ‘Hey, look, we were in the same place. We hated church, we didn’t want to have anything to do with Christians or religion, but God has called us to be part of the church, and he’s called the church to be healthy and wholesome, so here’s how we’re going to model it. Come and help us do this.’ ” The Anchor’s pastors wanted to use their own experiences to encourage and advise others with similar backgrounds and visions. They discovered, however, that planting churches through their Vineyard affiliation was very difficult—“near impossible” and hindered by miles of red tape, according to Brooks—despite the denomination’s focus on church planting, missions, and evangelism (Jackson 1999, 107, 340). Ban noted that one nonnegotiable requirement was two years’ worth of formal training in the Vineyard’s program for new pastors. While this requirement may be well intentioned and justified from the perspective of Vineyard’s church-planting overseers, it posed a huge hurdle for the Anchor’s staff: none had completed formal pastoral training themselves, and they were not comfortable requiring training of new pastors for their church plants. Rather, they heard God calling them “to create a place for people to use each other for a resource,” said Ban, “and begin to find qualification in the Lord rather than on what you have or don’t have on a piece of paper, and [we] began to encourage and release people to do church plants.”
These tensions ultimately led the Anchor’s congregation to leave Vineyard in late 2009 and form Anchor Mission U.S.A., a network of existing churches, new church plants, and missions with a similar theology and calling as the Anchor. Ban explained this as a positive move: “We really feel like the Lord gave us vision for a movement that he was calling us to, rather than exiting Vineyard because of a dislike.” The way in which Ban frames this decision leaves little room for argument from those who believe and trust in God’s will; the Anchor’s separation from Vineyard in order to pursue God’s calling to plant new churches was a defensible position that placed the church on the forefront of renewal, far more so than simple dissatisfaction with its perceived juvenile status within and resistance to the Vineyard church network. As of June 2014, Anchor Mission officially includes fifteen churches at locations in Chicago, New Orleans, Warsaw, and elsewhere. According to its website, Anchor Mission self-identifies as a “post-denominational organization”; much like the early years of the Vineyard movement, it has no ecumenical or pastoral hierarchy, instead operating cooperatively.11 The Anchor Fellowship’s staff provide moral support, encouragement, and the benefit of experience in pastoring peripheralized Christians and bringing them into community with one another.
Every Anchor Mission church prioritizes worship as a foundational method of connecting with God, though they all sound slightly different: the worship leaders and pastors have a lot of freedom in designing their worship services to be relevant for their congregations (see fig. 9.1). Ban explained that worship styles, common patterns of resistance, and fashions are ultimately not sustainable affinities; rather, “the only thing that binds us together is our pursuit of the Lord.” At the original Anchor Fellowship in Nashville, worship constitutes a focused period of this pursuit in which the congregation is united emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
Fig. 9.1 A rehearsal of the Anchor’s worship band. Photo by the author. Used courtesy of the Anchor Fellowship, Nashville.
Sunday, September 12, 2010, 5:30 P.M. This evening’s six-member worship band is arranged in an arc on the stage, facing the congregation but with no single musician providing a focal point. David Lim leads worship on electric guitar, standing stage left. Although I’ve already attended several services at the Anchor, I’m still surprised by the sheer volume of the band when it starts playing—I feel like I’m in a rock club. The sound engineer has mixed Lim’s baritone vocals only slightly higher than the instruments; although the songs’ lyrics and melodies are of primary importance, the accompanying music is a close second. The congregation stands and sings, many reading the song lyrics projected onto the bare wall above the stage; some raise their arms above their heads, hands facing outward, bodily praising God and inviting him in. The music is incredibly loud, and though I can see other congregants’ lips moving, I can’t hear them singing along—I can barely hear myself singing.
