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'''What Are We Talking About?'''

At the heart of the Emergent Church movement—or as some of its leaders
prefer to call it, the “conversation”—lies the conviction that changes in the
culture signal that a new church is “emerging.” Christian leaders must therefore
adapt to this emerging church. Those who fail to do so are blind to the cultural
accretions that hide the gospel behind forms of thought and modes of expression
that no longer communicate with the new generation, the emerging generation.
One reason why the movement has mushroomed so quickly is that it is bringing
to focus a lot of hazy perceptions already widely circulating in the culture. It is articulating
crisply and polemically what many pastors and others were already beginning
to think, even though they did not enjoy—until the leaders of this movement
came along—any champions who put their amorphous malaise into perspective.

'''What Characterizes the Movement?'''

''Protest ''

It is difficult to gain a full appreciation of the distinctives of the movement without
listening attentively to the life stories of its leaders. Many of them have come
from conservative, traditional, evangelical churches, sometimes with a fundamentalist
streak. Thus the reforms that the movement encourages mirror the
protests of the lives of many of its leaders.

The place to begin is the book ''Stories of Emergence'', edited by Mike Yaconelli.
Most of these “stories of emergence” have in common a shared destination (namely,
the Emergent Church movement) and a shared point of origin: traditional (and
sometimes fundamentalist) Evangelicalism. What all of these people have in common
is that they began in one thing and “emerged” into something else. This gives
the book a flavor of protest, of rejection: we were where you were once, but we
emerged from it into something different. The
subtitle of the book discloses what the editor sees
as common ground: ''Moving from Absolute to Authentic''.

An example may clarify what the book is trying
to accomplish. Spencer Burke used to sit in a plush
third-floor office, serving as one of the pastors of
Mariners Church in Irvine, California—“a bona
fide megachurch with a 25-acre property and a
$7.8 million budget.” Every weekend 4,500 adults
use the facilities, and the church ministers to
10,000 people a week. But Burke became troubled
by things such as parking lot ministry. (“Helping
well-dressed families in SUVs find the next available
parking space isn’t my spiritual gift.”). He
became equally disenchanted with three-point sermons
and ten-step discipleship programs, not to
mention the premillennial, pretribulational eschatology
on which he had been trained. Burke came
to realize that his “discontent was never with
Mariners as a church, but [with] contemporary
Christianity as an institution.”

Burke organizes the causes of his discontent
under three headings. ''First'', he has come to reject
what he calls “spiritual McCarthyism,” the style of
leadership that belongs to “a linear, analytical
world” with clear lines of authority and a pastor
who is CEO. Spiritual McCarthyism, Burke
asserts, is “what happens when the pastor-as-CEO
model goes bad or when well-meaning people get
too much power.” These authority structures are
quick to brand anyone a “liberal” who questions the
received tradition.

The ''second'' cause of Burke’s discontent is what he
calls “spiritual isolationism.” Under this heading he
includes the pattern of many churches moving
from the city to the suburbs. Sometimes this is
done under the guise of needing more space.
Nevertheless, he insists, there are other motives.
“It’s simpler for families to arrive at church without
having to step over a drunk or watch drug deals go
down in the alley. Let’s be honest: church in the
city can be messy. Dealing with a homeless man
who wanders into the service shouting expletives
or cleaning up vomit from the back steps is a long
way from parsing Greek verbs in seminary.”
Indeed, megachurches out in the suburbs sometimes
construct entire on-campus worlds, complete
with shops and gyms and aerobics centers.

The ''third'' cause of his discontent Burke labels
“spiritual Darwinism”—climbing up the ladder on
the assumption that bigger is better. The zeal for
growth easily fostered “a kind of program-envy….
Looking back, I spent a good part of the 1980’s and
‘90s going from conference to conference learning
how to ride high on someone else’s success.” To
shepherd a congregation was not enough; the aim
was to have the fastest-growing congregation. “It
was survival of the fittest with a thin spiritual veneer.”

In 1998 Burke started TheOoze.com. The
name of the active chat room is designedly
metaphorical: Burke intends this to be a place
where “the various parts of the faith community are
like mercury. Try to touch the liquid or constrain
it, and the substance will resist. Rather than force
people to fall into line, an oozy community tolerates
differences and treats people who hold opposing
view with great dignity. To me, that’s the
essence of the ''emerging'' church.”

