lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "christendom" Category
What is the Emergent Church?
Last night Amy and I joined a friend for a presentation at Harvest Bible Chapel on the topic of, “What is the Emergent Church?”1 as part of an ongoing apologetics series they are doing.
As someone who gets to teach the course, The Emerging Church in the 21st Century, once a year, I was looking forward to attending and seeing what was said and discussed; especially considering the speaker for the evening was Dr. David Finkbeiner, a professor at Moody Bible Institute.I mean, if you want to get a balanced understanding of what the “Emergent Church” is all about, who better to ask than a professor of systematic theology at a school that officially, “does not endorse the emerging/emergent church” right?!
Harvest would have done well (though from what I could tell – would never so much as have considered it) to have invited at least one person who could have spoken as an insider to the EC discussion.
It was clear from the get-go that the tenor of the evening was going to be critical, bordering on condemnatory. And this, even after Dr. Finkbeiner admitted that there is no simple way to define the EC as a whole.
Dr. Finkbeiner’s focus for the evening was theological method. His premise was that what undergirds the “Emergent Church” movement is a post-conservative theological method. His aim was to critique this theological method overagainst a more traditional conservative evangelical one.
Essentially, here’s what that meant…
1) Post-Conservatives err in their non-foundationalist approach to epistemoplogy which takes things like history, context, and culture seriously, where as conservatives rightfully embrace Scripture as the objective and sole foundation to all knowledge.
2) Post-Conservatives err in asserting that absolute truth, while real, may often times be beyond our ability to fully grasp. Conservatives rightfully assert not only the reality of absolute truth, but affirm our ability to, “with a little hard work,” objectively know it.
3) Post-conservatives err in not championing the inerrancy of Scripture. Conservatives rightly hinge all their hopes on Scripture having been verbally and inerrantly inspired.
So, here we have a guy who is doing a masterful job of towing the line of modern conservative evangelicalism, lambasting those who dare to think, “There might be some stuff we’re missing here.”
As I listened to him describe some of the perspectives and viewpoints of post-conservative evangelicals I found it hard to believe that he wasn’t converting himself!
He quickly and coyly dismissed a broad range of the most helpful aspects of post-conservative theology…
– The idea that we need one another in the pursuit of truth because all of our perspectives are bound by a host of factors
– The notion that theology loses its character when not born out of an embodied witness
– The view that the authority of Scripture lies not primarily in its abstract character, but in its function in the life of the Church
– The insight that biblical propositional truth derives its meaning and significance from the narratives in which they’re embedded
– That post-conservative theology is, at its core, a prophetic call to revisit some of our modernistic assumptions
In each and every instance, the speaker noted that these are the hallmarks of post-conservative theology and then attempted to show why they ought to be rejected.
OK, so that was the presentation and as enlightening as it was, the Q & A time was even better. I quote.
“Is Willowcreek an Emergent Church? I heard they sell Brian McLaren books.”2
“Is the Emergent Church a cult?”
“I’ve heard that Urbana and InterVarsity are becoming more Emergent. Should I keep my kids away from those groups?”
I actually had the opportunity to ask the last question of the evening…
With a little trepidation, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I teach a course on the Emerging Church at the seminary level and I need to say that I think there have been some pretty unfair characterizations of the movement here tonight. I was hoping that before we go you might offer a positive comment about the role the EC has had in the recovery of the importance of the Missio Dei or incarnational approaches to ecclesiology.
Dr. Finkbeiner commented that, “Yes, there has been some focus in those areas, but they still are wrong in how they do theology.” So, no, he didn’t have one positive thing to say the entire evening about the EC.
Left completely aside from the discussion of the evening was the historical evolution of the EC movement, its place in the scope of the collapse of Christendom, and the most relevant bit of information given the scope of the talk, namely, that theological method simply isn’t at the center for 90% of the people who are in any way affiliated with the movement. For the vast majority, what is central is joining God in his mission in the world and finding ways to make the church, not culturally relevant (as too many assume), but incarnationally faithful in the pattern of Jesus.
Between the tenor of the presentation and the questions and comments of the audience, it’s little wonder that conservative evangelicals are so often characterized by fear and close-mindedness. There are many in the EC community who are trying to carve out a way of being the church and doing theology that doesn’t fell prey to these charges. I was really hoping to come away pleasantly surprised by the event. Sadly, I didn’t.