The church’s interior is rather small and has a utilitarian aesthetic: bare brick walls, scarred wood floors, a couple hundred folding chairs, and a plywood stage. Bare lightbulbs are strung from the ceiling, where the wooden rafters are visible. This contrasts with the professional PA system in the front and sound console in the rear of the sanctuary, both of which are huge and look expensive. While singing, I glance around and smile and nod hello to some pastors and church members I know. Many are college students, and most have moved to Nashville from elsewhere; I see current and former members of alternative Christian rock bands, at least a few employees of the nearby United Record Pressing vinyl record manufacturing plant, and the guys with whom I attended a (secular) heavy metal show last night. Subcultural style abounds: ripped denim, T-shirts, long hair, tattoos, piercings, and thrift store chic are common.
After about forty-five minutes of worship music, senior pastor Joshua Stump carries a podium to the stage and starts preaching from Mark 1:29–34.12 He is troubled by the current discourse on “hipster Christianity” sparked by Brett McCracken’s recent book, cover article for this month’s issue of Christianity Today, and Wall Street Journal opinion piece (2010a, 2010b, 2010c). At issue is the presumption that hipster Christians’ faith is fashionable and has little substance. Stump sounds like he agrees: he argues that many young Christians are more attracted to the culture of Christianity than they are to the responsibilities of their faith. He exhorts the congregation to pursue an “authentic faith,” arguing that one cannot be committed to the Christian lifestyle without practicing Christian love.
Pastor Stump seamlessly transitions from his sermon into the Anchor’s weekly ministry time. He asks us to consider whether our faith is authentic and intentional, actively informing our daily lives, or whether it is only routinized, a facade without deeper significance. He calls for every present member of the lay ministry team to come forward and pray for the congregation as the worship band returns to the stage and resumes playing. As I look around me, I see raw emotion on many faces; some members are clearly grappling with the challenge that Stump has presented. The music rises and falls in volume and intensity, simultaneously driving and reflecting the congregation’s energy. We are united in a corporate religious experience; the atmosphere is affecting and thick with emotion. The ministry team spreads throughout the congregation to pray for individuals. Titus, whom I met at Alpha Class on Thursday, comes over, places his hands on my shoulders, and prays for me to receive God’s grace. The band finally decrescendos one final time, fading away into an expectant silence. Stump then directs the congregation to form a large circle around the periphery of the sanctuary. We join hands and sing an a capella doxology to close the service.13
As described above, Sunday churchgoers at the Anchor experience worship viscerally. The sermons frequently address issues that churchgoers face in their daily lives from a biblical perspective and can result in uncomfortable moments if congregants feel directly confronted. Corporate prayer and ministry time is literally hands-on, either on an individual basis (as when Titus prayed over me) or as a group, when (for example) the congregation lays hands on and prays over churchgoers who are moving away. The Anchor’s building—one of the oldest church buildings in Tennessee, originally built in the middle of the nineteenth century for a Primitive Baptist congregation—is not well insulated and can get uncomfortably hot. The walls might perspire, and the floor may shake. Live worship music at the Anchor is as loud as at a rock concert and similarly physical; close to the stage, one can feel the speakers push the air. When the band crescendos, accelerates, modulates to a higher key, or simply starts playing a familiar and well-loved song, congregants respond both physically and emotionally. Most congregants sing along, constructing and perpetuating corporate unity through worship music. Many experience the Holy Spirit’s presence in this affective environment.
Worship is a fundamental part of religious life at the Anchor. It brings individuals together in shared experience, providing a communal environment in which they can open themselves to spiritual encounters. Congregants affirm and reaffirm their faith both individually and collectively during worship services. They invite the Holy Spirit into the building and learn how to recognize God’s presence (cf. Luhrmann 2012). Sermons and pastoral teaching contribute to this continual educational process and help unite churchgoers in their collective spiritual experience. As Ban explained to me in an interview, “Through worship, we can come into, we can encounter the Lord, and we can find healing, and we can be rebuilt, and we can experience who we were meant to be.” This perspective on worship—that its purpose is to allow individuals to encounter the Lord, receive healing (both literally and metaphorically), and be rebuilt—shapes and is shaped by the Anchor’s institutional history of resistance and renewal.