''Protest Against Modernism''

The difficulty in describing the Emergent
Church movement as a protest against modernism
is partly one of definition: neither modernism nor
postmodernism is easy to define. Even experts in
intellectual history disagree on their definitions.

The majority view, however, is that the fundamental
issue in the move from modernism to postmodernism
is ''epistemology''—i.e., how we know
things, or think we know things. Modernism is
often pictured as pursuing truth, absolutism, linear
thinking, rationalism, certainty, the cerebral as
opposed to the affective which, in turn, breeds
arrogance, inflexibility, a lust to be right, the desire
to control. Postmodernism, by contrast, recognizes
how much of what we “know” is shaped by
the culture in which we live, is controlled by emotions
and aesthetics and heritage, and can only be
intelligently held as part of a common tradition,
without overbearing claims to being true or right.
Modernism tries to find unquestioned foundations
on which to build the edifice of knowledge and
then proceeds with methodological rigor; postmodernism
denies that such foundations exist (it is
“antifoundational”) and insists that we come to
“know” things in many ways, not a few of them
lacking in rigor. Modernism is hard-edged and, in
the domain of religion, focuses on truth versus
error, right belief, confessionalism; postmodernism
is gentle and, in the domain of religion, focuses
upon relationships, love, shared tradition, integrity
in discussion.

How then do those who identify with the
Emergent Church movement think about these
matters? The majority of emerging church leaders
see a very clear contrast between modern culture
and postmodern culture and connect the divide to
questions of epistemology. Some think that we are
in a postmodern culture and therefore ought to be
constructing postmodern churches. A few
acknowledge that not everything in postmodernism
is admirable and therefore want to maintain
some sort of prophetic witness against postmodernism at various points while eagerly embracing
the features of postmodernism that they perceive
as admirable.

Brian McLaren, probably the most articulate
speaker in the emerging movement, has emphasized,
in both books and lectures, that postmodernism
is not antimodernism. The telling point for
McLaren and most of the other leaders of the
Emergent Church movement is their emphasis on
the discontinuity as over against the continuity
with modernism. When McLaren speaks through
the lips of Neo, the postmodern Christian protagonist
of his best-known books (the ''New Kind of Christian'' trilogy), he can use “post-” as a universal
category to highlight what he does not like: “In the
postmodern world, we become postconquest, postmechanistic,
postanalytical, postsecular, postobjective,
postcritical, postorganizational, postindividualistic,
post-Protestant, and postconsumerist.”
These books show how much what McLaren
thinks “a new kind of Christian” ''should'' be like today
is determined by all the ''new things'' he believes are
bound up with postmodernism: hence “a new kind
of Christian.”

Much of McLaren’s aim in his writing and lecturing
is to explode the certainties that he feels
have controlled too much of the thinking of
Western Christian people in the past. But there is
a danger in constantly exploding the certainties of
the past: if we are not careful, we may be left with
nothing to hang on to at all. Recognizing the danger,
McLaren takes the next step by providing us
with two definitions.

The first of his definitions is of ''philosophical pluralism'',
the stance that asserts that no single outlook
can be the explanatory system or view of reality
that accounts for all of life. Even if we Christians
think we have it, we must immediately face the
diversities among us: are we talking about Baptist
views of reality? Presbyterian? Anglican? And
which Baptist? Philosophical pluralism denies that
any system offers a complete explanation.

The second definition is of ''relativism''. It is the theory
that denies absolutism and insists that morality
and religion are ''relative'' to the people who embrace
them. Lest Christians think none of this applies to
them, McLaren draws attention to the ethnic cleansing
of the Old Testament, to David’s many wives, to
injunctions against wearing gold rings.

If both philosophical pluralism and relativism
are given free play, McLaren asserts, it is difficult to
see how one can be faithful to the Bible. Yet absolutism
cannot be allowed to rule: the criticism of
absolutism is too devastating, too convincing to
permit it to stand. So perhaps a culture plagued by
absolutism needs a dose of relativism to correct
what is wrong with it—not so much a relativism
that utterly displaces what came before, but a relativism
that in some sense embraces what came
before, yet moves on. If absolutism is the cancer, it
needs relativism as the chemotherapy. Even
though this chemotherapy is dangerous in itself, it
is the necessary solution.

