So. This is basically what I've been working on the past couple months. Yea. Let me know what you think!
Emerging Where?
A comprehensive analysis of the Emerging Church
~Introduction~
Life. It’s our time-travel, our robust highway from beginning to end. As on any highway, we’re not alone. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s back and forth, go and stop, along with 6 billion other “commuters” on their own way. It’s a fact that life, in its living, essence, and function, is composed of relationships. Most common are the interpersonal; we have our being in our mother, and since we’re dependent, we learn to trust and obey. We learn to not stick our fingers in electrical sockets from our dads and moms. Then we move on to school, and we learn about girls being yucky and having cooties, and about boys acting like the dirt and mud they play in. Then all that high school drama…enough said. We have our relationships with our jobs, and with money, and with our possessions we’ve plundered. There’s relationships with music, and style, and culture, and politics, and of course, religion; the relationship with the deity. God, gods, church and worship teams, rugs and prayer five times a day, a menorah and celebrated feasts…it’s all around us, since before we can remember, and will be till the end of time.
Interestingly enough, this new generation has resurfaced many of the basic questions of religion and spirituality from the dusty cellar of the 18th-20th centuries. Who is God? Where is he? Is he (or it) in us? Where do we find fulfillment and satisfaction? Where do we find authenticity and a true relationship with someone or something outside what we see with our eyes? What does this relationship accomplish? We hope for the greater good for humanity. We hope for social justice, peace, acceptance, and vision for life. In American at least, everyone thought they had it canned up and nailed down in Jesus (no pun intended). Yet revolution of spiritual thought has arrived. Day after day, our global village is less globe and more village, and so we feel the impact of our neighbors’ findings in God, or New Age thought, or anything and everything else. Of course, then some of our neighbors start asking why we ever went with the whole religion route in the first place, and decide to forget all organized religion and just seek relative morality and social action and peace. They questioned whether religion was just the invention of man to compensate for the lack of understanding of our universe that is now supposedly obsolete in our 21st century.
Ultimately, the basic understanding that must be reached is that spiritually, our world is at a very different place than it has been in the last 300 plus years. And so our approach as Christians who are seeking to be faithful children of God, pleasing Him in our lives, and declaring His message of salvation to a lost, confused, and hungry world is not easy. To understand why it’s not easy, we must go back to relationships. This past American generation for the most part grew up in modern evangelical church, objectively singing hymns in their wooden pews, hearing about believing in Jesus and going to hell and burning if you didn’t. The problem wasn’t the message. It was the delivery. As a result, so many people increasingly felt judged by the absolute, sweeping statements hurled at them, didn’t feel truly cared for in their problems, and consequently went looking for God elsewhere. They said that if God is love and accepting and wanting relationship, certainly the evangelical church wasn’t where He was. So in many ways, the evangelical church has lost a lot of its credibility in America’s eyes, and our culture has broken off its relationship with the church. They’ve become disinterested and disengaged. They’ve turned to other ways to finding spiritual fulfillment and satisfaction, and many have found it in Eastern religious influence.
Suddenly, Christians trying to remain faithful to Christ’s call to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations” find themselves in a completely different mission field than sixty or seventy years ago. Our old evangelical strategies don’t seem to work like they used to. The problem is that we can’t seem to figure out a way of presenting the truth about the authentic, personal, eternally satisfying relationship with God possible through Jesus Christ in a convincing manner. Fire and brimstone was tried, being born again died out, and “Jesus and I are best buds” fell apart. Where do we go from here? Firstly, we must be reminded that truth is truth, and can powerfully transform people regardless of approach. Secondly, it’s not all up to us. God changes hearts, not man.
What we can do though is strive for understanding our mission and understanding those we’re trying to reach, and that’s exactly what the Emerging Church is trying to do.
~Background~
The Emerging Church is a current Christian movement that seeks to effectively evaluate its surrounding culture and in response make changes in the organization, strategy, and practice of the church to effectively meet the spiritual needs of individuals both Christian and non-Christian. Initial hints of the movement showed in New Zealand about 20 years ago (Wikipedia), and the emergent philosophy and practice soon started making an impact in the United States. By the late 1990’s and early years of the new millennium, emergent leaders formed their perspectives, resulting in books such as “The Church on the Other Side”, and “A New Kind of Christian”, both written by Brian McLaren, who is to date the prominent voice for the emerging church in the United States. Other prominent leaders in the movement include Tony Jones, Rob Bell, Doug Pagitt, Spencer Burke, and Dan Kimball(DeYoung, Kluck, 18), to name a few. Although these men do seem to represent much of the emerging church, there are also many differences in their beliefs and their focus in ministry. For instance, there is in fact a difference between the emerging movement and the official emergent community, which is led by Tony Jones (DeYoung, Kluck, 16). In part, this difference testifies to the emerging church as a fluid, multi-faceted movement whose beliefs and practice vary. Therefore it is often on a situational basis, from leader to leader or church to church, that an understanding can be reached of how “emerging” can be translated or interpreted. As Kevin DeYoung describes it in his book “Why We’re Not Emergent”, co-authored by Ted Kluck, “Defining the emerging church is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. The “what” and “who” of the movement are almost impossible to define” (DeYoung, 16-17). Simply put, the emerging movement is difficult to define precisely because of the fact that it is emerging. Thankfully though, the majority of the community has taken enough shape to be generally evaluated as a whole. There are three major points that seems to define the emerging community.
