1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University
© 2025 Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
Gerardo Marti, professor of sociology at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, is fascinated by diversity and innovation as aspects of how the world is changing and how that affects churches today.
His first three books explored these themes in multicultural congregations. Marti’s fourth book explores what’s been called the emerging church or emergent Christianity. He co-authored The Deconstructed Church: The Religious Identity and Negotiated Practices of Emerging Christianity with U.K. sociologist Gladys Ganiel. Their book is due out from Oxford University Press in 2014.
In June 2013, Gerardo Marti gave an extended interview while he was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a Calvin College Summer Seminar, Los Protestantes: Latino Protestantism in the United States.
In this edited excerpt, he describes distinctive worship practices in emerging churches. One distinctive is openness, and The Deconstructed Church has an entire chapter on ‘faith as conversation.’
In this edited excerpt, Marti talks about diversity within the emerging church movement.
In this edited excerpt, he talks about how emerging churches help people remain within Christianity, rather than leave it altogether.
|
Learn more about Gerardo Marti’s book Worship Across the Racial Divide. He presents extensive research showing that there is no single style of worship or music that determines the likelihood of achieving a multiracial church. |
Gerardo Marti on Emerging Church Demographics
Why and how did psalm singing become such a hallmark of Reformed worship? Join Dr. Karin Maag for a fascinating journey through time, from Reformation Geneva to Scotland and from the Netherlands to New England, exploring the roots and impact of metrical psalm singing. Along the way, we will hear the voices of early modern Christians as they learned how to sing the psalms, both in unison and in harmony.
Sister Kathleen Harmon of the community of the Ohio province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Dayton, invites us to be transformed by the psalms and experience them as the whole story God is revealing to us. As we keep praying and singing them, the psalms interpret us, and that’s when the transformation comes.
Vinroy D. Brown Jr.—conductor, musicologist, educator, and minister of creative worship and music at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City—explores the vibrant intersection of Black sacred music and the psalms. He talks about Black composers and how they have reimagined the psalms through choral music, spirituals, and the gospel tradition for the benefit of everyone.
Why and how did psalm singing become such a hallmark of Reformed worship? Join Dr. Karin Maag for a fascinating journey through time, from Reformation Geneva to Scotland and from the Netherlands to New England, exploring the roots and impact of metrical psalm singing. Along the way, we will hear the voices of early modern Christians as they learned how to sing the psalms, both in unison and in harmony.
Sister Kathleen Harmon of the community of the Ohio province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Dayton, invites us to be transformed by the psalms and experience them as the whole story God is revealing to us. As we keep praying and singing them, the psalms interpret us, and that’s when the transformation comes.
Vinroy D. Brown Jr.—conductor, musicologist, educator, and minister of creative worship and music at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City—explores the vibrant intersection of Black sacred music and the psalms. He talks about Black composers and how they have reimagined the psalms through choral music, spirituals, and the gospel tradition for the benefit of everyone.
John Goldingay, an Anglican priest and the senior professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, posits the psalms are the densest material in the entire Old Testament. They expound the nature of God as the compassionate, faithful, and committed one, but also as the one who makes demands upon us. The psalms help us talk to God, even about difficult things—and when we do, we are talking to someone who is in a position to do something about it.