If absolutism is not the answer and absolute relativism
is not the answer, what is the Christian way
ahead? Here McLaren finds himself heavily
indebted to the short work by Jonathan Wilson,
''Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World: Lessons for the Church from MacIntyre’s After Virtue''. This is surely
what we want: we want to learn to live faithfully in
a fragmented world. Absolutism plays by one set
of rules. ''Real'' pluralism is like a large field where
many games are being played, each game observing
its own rules. This sort of pluralism is coherent.
But we live in a ''fragmented'' world: we are playing golf
with a baseball, baseball with a soccer ball, and so
forth. This is not ''real'' pluralism; it is fragmented
existence.

Doubtless a few small, coherent, communities
exist—Hasidic Jews, perhaps, or the Amish—who
manage to play by one set of rules, but the rest of us
are mired in fragmentations. As a result, there is no
coherence, no agreement on where we are going.
Our accounts of what we are doing maintain the
lingering use of the older absolutist language, while
we find ourselves, not in genuine pluralism, but in
fragmentation. In North America we have a memory
of absolutist totalitarian Christianity and experience
fragmentation. So our choice is whether to
go back to this absolutist heritage or forward to
something else. Can we weave a fabric that is not
totalitarian and absolutist but avoids absolute relativism?
The former returns us to the barbarities and
is unconvincing in a postmodern age; the latter simply
leaves us open to the marketers, for there is no
coherent defense against them.

The way ahead, McLaren suggests, is very helpfully
set out in David Bosch’s ''Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission''. Toward the end
of the book, Bosch lists eight perspectives that
speak to our situation and give us some direction:

#Accept co-existence with different faiths gladly, not begrudgingly. It is not their fault if they are alive.
#Dialogue presupposes commitment to one’s position, so it is surely not a bad thing to listen well. Dialogue should be congruent with confidence in the gospel.
#We assume that the dialogue takes place in the presence of God, the unseen Presence. In such dialogue we may learn things, as Peter does in Acts 10–11. Similarly, Jesus
learns from his interchange with the Syrophoenician woman.
#Missional dialogue requires humility and vulnerability. But that should not frighten us, for when we are weak, we are strong. It is surely right, for instance, to acknowledge
earlier atrocities committed by Christians, even as we remain careful not to disparage those earlier Christians.
#Each religion operates in its own world and therefore demands different responses from Christians.
#Christian witness does not preclude dialogue.
#The “old, old story” may not be the true, true story, for we continue to grow, and even our discussion and dialogues contribute to such growth. In other words, the questions raised
by postmodernism help us to grow.
#Live with the paradox: we know no way of salvation apart from Jesus Christ, but we do not prejudge what God may do with others. We must simply live with the tension.

I have taken this much space to summarize
McLaren’s views (articulated at a recent lecture) for
a couple of reasons. One is because most sides
would agree that McLaren is the emerging church’s
most influential thinker (or, at the very least, one of
them). Another reason is because while most leaders
of the Emergent Church movement set up a relatively
simple antithesis—namely, modernism is
bad and postmodernism is good—McLaren is careful
in this piece to avoid the obvious trap: many
forms of postmodern thought do in fact lead to
some kind of religious relativism, and McLaren
knows that for the Christian that is not an option.
He clearly wants to steer a course between absolutism
and relativism, and he is more careful on this
point than some of his peers.

Nevertheless, for McLaren, absolutism is associated
with modernism, so that every evaluation he
offers on that side of the challenge is negative.
Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single passage in
any of the writings of the Emergent leaders that I
have read that offers a positive evaluation of any
element of substance in modernism. But McLaren
does not connect relativism with postmodernism.
He appears to think of relativism as something
more extreme (perhaps postmodernism gone to
seed?), while postmodernism itself becomes the
uncritiqued matrix in which we must work out our
theology. So while he dismisses absolute religious
relativism (it cannot be said that he critiques it;
rather, he recognizes that as a Christian he cannot
finally go down that avenue), I have not yet seen
from McLaren, or anyone else in the Emergent
Church movement, a critique of any substantive
element of postmodern thought.