Firstly, this “conversation”, as emergent leaders would call it (Carson, 9), focuses on bringing reformation to the evangelical church’s modernistic beliefs and practices to meet the postmodern culture. The emergent movement would say that it calls for the church to move away from its doctrinal absolutism, “in or out” perspective, and unflinching walls in its relationship with culture, non-believers, and other religions. This cultural shift (from modernism to postmodernism) that emergent leaders believe we should meet comes down to a change in epistemology (Carson, 27), which, as defined by www.Dictionary.com, is “The theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge.” While modernism would search for and focus on absolutes, certainty, “unquestionable foundations”, “truth versus error”, Christian postmodernism acts in the light that almost everything we know is shaped by our culture’s perception, focusing on discussion, questioning and probing our beliefs, and the journey and experience of the Christian life. It is on this assertion of the importance of moving to a postmodern approach to Christianity that majority of the emerging church’s arguments are built from.
The next reformation that the emerging community seems to drive is in its focus on orthopraxy, how Christians live out their beliefs, instead of orthodoxy, what is believed, a Christian’s doctrine and theology. In fact, emergent leaders often equate orthopraxy as orthodoxy. Erwin McManus, an emergent leader, says, “The power of the gospel is the result of a person – Jesus Christ – not a message. The gospel is an event to be proclaimed, not a doctrine to be preserved” (DeYoung, 108). Additionally, Brian McLaren writes about orthodoxy as “virtue, and it’s Christlikeness…Orthodoxy itself is a practice…So ethics comes first, then doctrine comes second” (DeYoung, 110). This elevation of orthopraxy over orthodoxy seems to stem from the emerging community’s heading away from the modern, Evangelical church and its belief that orthopraxy flows out of correct, Bible-based orthodoxy, instead of the other way around.
Lastly, the emerging community according to D.A. Carson, in his book “Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church”, is a responsive protest to many of the faults of the Evangelical church. He writes in chapter one of Spencer Burke’s story of leaving his traditional evangelical modern church after eighteen years of ministry (Carson, 15). Burke became “disenchanted” with the assumed structure of church and meetings, as well as the rigid absolute body of doctrine. Burke sums up his dissatisfaction with the church into three points that can be related as common ground for the emerging community as a whole. Firstly, Burke “has come to reject what he calls ‘spiritual McCarthyism’” (Carson, 16). At its essence, spiritual McCarthyism is what Burke believes to be overarching “authority structures” that hold too much power, influence, and especially those institutions that will not accept any rejection of the established form and way of doing things. The second cause of Burke’s dissatisfaction is “spiritual isolationism” (Carson, 17), which Burke describes as the movement of the evangelical church to simply ignore the many problems, including social issues, that surround the church, often by “moving [the church] from the city to the suburbs.” Additionally, he sees spiritual isolationism as a disconnect between many Christian’s praxis (orthopraxy) and the assumed “evangelical expectations”, seeming to refer to the hypocrisy that often be found in the evangelical church. Lastly, Burke says his discontentment with the established form of evangelical, modernist church comes from the “spiritual Darwinism”, which he sees as “the assumption that bigger is better” (Carson, 18). This spiritual Darwinism that Burke confronts appears to point at the seeker-sensitive, megachurch lack of authenticity with its consumer-minded approach to ministry, creating a product and “buy-in” for the “searching.”
These three main overarching points appear to shape the outline of the emerging community’s definition. In this outline, we see a strong call and move towards matching the church’s practice with the needs of our postmodern generation. In addition, this is furthered by the emerging church’s emphasis on orthopraxy as opposed to orthodoxy. Lastly, we see a few of the faults that emergents find with the traditional, evangelical church as an institution. Doubtless, there are nuances in the philosophy and thinking behind the movement, and these different categories that will be addressed under the broader lens of the previous points. As we continue on in our look at the emerging church, we will see both its favorable aspects as well as its faults in contrast with the modern, traditional church it is moving away from.