- There is no such thing as the Emergent Church. This is a classic conflation of the terms Emergent Village and Emerging Church offered by those who aren’t all that familiar with the topic [↩]
- Someone from Harvest was quick to announce that Harvest doesn’t! [↩]
We Need WAY More Missional Conversations: A Response to Ed Stetzer
I regret that I’ve never med Ed Stetzer face to face. I’d like to believe we’d be fast friends who share a mutual passion for people coming to know Christ and joining in God’s mission in the world. At the same time, we’d disagree about a lot. For starters, a blog post he published yesterday critiquing the need for missional (among other) conversations.
Ed seems worried about missional conversations that don’t…
involve men and women being redeemed, changed [sic], and transformed by the gospel.
I read that and think to myself, “What? Where in the flip is he getting his definition of missional and who is he talking to? These are the things that are at the very center of missional theology and ecclesiology.” I have worked hard over a healthy number of years to stay involved in every way I can imagine in the missional conversation and outside of the very fringes that you find in any population, I simply don’t know of any missional people or groups that would merit this kind of concern.
Ed says,
It is never a good thing to be defending our lack of converts to Christ while we are busy converting people to our cause. To me, it is the difference between complaining and creating a new (and better) way.
He goes on to say,
I don’t want missional to mean attacks on mega and fast growing churches who are reaching people “wrongly,” while missional churches are reaching few “rightly.”
I think I get Ed’s heart here, but these statements are FAR too simplistic. One of the main reasons for the lack of converts in missional and emerging churches is the popularity of churches who are, in fact, “reaching people ‘wrongly’.” For those who embrace missional theology and are trying to cultivate missional communities, especially in contexts where Christendom still exists, we are fighting an uphill battle… and wearing a 100 lb. pack… and it’s raining… and we’re barefoot… and… You get the point. In a culture which still features the cheap grace of individualistic salvation and consumeristic church involvement, guess what – the message of dying to yourself, submitting yourself to a community and joining in God’s Kingdom mission that will, in all likelihood, threaten your identity and lifestyle is pretty unpopular. When given the option, would-be converts will of course respond,
Thank you very much, I think I’ll just attend St. McDonald’s where I get saved by raising my hand, I can disappear in the mass of people, and the entertaining music & speaking gives me warm fuzzies every time I’m there.
The fact of the matter is that those who identify with missional theology engage in this fight for the very reasons mentioned above – because the converts made by the dominant expressions of Christianity in the US are in no meaningful way redeemed, changed or transformed. I doubt many people are more aware of the crisis of nominal Christianity in the US that Ed, so I find this a surprising oversight. So, albeit with the character and concern of Jesus, I think this is very much a biblically justifiable fight for missional people to be engaged in – the fight for biblical faithfulness and fulfilling of the command to make disciples.
Ed goes on to say,
I am not willing to say that a lack of converts is a sign of unfaithfulness. But, I am willing to say that too many change movements are not seeing lost people’s lives changed.
Fair enough, but this reality is far more poignant and dire when we consider the lack of disciple-making happening in long standing traditions that aren’t thinking about change at all!
Stetzer rounds out his post by saying,
So, let’s continue conversations about being “missional” or whatever, but let’s not do so if it distracts us from the mission. Instead let’s talk about these issues but not let them distract us from our main focus–showing and sharing the love of Jesus to a desperately lost world that needs a message of hope.
To this I say a quick and hearty AMEN! But I am also quick to resist Ed’s false dichotomy by pointing out that having “conversations about ‘missional’ or whatever,” aimed at the faithful practice and witness of the church is VITAL to the manner in which we show and share the love of Jesus. Not having these conversations, or having them poorly, is far more dangerous than seeing them as a distraction.
Between the promise I believe missional theology and ecclesiology hold for the trajectory of Western Christianity and how incredibly misunderstood both remain, I submit that we need WAY more conversations, not less.
Transitioning Traditional Churches into Missional Ones
A little over a week ago, my cousin-in-law Josh, asked how one might go about transitioning traditional churches into “something more missional at its core.” Since I have banged my head against this wall for years in several different churches, my response will be a mixture of, “here’s where I failed,” and “here’s what I think is most helpful.” For anyone who might have missed them, my posts on, “The Move: The Journey from Attractional to Missional,” and “What is Missional?” would be really helpful in understanding where I am coming from.
I should say a few things at the beginning to help frame my thoughts.
1) This is a wine skins issue (Mt. 9:17). Anyone considering this topic who thinks (whether they realize it or not) that this is basically about getting new wine into old wine skins is destined for frustration and failure – I speak from experience! Missional churches represent brand new wine skins, not just new wine.