When I asked Lim about the church’s reputation almost two years after the service described above, he told me, “I feel like the reputation of the church has changed positively over the last few years. For a while we were [known as] the emo church, then we were the hipster church. Hopefully, now, that’s changing again.... We just want to be known as a church where the Lord is there, where people go and are accepted, however, that are also healed of their wounds.”14 Healing—one of the gifts of the Spirit—is a common discursive frame at the Anchor, where members have come from broken families, experienced addiction and divorce, been ostracized by their previous churches, or become disenfranchised from mainstream evangelicalism because of the culture wars with secular popular culture (Romanowski 1996; Nekola 2009). These backgrounds have shaped the Anchor’s perspective on worship, as described above by Pastor Ban. Individuals who find healing have often been hurt; those who desire to be rebuilt may feel as if they have been destroyed; those who search for meaningful lives may feel adrift and purposeless. Communing with God and other Christians through worship at the Anchor heals and renews and has done so since the church’s inception.
Joshua Stump founded the Anchor Fellowship in 2003 as an unaffiliated home group. Early on, the Anchor was a space of resistance, a refuge for Christians who were dissatisfied with their former churches. Brooks told me that it “was just born out of rebellion, which is not a good thing.... I think all of us were very broken, very hurt, we had so many issues.” Many of those early attendees had been professionally involved in the music industries. According to Brooks, the Anchor attracted “musicians and artists that would pretty much refer to themselves as Christians but don’t really want to, that kind of vibe, and are happy to call the Anchor their home, because... it’s not a very ‘church’ place.” In other words, the Anchor doesn’t look, sound, or feel like a traditional church. As a result, it has always attracted Christians who find traditional church worship practices, politics, and institutional hierarchies to be irrelevant—people whom Ban described as being “pissed and done with church.”
The Anchor’s first worship leader, Ben Crist, moved to Nashville to attend Belmont University and joined the Anchor while still in college. He wrote songs that reflected this ambivalence, brokenness, and hurt, addressing the quotidian confusion he experienced as a Christian. For example, in “We Can Be Renewed,” he observes that “pain comes quietly to Earth” and claims that “we’re infected with the hurt,” the passive voice construction here suggesting that we experience hurt through no fault of our own.15 The song’s refrain—“What of the dreams I shared with you? Here’s hoping that we can be renewed”—posits renewal as an uncertain process, instead of the assured promise heard more commonly in praise and worship songs. In an earlier song, “Hear Our Prayers,” Crist addresses God directly, asking him to “take our burdens, calm our fears.”16 The song is written in the first-person plural—the pronouns “our” and “we” appear throughout—and functions as a collective lament when the congregation sings it together. The chorus makes this explicit: “God will you make us a people that love you?... God see our tears that we’re struggling to see through.”
In his lyrics, Crist often acknowledges that life can be painful for Christians and that God’s plan for one’s life can be difficult to perceive and follow. Churchgoers who had already experienced confusion and pain in their own lives found these songs very meaningful and evocative. Lim inherited this tradition of emotionally and spiritually powerful worship songs from Crist when he joined the Anchor’s staff as head worship leader in 2006. Lim brought to the Anchor experience leading worship and an emphasis on professional-quality performance and production values, developed during his time working as a guitar technician for Christian performing artists Newsboys. Under Lim’s leadership, the worship team produces a musically immersive experience and performs in an anthemic rock-based musical style that sounds similar to that of popular modern worship artists such as David Crowder or Chris Tomlin. Each worship leader is free to pick and choose songs from the Anchor’s repertoire with little guidance from Lim. While this repertoire includes many CCLI-licensed songs, such as Michael W. Smith’s “Let It Rain,” currently about half of the songs are originals, written by Lim or Crist, or by their friends in the Christian bands Ascend the Hill, the Ember Days, or Great Awakening.17 During rehearsals—which double as soundchecks that start two hours before each service—the leader will explain the arrangement she wants, quickly discuss parts with each musician, and identify areas where the band could vamp, extend a verse, or repeat a chorus, depending on how the Spirit directs them. Lim might provide some guidance, especially if asked, but in general he trusts the leaders and musicians on his team to prepare a worship service that satisfies both the congregation’s technical expectations and its spiritual needs.