''Protesting on Three Fronts''

The Emergent Church movement is characterized
by a fair bit of protest against traditional
Evangelicalism and, more broadly, against all that it
understands by modernism. But some of its proponents
add another front of protest, namely, the
Seeker-sensitive church, the megachurch.

The degree to which this element stands out
varies considerably. It is certainly present, for
instance, in Dan Kimball’s ''The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations''. His recent
book is praised by not a few pastors in the Seekersensitive
tradition, doubtless because Kimball casts
his work, in part, as the way forward to reach a new
generation of people who have moved on, generationally
and culturally, from the kinds of people
who grabbed the attention of the Seeker-sensitive
movement three decades ago. Although there are
differences, the Emergent church leaders, like the
Seeker-sensitive leaders in their time, are motivated,
in part, by a desire to reach people who do not
seem to be attracted to traditional approaches and
stances—and the Seeker-sensitive movement is
now old enough to be one of the “traditional”
approaches. Pastors in the Seeker-sensitive tradition,
then tend to see in the emerging church leaders
a new generation of Christians doing the sort of
thing that they themselves did a generation earlier.

Kimball’s book sets out how to go after the post-
Seeker-sensitive generation. Much of his material
goes over common ground. He offers a kind of
popular profile of what he thinks postmodernism
embraces: it accepts pluralism, embraces the experiential,
delights in the mystical, and is comfortable
with narrative, with what is fluid, global, communal/
tribal, and so forth. Kimball then turns to how
we should go about things rather differently. This
includes an appendix on post-Seeker-sensitive worship.
Here we must have much more symbolism
and a greater stress on the visual. We should have
crosses and candles. There might be an entire communion
service without a sermon. The entire geography
of the room may be different, with the possibility
of different groups within the assembly
engaging in different things at a time, and perhaps
someone going off for a while to a quiet desk for a
bit of journaling. The entire experience should be
multisensory; the prayer corner may well burn
incense. “Worship in the emerging church,”
Kimball writes, “is less about looking out for what is
on the cutting edge and more about moving back
into our spiritual center with Jesus as our sole focus.”

Kimball offers us antithetical visions of modern
preaching and postmodern preaching. In modern
preaching, the sermon is the focal point of the service,
and the preacher serves as the dispenser of biblical
truths to help solve personal problems in modern
life. Sermons emphasize explanation—explanation
of what the truth is. The starting point is
the Judeo-Christian worldview, and biblical terms
like “gospel” and “Armageddon” do not need definition.
The biblical text is communicated primarily
with words, and this preaching takes place within
the church building during a worship service.

By contrast, Kimball writes, in the postmodern
Emergent Church movement, the sermon is only
one part of the experience of the worship gathering.
Here the preacher teaches how the ancient
wisdom applies to kingdom living; the preacher
emphasizes and explains the experience of who the
truth is. The starting point is the Garden of Eden
and the retelling of the story of creation and of the
origins of human beings and of sin (cf. Acts
17:22–34). The scriptural message is communicated
through a mix of words, visual arts, silence, testimony,
and story, and the preacher is a motivator
who encourages people to learn from the
Scriptures throughout the week. A lot of preaching
takes place outside the church building in the
context of community and relationships. Such
preaching will be deeply theocentric rather than
anthropocentric, and care should be taken not to
insult people’s intelligence.

What cannot be overlooked in Kimball’s book,
I think, is how much of his analysis is specifically
directed against churches in the Seeker-sensitive
tradition. For example, some of his suggestions—
such as insistence that sermons should be theocentric
and not anthropocentric, that they should not
insult the intelligence of the hearers, that instruction
in the Word should go on throughout the week
and not be confined to public services on Sunday,
and what we should aim for in kingdom living, one
could easily find in Reformed exhortations, perhaps
in the pages of a magazine such as this.

