Are We an Emergent Church

I tend to use Donnel’s blog as a launch pad for a variety of blogs I read (I guess I’m too lazy to update my list), so when I saw a new listing, ServantBlog, I checked it out. Andy and Kate White seem like great people, and I’ll continue to read their blog, but more to the point, they listed Brian McLaren’s blog, which launched me into several hours of reading about the emergent church movement.

I first heard of Brian McLaren last summer when I read his book The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian. It was a very enjoyable read. While it challenged many of my “modern” evangelical presuppositions, it also spoke to a long smoldering ember in my heart to live my life as a Christian in a more dynamic holistic way. I should also point out that it blended well with all that has been happening at the Vineyard, which now leads me to wonder to what extent the A2 Vineyard could be classified as part of the “emergent church” movement…at least unofficially.

Here are some excerpts from a November 2004 Christianity Today article, The Emergent Mystique, on the Emergent Church movement, including a summary of McLaren’s first book. My comments are italicized and [bracketed]:

"'This is not just the same old message with new methods,' Rob [Bell, pastor of a 10,000 member “emergent church” in Grand Rapids] says. 'We're rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion, as a way of life. Legal metaphors for faith don't deliver a way of life. We grew up in churches where people knew the nine verses why we don't speak in tongues, but had never experienced the overwhelming presence of God.'

In fact, as the Bells describe it, after launching Mars Hill in 1999, they found themselves increasingly uncomfortable with church. 'Life in the church had become so small,' Kristen says. 'It had worked for me for a long time. Then it stopped working.' The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself—'discovering the Bible as a human product,' as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. 'The Bible is still in the center for us,' Rob says, 'but it's a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it.'

'I grew up thinking that we've figured out the Bible,' Kristen says, 'that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again—like life used to be black and white, and now it's in color.'"

The emphasis on the mystery of wonder reminds me of what we learned from Phyllis Tickle last weekend and I can definitely relate to the Bell’s realization that they didn’t really understand the Bible after all.
…….

A New Kind of Christian became influential not just because of its content but also its form. McLaren cast the book as a story of two friends, a disillusioned evangelical pastor named Dan Poole and an enigmatic high school science teacher nicknamed Neo. On the brink of despair with his own ministry, Dan is led by Neo—who turns out to be a lapsed pastor himself—through a series of set pieces that introduce the initially skeptical Dan to a "postmodern" approach to Christianity.

The modern period of history, as Neo tells it, is coming to an end. We are entering "postmodernity," an as-yet ill-defined borderland in which central modern values like objectivity, analysis, and control will become less compelling. They are superseded by postmodern values like mystery and wonder. The controversial implication is that forms of Christianity that have thrived in modernity—including Dan's evangelicalism—are unlikely to survive the transition.

[which is exactly the kind of discussions we’ve been having in our Questers discussion of NT Wright’s works

…. recently McLaren has started to sketch the outlines of his vision of a postmodern church. He sketches a big circle labeled "self," a smaller circle next to it labeled "church," and a tiny circle off to the side labeled "world."

"This has been evangelicalism's model," he says. "Fundamentally it's about getting yourself 'saved'—in old-style evangelicalism—or improving your life in the new style. Either way, the Christian life is really about you and your needs. Once your needs are met, then we think about how you can serve the church. And then, if there's anything left over, we ask how the church might serve the world."

He starts drawing again. "But what if it went the other way? This big circle is the world—the world God loved so much that he sent his Son. Inside that circle is another one, the church, God's people chosen to demonstrate his love to the world. And inside that is a small circle, which is your self. It's not about the church meeting your needs, it's about you joining the mission of God's people to meet the world's needs."

With his circle diagrams, McLaren is popularizing the work of the late British missionary Lesslie Newbigin, who returned from a lifetime in India to spend his last years reflecting on the need for a new theology of mission. "According to Newbigin, the greatest heresy in monotheism is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of election," McLaren says. "Election is not about who gets to go to heaven; election is about who God chooses to be part of his crisis-response team to bring healing to the world."

[YES!!!]
…….

If critics overlook the evangelistic energy of the emerging church, they also often lump together two very different kinds of postmodern thought. The most notorious postmodern thinkers have been the "deconstructionists"—French intellectuals like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who seek to show that the cherished ideals of Western society (and Christian faith) are fatally compromised by internal contradictions.

But another stream, less well-known outside universities and seminaries, has taken dissatisfaction with modernity in a more constructive direction. It is these thinkers—the late philosopher Michael Polanyi and Notre Dame professor Alasdair MacIntyre, along with theologians like Newbigin—who are gaining the attention of the emerging church's more theologically inclined leaders.