2) This takes a long time. The most experienced people will tell you 8-10 years minimum. When we are talking about changing the core identity of, not just a person, but a community, we have to expect a long hard road. An apt analogy – God got Israel out of Egypt in pretty short order, but it took another 40 years to get Egypt out of Israel.
3) No one person is capable of maneuvering this transition. Solo pastors are dead in the water in this regard. And this isn’t to say that the better way is having a team of top-down leaders – this will end up being damaging as well. One of the keys to instilling missional DNA in a church community is inspiring and encouraging new imagination from the bottom.
Those things being said, what does it take? What might the process look like?
My short answer is,
A Spirit-guided intermingling of communal practices, teaching, and prayerful reflection.
Here’s my slightly-longer expansion on those three things.
I take for granted that fundamental to the distinctions of “traditional” and “missional” is a vision of what it means to be the church in Post-Christendom vs. Christendom. My personal opinion (others may disagree) is that there is no point in talking about what it means to be a missional church until Christendom has been rejected as a cultural value. Thus, transitioning traditional churches to missional ones is a non-linear process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Communal practices, teaching, and reflection are the tools which assist in this ongoing task. It would be a (classically modern) mistake to think of this as a mainly intellectual enterprise. Instead, in the integration of these things, deconstruction and reconstruction happen alongside one another.
Since there is no universal model to apply to this topic, we are better served by asking general questions that need to be answered in specific contexts. Here are some questions which I think would serve us well in maneuvering this sort of transition.
– In both small numbers as well as large, what are the practices we can engage in as a community that will shape us into people and “a people” who think and act like Jesus?
– As we try to be honest with ourselves, what things are we doing as a community that don’t seem to be contributing to our spiritual formation?
– How do we incorporate space in our times together (in homes, in meetings, in gatherings) to intentionally reflect on and respond to what we sense God is speaking and doing in our community?
– Who are those in our community who seem most gifted to teach (identified by the fruit of their teaching helping people become more like Jesus)? How can we encourage these people to engage with authors and speakers who are dealing with the subject of missional ecclesiology on our behalf?
– How do we make incremental yet strategic changes in the percentage of money that goes to those things which ensure our security as opposed to those things which necessitate faith in the midst of great risk?
Over and above questions like these, I would also suggest these sort of biblical principles for those who shoulder the responsibility for a transition like this:
– Find people of peace who can be trusted and are willing to commit to the journey. Ask for their help.
– Demonstrate servant leadership by being open, transparent, and broken.
– Commit to structures of biblical conflict resolution. Entrust to God’s care those who choose to leave (there will be many and this is not necessarily a sign of poor leadership).
OK, there’s some initial thoughts. I’m sure I’ll have more so I hope to continue the discussion by way of comments.
Reflections on the Missional Learning Commons
Amy and I had a great time at the Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne two weekends ago.
The theme of the weekend was,”Deeper Church.” Essentially what that meant was having discussions about certain topics which surface when we stop thinking about church as a worship service with a host of corresponding programs and begin to embrace church as a way of life in which we are joining God in his mission of reconciliation and the restoration of all things. Some may want to try and explain how these are really two ways of saying the same thing, but for the vast majority of people who have been involved in this conversation for any length of time, the differences are too real and too important to dismiss with semantic gymnastics.
On Friday night there were maybe 30 people in attendance to discuss Soong-chan Rah’s book, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. This conversation was continued as the topic of the final session on Saturday. Both conversations were engaging and helpful. While the book had clear shortcomings and oversights, it served as a springboard for us to ask the question, “Why are missional congregations so white?” We see this as a problem because implicit in missional theology is the value for listening to voices from the margins of society – something which should be a no-brainer to those of us who regard Scripture (a book authored by those speaking from the margins of society!) as our guiding text. Those who live on the margins of society have much to teach those of us who don’t and the longer our congregations remain socio-economically and culturally homogeneous, the more the Body of Christ, and by implication, the world to which we testify of an alternative reality, suffers.
In light of that, we had discussions about the practices of deeper churches, what sharing the gospel means and looks like for deeper churches, and whether or not these deeper churches should have paid staff. This session was led by a 3-person panel: Matt Tebbe one of the pastors of Life on the Vine who is bi-vocational, JR Woodward, who raises all of his support, and Bob Havenor, who was advocating for an up-paid approach to church leadership.
Thanks to Ben Sternke who put the missional commons site together, you can find audio from all of the sessions here.
If you are in the midwest and interested in the missional conversation, I hope you’ll consider joining us next year – details TBD.