Other parts of Kimball’s advice, of course, could
not similarly be aligned. Yet the fact that so much
of what he has to say ''can'' be aligned with many serious
voices within traditional Evangelicalism suggests
that most of the time the “implied reader” of
his book is not the more traditional evangelical
church, but Seeker-sensitive churches. In Kimball’s
view, they too are out of step with the culture and
fall under the curse of modernism. Moreover, if, as
we have seen, several of Kimball’s individual suggestions
as to the way ahead are reminiscent of
stances taken within parts of traditional
Evangelicalism, the structure of his thought, taken
as a whole, is distinctively postmodern.

'''What Should We Be Asking?'''

This is but a sketchy introduction to the
Emergent Church movement. What have
we learned so far and what questions
should we be asking?

From these summaries of the stories of many of
the leaders of the emerging movement and the survey
of some of their publications one point stands
out rather dramatically. To grasp it succinctly, it is
worth comparing the Emergent Church movement
with the Reformation, which was, after all, another
movement that claimed it wanted to reform the
church. What drove the Reformation was the conviction,
among all its leaders, that the Roman
Catholic Church had departed from Scripture and
had introduced theology and practices that were
inimical to genuine Christian faith. In other words,
they wanted things to change, not because they
perceived that new developments had taken place
in the culture so that the church was called to adapt
its approach to the new cultural profile, but
because they perceived that new theology and
practices had developed in the church that contravened
Scripture, and therefore that things needed
to be reformed by the Word of God. By contrast,
although the Emergent Church movement challenges,
on biblical grounds, some of the beliefs and
practices of Evangelicalism, by and large it insists it
is preserving traditional confessionalism but changing
the emphases because the culture has changed,
and so inevitably those who are culturally sensitive
see things in a fresh perspective. In other words, at
the heart of the emerging reformation lies a perception
of a major change in culture.

This does not mean that the Emergent Church
movement is wrong. It means, rather, three things.

''First'', the Emergent Church movement must be
evaluated as to its reading of contemporary culture.
Most of its pleas for reform are tightly tied to its
understandings of postmodernism. The difficulty
of the task (granted the plethora of approaches to
postmodernism) cannot exempt us from making an
attempt.

''Second'', as readers will have already observed
from this short survey, the appeals to Scripture in
the Emerging Church literature are generally of
two kinds. On the one hand, some Emergent
church leaders claim that changing times demand
that fresh questions be asked of Scripture, and then
fresh answers will be heard. What was an appropriate
use of Scripture under modernism is no
longer an appropriate use of Scripture under postmodernism.
On this gentler reading of
Evangelicalism’s history, traditional evangelicals are
not accused of being deeply mistaken for their own
times, but of being rather out of date now, not least
in their handling of the Bible. On the other hand,
the Emergent Church’s critique of modernism, and
of the Evangelicalism that modernism has produced,
is sometimes (not always) so bitter that
Evangelicalism’s handling of Scripture can be
mocked in stinging terms. This is not meant to
imply that this is true of all emerging pastors.

''Third'', granted that the Emergent Church movement
is driven by its perception of widespread cultural
changes, its own proposals for the way ahead
must be assessed for their biblical fidelity. In other
words, we must not only try to evaluate the accuracy
of the Emergent Church’s cultural analysis, but
also the extent to which its proposals spring from,
or can at least be squared with, the Scriptures. To
put the matter differently: Is there at least some
danger that what is being advocated is not so much
a new kind of Christian in a new Emergent Church,
but a church that is so submerging itself in the culture
that it risks hopeless compromise?

Even to ask the question will strike some as
impertinence at best, or a tired appeal to the oldfashioned
at worst. I mean it to be neither. Most
movements have both good and bad in them, and
in the book from which this article is taken I highlight
some of the things I find encouraging and
helpful in the Emergent Church movement. I find
that I am more critical of the movement because
my “take” on contemporary culture is a bit removed
from theirs, partly because the solutions I think are
required are somewhat different from theirs, partly
because I worry about (unwitting) drift from
Scripture, and partly because this movement feels
like an exercise in pendulum swinging, where the
law of unintended consequences can do a lot of
damage before the pendulum comes to rest.

The Emerging Church - Revision history

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JoyaTeemer: Created page with '{{info}} '''What Are We Talking About?''' At the heart of the Emergent Church movement—or as some of its leaders prefer to call it, the “conversation”—lies the convicti...'