From Newbigin, McLaren has drawn the idea of the church as "missional"—oriented toward the needs of the world rather than oriented towards its own preservation. From Polanyi and MacIntyre, he concludes that the emerging church must be "monastic"—centered on training disciples who practice, rather than just believe, the faith.

He cites Dallas Willard and Richard Foster, with their emphasis on spiritual disciplines, as key mentors for the emerging church. None of these thinkers has any inclination to throw out the baby of truth with the bathwater of modernity.
.....[end of CT article excerpts]

If you substitute (or add) NT Wright for Willard and Foster, you get something a lot like Ken’s emphasis on outreach (missional), contemplative prayer (monastic) and re-examining what the bible really means through rediscovering the historical context (from Wright). Maybe we are part of the Emergent “conversation”, as McLaren calls it (since it doesn’t rank as a movement yet in his mind).

If you’re up for more reading, here a triad of interesting and related articles. The first is a critique by Chuck Colson of the postmodern movement. The second is an open letter from Brian McLaren responding to the article and the third is Colson’s response to McLaren. I’ve excerpted them, albeit clumsily, if you don’t have time to read them in toto.

1) The Postmodern Crackup - Christianity Today Magazine: "Is postmodernism—the philosophy that claims there is no transcendent truth—on life support? It may be premature to sign the death certificate, but there are signs postmodernism is losing strength……It would be the supreme irony—and a terrible tragedy—if we found ourselves slipping into postmodernity just when the broader culture has figured out it's a dead end."

2) Brian McLaren: An Open Letter to Chuck Colson….I can agree with you that the “no transcendent truth” kind of postmodernism is dead, because as I said, it never was very alive. At most, it was an early, reactionary phase in a yet-embryonic movement that has much more mature, constructive, and positive voices emerging.…You feel that postmoderns have developed a self-contradictory message (THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH: there are no absolute truths!). This absurdity might allow them to do anything they want in the name of no absolutes (which to you means “no morality”).…. This is a good thing, and I applaud you for it, and I share your concern!….But try to understand this parallel reality: In the late 20th century, postmodern thinkers looked back at regimes like Stalin’s and Hitler’s…Postmodern thinkers realized that these megalomaniacs used grand systems of belief to justify their atrocities. Those systems of belief – which the postmodern thinkers called “metanarratives,” but which also could have been called “world views” or “ideologies” – were so powerful they could transform good European intellectuals into killers or accomplices. They thought back over European history and realized (as C. S. Lewis did) that those who have passionate commitment to a system of belief will be most willing, not only to die for it, but to kill for it…. I’m tempted to point out the irony that some Christians like yourself seem to be more deeply entrenching themselves in “modernity just when the broader culture has figured out it’s a dead end.”

3) Chuck Colson's Response…. Immanuel Kant spent his life thinking about whether truth is knowable and how you can know it. The issue is clear: are the answers to life found by a thinker sitting in a Dutch oven and exclaiming after much reflection, cogito ergo sum, which in some ways led to the rise of a humanist view of the world, unintended though it was? Or is the meaning of life found in Revelation (which I believe is aided by reason)? This is a very fundamental question…..To put it in the most shorthand way, relativism and deconstruction and existentialism have to lead to the loss of any transcendent authority. Whenever a society lacks transcendent authority, it is going to be governed by whoever can obtain power – and there will be no restraints upon that person or party. The process is almost inevitable….If postmodernism succeeds in destroying transcendent authority, the inevitable consequences are anarchy and nihilism. But nihilism is a vacuum and all vacuums must be filled; so without the restraint of a higher law a tyrant can always be depended upon to step in to fill the power vacuum; and people always choose order over liberty…. If you stop looking for truth and you stop debating primary questions, that is, the fundamental issues people deal with in life, then whoever occupies the seat of power makes those decisions for us. The utopians may think this is a good thing. They believe the victors (their choice) will be more enlightened and benign than the white oppressors who wrote history and of course were only expressing their view of life, which they imposed upon culture. The utopian myth, which for generations has been the principal enemy of liberty, is based on false premises as Christians who are aware of the Fall know...Of course, the postmoderns are right in saying that looking over European history, those who have “a passionate commitment to a system of belief will be most willing not only to die for it but to kill for it.” But is it wrong to die for a noble cause—or to kill in a just war, restraining evil? The Greeks recognized courage as one of the four cardinal virtues – courage to defend justice. Where would we be if people did not have a wholehearted commitment to a system of belief like democracy, freedom, and liberty? We’d still be living under monarchs...What this tells me is that people are still asking the same questions the Greeks asked. They’re still looking for ultimate meaning, still looking for first principles. They’re still plagued by the questions that exist within us because the Imago Dei is within us. The problem is that you are not going to find that answer in the art world. I think we really have a much better answer if we have the opportunity to explain this to her. And that, dear brother, is what my column was all about.