The intimacy of worship is a common theme among the Anchor’s staff.18 Lim’s goal for worship is “just to be direct[ly] focused on the Lord and genuine in what we’re singing.... I try to really encourage all my leaders and the band to lead worship by asking the Lord what he’s doing and what he’s saying, and roll with that, because you can’t fail.” He and his team pursue this goal by leaving their arrangements relatively open-ended, allowing the leader to listen to the Holy Spirit’s direction and extend the song in order to prolong, heighten, or otherwise emphasize the congregation’s spiritual experience. While playing, the leader will often direct the band and lyric projectionist by preemptively reciting a lyric right before shifting to the next section of the song.19 Lim and his team gather together regularly for discipleship and worship training in which he emphasizes the spiritual foundation of leading worship. They open rehearsals with a prayer, they address their songs to God, and Lim leads each service’s band through a discussion of the importance of God’s presence and a prayer immediately before the service begins.
One of the Anchor’s main challenges is growth and progress, as opposed to stagnation and repetition. Ban explained the Anchor’s focus on worship as something that has to evolve continually if it is to remain honest and effective: “The Lord has given us worship as an avenue to connect with him, and to enter into his presence.... [If] you’re just going through the motions or you’re just trying to create a model, or a mode, [then] you can get stuck in that, not really listen and follow the Lord.... Having a mode and a model is easy, it’s predictable, and we like that.” If a specific song becomes ritualized due to its popularity with the congregation, then any spiritual connection with God through that song also becomes ritualized and, thus, inauthentic. Experiential spirituality is intended to be new, provocative, and transformative. The repetition of ritual performance subverts spirituality as a process, despite its clear meaning and significance to worship participants (see Turner and Bruner 1986; Turner 1995). Lim recognizes this as a danger and does his best to avoid it:
No one wants to change. They find a song that they think works, and then you go with it. After a while, as good of a song as that may be—and many songs are—they lose meaning to people. It [becomes] an automatic response.... The intensity has to come from engaging with the Holy Spirit and communing with the Lord. It can’t come from this musical moment, where we built the song so big or so dynamically or whatever that it makes you feel a certain way. That’s the easy thing to get caught up in: the band does this big swell and now everyone’s in it. But, can you experience this same thing in the softer moments? Well, of course. Really, at that point it’s theology: Is the Lord there more during these things or less during the quieter moments? Well, we have to say no. Is the Spirit working more during the big moments? No, of course not.... I really don’t want to plan a song that I think will just be a big song. Because, at that point, I’m doing it because I want to manipulate.
Lim’s approach to resisting this danger has been to retire some popular songs and to evolve away slightly from the anthemic style that defined the Anchor’s worship music for several years. “The irony,” Lim told me, “is that people do want to be manipulated as much as they say they don’t.” Refocusing and renewing the worship experience has thus been a trial for Lim and Ban, as they are teaching their congregation how to be open to the Holy Spirit through worship in all of its manifestations and not just in the obvious, “big” moments. Some churchgoers have not reacted well and left the church because they felt that they no longer experienced an intense spiritual presence during worship at the Anchor. Others have stayed, and still more have been drawn to the church, learning to value its approach to worship, experiential spirituality, and the Christian faith without expectations born from past experiences.
The Anchor’s staff is almost defiantly proud of redefining worship, subverting existing norms of pastoral accountability, eschewing formal seminary training and hierarchical interchurch relationships, and chafing under the authority of the Vineyard movement. That said, they no longer prioritize rebellion or resistance for its own sake. Indeed, a goal of Anchor Mission U.S.A. has been to facilitate community building and interchurch support at an institutional level and thus avoid the challenges that unaffiliated, nondenominational churches face. Ban told me that for the Anchor Fellowship “to stand alone and be alone [as an unaffiliated congregation]... is very difficult, and it’s not something that we necessarily see as a biblical model.” As the Anchor Fellowship’s worship services constitute resistance and renewal at the local level every Sunday, so does Anchor Mission U.S.A. at the institutional level, simultaneously resisting existing denominational hierarchies and renewing like-minded congregations. Instead of observing the boundaries that have traditionally separated Pentecostal and charismatic praxis from evangelicalism, the Anchor finds value in both the emotional and the intellectual approaches to the Christian faith. As it resists and conflates these divisive typologies, the Anchor participates in a larger project of renewing Protestantism by subverting them. Ultimately, however, theologies, ideologies, and practices at the Anchor are squarely centered in making intimate spiritual experiences available to all: Brooks told me that when outsiders ask him, “Who’s your spiritual authority? Who do you guys answer to?,” he replies, “Well, we answer to God.”