~Statement of the Current Debate~
Today, the emerging community continues to make an impression in the Christian and non-Christian worlds, though its movements are often under the radar. Leaders such as Brian McLaren and Rob Bell continue to weave their ideas through materials like McLaren’s multiple books and Bell’s engaging “Nooma” videos. As a whole, emergents have made their biggest mark through the blogosphere and sites like TheOoze.com (led by Spencer Burke) where individuals can become part of the “Conversation for the Journey”. While bold in their proclamations for changing the way we “do” Christianity to better engage the postmodern culture, emergents remain wary of being labeled just as the “new fad”. Instead, they ultimately want to be known for an authenticity of faith and practice; a real, experiential relationship with the living God instead of just a belief system with restricting doctrines. This is in response to their conclusion that the modern Christian church holds doctrine in such an unwavering, absolutist form that it elevates knowing things about God over truly knowing God, though some might argue if there is any difference. The emerging church seeks to bring back into balance right belief with right living, orthodoxy with orthopraxy.
These endeavors are praiseworthy to be sure. In a culture that is “no longer secular, but at a horizon now shaped by an incredible appetite for worship and spirituality” (Webber, 200), it is key that Christianity shifts to effectively meet this change. Though its audience seems to have changed, the message of the gospel has not. Many key Christian leaders who are not emerging, such as D.A. Carson, Al Mohler, and John MacArthur hold serious concerns that if the emerging church rejects the modern church’s foundation of propositional truth about God built on the authority of Scripture, the result will be no Christianity, but a relativistic moralism without regard to sin and a Savior.
~Thesis Statement~
While there are many positive aspects to the emerging movement (which will be shortly discussed), there are an equal amount of dangers that the movement brings, all of which appear to stem from a lack of holding to the authority of Scripture. This cannot be so. If the emerging church is to prosper and bear fruit from its strengths and insightful questions about practiced Christianity, they must hold strongly to the authority of Scripture and stand on foundational propositional doctrines that will propel effective Christian ministry to a hurting world.
~Argument~
That Which We Must Embrace
In the past 200 years, the Western Christian church has lost more influence than at any other time in history. Christianity used to pervade almost all social aspects. Obviously we cannot tell to what level Christianity was rooted in the public’s hearts though, since much of going to church and faithfully sitting in the pews and singing hymns and reading the Bible and being a good person was about social acceptance and normality. It is obvious things aren’t as they used to be. In our Western prosperity, people realized that they didn’t “need” faith or God. If we look at today’s culture though, we see a post-Christian, yet spiritual society. People seek fulfillment and answers to life, yet refuse to believe that the evangelical Christian church and the Sunday schools of their childhoods can provide them. Instead, our postmodern culture, swayed by Eastern religious influence, has turned to faiths based in the experiential, realization of the self-God, and transcending one’s consciousness, such as Oprah’s New Age spirituality, based on Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth. D.A. Carson, in Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, writes:
“The postmodern ethos tends to be anti-absolutist, suspicious of truth claims, and wide open to relativism. It tends to adopt therapeutic approaches to spirituality, and –whether despite the individualism of the Western heritage or perhaps even because of it – it is often attracted to communitarian wholeness.”
It is this changed culture for which the emerging church seeks to provide, something which many churches failed to observe and act upon. Al Mohler points out in his article What Should We Think of the Emerging Church?, “Something remarkable has occurred in the culture, and Emerging Church leaders certainly have a point in criticizing mainstream evangelicalism for missing the crucial fact.” This is one key, positive direction in which the emerging church has lead and which the rest of evangelical Christianity must fix its headings upon. In the emergent conversation, the metaphor of being missionaries in foreign countries is often used to express how we must adapt to this different time with a different culture with a different mindset and different language. “It does no good to answer questions that are no longer asked.” (Webber, 198) It is time for mainstream Christianity to admit that we live in a new world and a new mission field. The church must reorganize itself in structure, practice, and most importantly, mission focus and strategy in order to more effectively proclaim the gospel.
The emerging church’s second positive characteristic that should not go unnoticed by Western evangelical Christianity is the emerging church’s passion for wrestling with truth and theology, though some critics would state that emergents hold no propositional truth with which to wrestle. The modern Christian church member is often characterized by a naivety and blind discipleship to doctrine and theology that doesn’t seek to press into full understanding and grasp of theology. Instead, many Christians believe what they believe because their pastor told them. Though not necessarily bad, we as Christians must press into truth for ourselves, investigating Scripture to meet and know God. We must not simply stand and walk on previously paved roads, but instead understand and known every stone hand-laid by faithful Christians whose eyes were opened to Scripture-based truth.
That Which We Must Be On Guard Against
The first real and significant danger of the emerging movement lies within the very same desire to bring reformation to the Christian church to engage our postmodern culture. At the heart of the shift from modernity to postmodernity is the understanding of epistemology, and whether truth is truly knowable, whether we as fallible, corrupt human beings can accurately comprehend anything true about the infallible, pure God. The emerging church asks the question if we as Christians can believe in doctrinal absolutes and propositional statements. Who are we to compartmentalize God in categories and absolutes? While the veil of these statements is a humble posture, it leads down a dangerous path of uncertainty and questioning almost the entire foundation of our Christian faith. Secondly, it harms and works against one of the very core values of the emerging church: missional living and inviting others to join to “story of God” (a phrase often used by emergents). There are multiple sub-dangers that are observable (and have already been experienced by those in the emerging church) if we begin questioning whether truth about God is knowable.
