how the 'emerging church' needs to emerge

I’m assuming, if you’re reading this, that you’re kind of a church nerd (like me) and have some familiarity with what I mean by “the emerging church.” If not, this description is as good as any:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_church

I would say I’m an outsider to the emerging “movement” but an insider in the “conversation.” These comments come not from a place of opposition but from my desire to see the movement continue so that it might help enrich and reform all expressions of the church in North America. I make hard critiques assuming that if Achilles could have been humbled, he might’ve thought to protect his heels.

11)      The emerging movement needs to stop defining itself as anti-institutional.

Institutions aren’t bad. Bad institutions are bad. So long as humans want to continue gathering with any level of organization (that is, by anything other than sheer randomness and happenstance), they’re going to form institutions. There is something anti-incarnational about this attitude. It says, “I’ll go along with this so long as it defies any known way that humans have ever learned to be human together.”

22)       The emerging movement needs to become less utopian.

This is a tough one to tackle since many emergents are extremely hesitant to call their movement anything more than a “conversation”—certainly they’ll say nothing of it being missional, attractional, evangelical, let alone that it begins with any clear endgame in sight. To save space, I’ll grant the last one. However, most emerging churches I’ve come across do build their purpose and theology around the needs of their immediate context (missional), they obviously appeal to a certain limited demographic or subculture (attractional), and in some way they’re trying to share the good news of Jesus Christ (evangelical).

Beyond semantics, though, the larger issue here is that when any group (and there are certain umbrellas underneath which emergents can be considered one group) defines itself in opposition to what came before, they start to emit an unstated but palpable arrogance that tacitly says, “we finally got it right.” Emergents aren’t the first to push back with a less defined, more open-ended, Spirit driven movement when the historical church has become too propositional, too self-assured and too institutionally rigid. Jan Huss did it. Philip Jakob Spener did it. Nikolaus von Zinzendorf did it. As the more informed emergents are aware, this is also the basic spirit that birthed the writings of the great mystics like Theresa of Avila or Meister Eckhart, and ironically, it may have even been at the heart of early American revivalism (widely regarded as the predecessor to modern American Evangelicalism).

My point is that we’ve seen this movie before. The ending is always the same. Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was different in detail than Braveheart but we recognized the basic outline even before seeing it play out. It’s no different with church history. Over and over again (1) the church becomes too propositional, too self-assured, and too rigidly structured until it starts to look very much like any other hierarchical institution and very little like Jesus; (2) some honest disciples yearn for more and break off, in the process holding a mirror up to the parent institution (which, itself, begins to reform even after the discontented have left); but (3) over time, the trailblazers themselves who broke off, become too propositional, too self-assured, and too rigidly structured. They do this for the simple reason that they’re human, and that’s what humans do. Eugene Peterson nails it when he says, “In two thousand years of practice we haven’t gotten any better. You would think we would have, but we haven’t.”[1]

I’m thankful that this cycle continues. I’m thankful that there are groups who continue to yearn for a better church, and we’re all enriched when they act on this yearning. But if you’re an emergent, just acknowledge this larger history here, be humbled by it, chastened by it, and your movement will be better for it.

33)      The emerging movement needs always to recognize the beam in its own eye.

You’re seeing by now that these are all very nearly the same critique. To be sure, many emergent thinkers are sharp enough and careful enough to acknowledge the hidden irony in their own critiques of Mainline and conservative expressions of the church. If ever they aren’t, the results are tragic, because like any of us, they’re always one self-righteous remark away from becoming what they hate. Don’t become hypocritical when you point out the establishment’s hypocrisy. Don’t be triumphalistic about the fact that you’re not triumphalistic. Don’t become dogmatic about your avoidance of all dogma. That’s all.