1. Sweeney writes that Vineyard has been instrumental in popularizing among mainline and nondenominational evangelicals a worship style—which he describes as “California-style charismatic liturgy”—that fuses charismatic praxis and evangelical theology (2005, 149–51). Versteeg explicitly links Vineyard to the Third Wave movement, which followed Pentecostalism and charismatic renewal and brought Spirit-filled praxis to existing congregations without uprooting their theologies (2010, 63). Nathan and Wilson, two Vineyard pastors, describe a similar synthesis among contemporary congregations, in which charismatic renewal empowers the ministries and theologies of traditional evangelical churches (1995, 34). See Burgess (2002) for brief discussions of the Third Wave and neocharismatic movements.
2. The Anchor worship band’s anthemic rock style is best described as modern worship, which, Ingalls notes, emerged in the mid-1990s and is heavily influenced by contemporary British bands such as Coldplay, Radiohead, and U2 (2008, 140).
3. See http://www.theanchorfellowship.com.
4. Although Balmer uses the term “subculture” to describe conservative evangelicals broadly (1989, xii), my usage throughout this chapter follows Hebdige’s (1979) definition and description of a subculture as a group that resists and redefines the dominant norms of mainstream culture through music, fashion, and other elements of style.
5. Prayer training, both formal and informal, is necessary for newcomers to experiential spirituality to learn how to recognize God’s voice in their own heads and separate his thoughts from their own. See Luhrmann (2012) on developing and learning prayer as a skilled practice.
6. See http://www.theanchorfellowship.com/who-we-are/.
7. All quotations attributed to George Brooks are taken from an interview conducted by the author on March 7, 2010.
8. All quotations attributed to Brian Ban are taken from an interview conducted by the author on May 26, 2012.
9. Christy Brooks is George Brooks’s wife and the founder of Anchor Mission–affiliated Morning After Ministries, a women-centered outreach.
10. For further discussion of the importance of festival gatherings to the Christian periphery, see Mall (2012).
11. See http://anchormissionusa.com/∼anchorm/manifesto.php.
12. In this passage, Christ heals many sick individuals brought to him by townspeople who are attracted to his healing powers.
13. The Anchor closes many services with the doxology that I learned attending a Southern Baptist church during my childhood—Thomas Ken’s hymn “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow” (1674).
14. All quotations attributed to David Lim are taken from an interview conducted by the author on May 26, 2012.
15. Ben Crist’s band, the Glorious Unseen, later signed with BEC Recordings, affiliated with the Christian label Tooth & Nail Records. “We Can Be Renewed” appears on the Glorious Unseen’s album The Hope That Lies in You (BEC Recordings 44099, 2009).
16. “Hear Our Prayers” appears on the Glorious Unseen’s album Tonight the Stars Speak (BEC Recordings 81136, 2007).
17. Many churches license copyrighted worship songs through Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI). All three of these bands, as well as Lim’s project We Are Creation, record for Nashville-based Come&Live!, a nonprofit record label founded by Anchor member (and former Tooth & Nail A&R director) Chad Johnson.
18. According to Versteeg, the intimacy of worship is a broad priority throughout the Vineyard (2010, 220).
19. In practice, this sounds very similar to the “lining out” tradition of leading a congregation through a hymn without using a lyric sheet or other notation (Titon 2006).
Balmer, Randall Herbert. 1989. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Burgess, Stanley M., ed. 2002. The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Ingalls, Monique Marie. 2008. “Awesome in This Place: Sound, Space, and Identity in Contemporary North American Evangelical Worship.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.
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