Firstly, if we lose confidence that truth about God is knowable and can be organized into absolute propositional statements, we offer the same uncertainty and relativism as the rest of the world and its religions. Our message of the gospel, that Jesus Christ, fully man, fully God, became incarnate on the mission to die and take upon himself the inability of the human race to please God, otherwise known as sin, isn’t even a message, because we can’t stand for it. Kevin DeYoung touches on many of these points in his book Why We’re Not Emergent. He writes:
“We can tell people about Jesus every day until he returns again, but without some doctrinal content filling up what we mean by Jesus and why He matters, we are just shouting slogans, not proclaiming any kind of intelligible gospel.” (108)
The second sub-danger is that because we’re unsure of our message, Christianity is watered down into a mere moralism built on the exemplary righteous life of Jesus, filled with social justice, healing the hurts of the world, and communal living. Kevin DeYoung touches on many of these points in his book Why We’re Not Emergent.
“[The emerging church] conflate the two so that orthodoxy equals right living, and right belief, if it matters at all, flows from right living instead of the other way around.” (110)
John Burke, an emergent pastor in Austin, Texas, writes in Listening to the Beliefs of the Emerging Church:
“When people being treating one another as God’s masterpiece waiting to be revealed, God’s grace grows in their lives and cleanses them. We have watched gay people, radical feminists, atheistic Harvard grads…and greedy materialists come into our church, hang out around the body of Christ, find faith, change, and grow to wholeheartedly follow Christ.” (66,67)
While we cannot limit the way God moves in people’s hearts, there is no mention here of a realization of sin and Christ as our atonement. Instead, Burke, and emerging church as a whole, appears to take a therapeutic and sympathetic mindset for unbelievers, modeling Jesus as a good example to follow to rid us of destructive life patterns. Not only is this diminishing Christianity to moralism, but could possibly be giving false hope of salvation for un-believers. The emerging movement must realize the incredible danger of this.
An example of where a loss of the authority of Scripture has brought a relativistic mindset and repudiation of clear biblical expository of sin is where Brian McLaren in an Christianity Today article expresses his loss for words in a making a pronouncement on homosexuality. In an effort to express the love of Christ and not making sweeping judgments, he writes, “We've heard all sides but no position has yet won our confidence so that we can say "it seems good to the Holy Spirit and us." Though the notion of uncertainty might sound humble and accepting of the homosexual community, McLaren exposes a clear rejection to clear Scriptural teaching. It is this manner of relativism that must be rejected.
Conclusion of Pros and Cons
We have looked at both the positive aspects of the emerging church that evangelical Christianity must embrace and the hazardous dangers that we must avoid. In our new mission field of spirituality, relativism, and postmodernity, it is crucial that the church re-arms itself to answer new questions and take on new approaches to evangelize and truly bring others into the “story of God”. At the same time the church must realize that though the methods to reaching culture may change, the message cannot ever be changed, for it is truth that anchors in the inerrant Scripture. In the spiritual fog of the world, the church must cling to the gospel more than ever and proclaim that truth is knowable and unchanging.
~Conclusion~
Jesus states in Matthew 16:18 “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” It is a comforting thought to know that no matter what circumstance, the gospel will stand firmly for all time. Jesus promises not only to safeguard his church and gospel, but also to build it. Even now, Christianity is taking strongholds in nations such as China and South America, where the gospel is rapidly spreading. Praise God! Meanwhile, the church must continue being faithful where it has already been established. It is our generation’s responsibility to preserve what has been imparted to us: the gospel. This thought begs the question of unity within the church. Without unity and a common standing on the key doctrines such as the atonement and authority of Scripture, we will be preaching different gospels. Paul states in Galations 1:8 “But if we or an angel from heaven preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” If we are not unified within the church, not only will our work cease to bear fruit, but we will surely be corrupted from within. That is why now is the crucial time to correct ourselves, both the emergent movement’s errors as well as the evangelical church’s. It is too dangerous for us to stall and dispute amongst ourselves while the world continues deeper into its postmodern journey. The gospel calls us to something better: to be unified around the truth given us by God’s revelation and to proclaim that truth of salvation to a dying, hurting world. More than ever before, non-believers are swimming in the corrupted waters of uncertainty, non-truths, and relativism. Why give them more of what they constantly endure? Let us instead give them the transforming, solid truth of the gospel that never fades and completely satisfies in a personal relationship with God.
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