Missional Learning Commons
This afternoon Amy and I are joining about a dozen others from our church community as attenders at a Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne, IN.
At the invitation of Dave Fitch (who has blogged about this gathering here), I attended my first one of these in December of 2007 before Amy was in Chicago. Last year Amy attended without me as I was in Kenya. So, especially since we have committed as a couple to helping cultivate a new missional community in the next year, I am really excited for us to get to participate in one of these together.
Here’s what I love about this event.
A) It’s free. And that’s not because it sucks. It’s because the “business” of Christian resourcing needs to die.
B) It’s local. The people who attend these every year have a real chance to stay meaningfully connected.
C) It’s not about personalities. Those who speak, are more like conversation starters. There is much more time given to dialogue than monologue.
D) There’s no hype. No book sales, no t-shirts, no vendors.
It’s just a band of brothers and sisters who are trying get on the same page about the implications of a missional ecclesiolgy as Christendom continues to crumble here in the midwest. It’s a living example of what I meant when I blogged about “The Power and Promise of Regional Gatherings for the Equipping of Missional Churches.”
Looking forward to a great weekend of connecting, discussing, dreaming, and praying.
Cultivating Missional Communities (& the Rozko’s)
In a new book, Fresh + Re:Fresh: Church Planting and Urban Mission in Canada Post-Christendom, Dave Fitch offers an introductory chapter entitled, “Fifty Years of Church Planting: the Story as I See it…” in which he summarizes the dominant approaches to church planting over the last few decades and discusses some of the major differences within Post-Christendom.
In speaking of the differences in the multiplication of church communities in Christendom vs. Post-Christendom, Fitch says,
Among the new missional leaders, church is the name we give to a way of life, not a set of services. We do not plant an organized set of services; we inhabit a neighborhood as the living embodied presence of Christ.
In agreement, I’d say that “cultivating missional communities” might be a better way to describe what we have more often known as “church planting.” In that vein, Fitch goes on to talk about the sorts of leaders necessary to cultivate missional communities suggesting that…
– they will be survivors
…the new missional community leaders must have patience, steady faithfulness and the ability to live simply. They must be able to get jobs and not see the ministry as a privileged full time vocation. They must have a mental image of how they are going to sustain their lives financially, relationally, spiritually and personally.
– they will be communal shepherds
They are not starting and managing an organization. They may not even be good at organization. Instead they are cultivating a communal sense of mission identity among a gathering people ‘for this time and place.’
– they will be interpretive leaders
Interpretive leaders do not dictate from the pulpit a list of do’s and don’ts and solutions from God for every problem. They interpret the Scriptures to open our eyes to what God is doing and where He is taking us. In other words, they cultivate other interpreters/listeners.
– they will be directors of spiritual formation
We must ever navigate against putting on a show that will attract; rather we must develop a liturgy that is simple, accessible and Scriptural and that guides our lives into Christ and guards us from the distractions that would take us away from Mission. …there will be no missional community of people formed and shaped for mission if we just preach Mission as a legalistic requirement. Mission requires patience, a sense of vision and a level of self-denial that can only be formed inwardly in living bodies, trained in the simple organic disciplines/liturgies of the historic church.
– they will be leaders who give away power
Hierarchy is the product of Christendom. It hails to a day when Christianity still held power in society… It is my belief therefore that missional leadership needs always to be multiple. Most missional pastors/leaders need to be bi-vocational (bi-ministerial) for their own survival. Such leaders must learn to mutually submit to the other leaders as they guide the journey of the community. They must mutually learn to mentor leaders and give away power.
A final insight from the chapter is this little gem,
This kind of leader often does not come from our (all too often) modernist seminaries. They are grown in a community which gathers to worship the Triune God so as to discern Him at work in our midst. (my thoughts on that here)
Beginning the year with this post is no coincidence. Amy and I have committed to serve alongside others from Life on the Vine to help cultivate a new missional community in 2010. There’s a lot more questions than answers at this point, but we’re excited to see what God might do as we make ourselves available.
While I am sure to offer tid bits on this process on the blog from time to time, if you would like to get the inside scoop on a regular basis as someone who would commit to be praying for us, leave a comment or let us know through the contact page. Peace to you in the New Year and thanks for your prayers & support.
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Hey, I'm JR - welcome to the blog.
I'm just an average guy trying to shape his identity around God's dream for the world and his place in it. This blog is a place for me (and you!) to reflect on and discuss all that might mean. Looking for a bit more on me? Check out the about me. Peace.
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