44)       The emerging movement’s thinkers should spend at least as much (and probably more) time responding theologically to mainstream and more centrist Christians as they do to fundamentalists.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I love Peter Rollins. Seriously. So far unreciprocated, but I love Peter Rollins. Nonetheless, I’m guessing his words on the otherness or absolute subjectivity of God are little different in content (if, marketed better) than so many dissertations of  Karl Barth scholars sitting in dusty library storage rooms across the western world. Did I mention that I love Peter Rollins? But his words on doubt being a vital part of faith and discipleship say little that Douglas John Hall hasn’t been saying for forty years. My point is not that what they’ve said isn’t worth repeating. I just don’t see evidence, most of the time, that emergents are aware that some hoary old scholar buried away in some third story office of a mainstream seminary has been, for decades, saying the same “inflammatory” things that they are now saying. It just never caused quite the same stir before because those scholars didn’t think to market themselves to recovering fundamentalists. My suggestion for emergent thinkers: pay attention to what’s going on in mainstream academia. By all means, continue making these ideas accessible to people who otherwise would never encounter them. But don’t stop at the low-hanging fruit of mocking fundamentalism. Poke some holes in my own mainstream worldview so that I too can be enriched by your observations.

That’s all.

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[1] Peterson, Eugene. Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992)

the radical discipleship of little old church ladies...

I’m definitely not alone on this. The moment my faith first mattered to me was the moment I discovered that Jesus was not, in fact, the lame white guy, smiling meekly in the halls of my childhood congregation. Just the opposite, actually—Jesus was a badass.

For all of us little boys (and quite a few girls) formed in the sanitized surroundings of suburbia, whose need for danger, and adventure, and purpose was lived out vicariously through Indiana Jones in childhood, James Bond in adolescence, and Che Guevara in college, the discovery of badass Jesus is very nearly the difference between life and death.

We want to ride the wave of that initial discovery, whatever the cost. We go running off into inner cities and far off countries fearful that we might lose it.

This is really valuable formation time for us. I wouldn’t trade this part of my story for anything. At some level, I hope it continues for the rest of my life. But at some point we need to integrate our image of badass Jesus into the life we’re actually living, not the life we fantasize about living in our highest ideals. Hardly willing to confess the reality of our middle class lives, we risk becoming caricatures of disciples. Still benefitting from middle class upbringings and middle class educations and middle class incomes, our hypocrisy becomes every bit as entrenched as that of the pseudo-Christianity we rebelled against, our devotion to Jesus every bit as vicarious as our devotion to Bond.   

At the height of my reforming zeal, it was very clear to me that what the church needed was a good clearance sale, everything must go. The church was in disrepair and I was going to repair it, dammit. Terms like “Constantinian” and “Churchianity” and “American civil religion” became a part of my everyday lexicon. The church of yesterday had sold out, far too many accommodations to the culture.

I had become what the ancients referred to as “a jerk.”

Sure, I would have cluttered it up with some snotty verbiage about the “thin tradition” and the “saints in every age,” but the simple version of my simplistic worldview was still that church of yesteryear had gotten it wrong and I was going to get it right. The problem was nearly as clear to me as a Colorado spring. Nearly. There was just one pervasive fact of church life that kept clouding it up. Little old church ladies.

It seems that every moment I’d finally settled into the black and whiteness of this narrative—out with the old, in with the new, new wine needs new wineskins, and so on—I’d turn around and there’d be some old church lady knitting a quilt for the poor, praying with the sick, bringing a warm meal to the grieving.

As I made my way through seminary, I’d gradually find bigger and bigger stages on which to talk. Man, I loved to talk. I was good at talking. I’d talk about everything I was going to do to lead a more Christ-like church into a new age. People loved my words. I loved their accolades. Meanwhile, some old church lady would be washing dishes in the basement or setting up some floral arrangement in the Narthex for someone who had died.

At this time, I’m quite certain that I would have explained to Jesus how “service needs to be the ‘calling card’ of the ‘cruciform church’” just as he was bending down to wash my feet.  

So here’s what I predict: I’ll continue to talk, and emergent church leaders will continue to talk, and mainstream church leaders will continue to talk, and conservative church leaders will continue to talk, and in each of their basements some little old church ladies will continue to get shit done for the kingdom of God.

If the church is going to become more Christ-like, it won’t be because of Guevara-wannabe hotheads like myself who are ready to take a can of gasoline and a match to two thousand years of church history. If the church is going to change, it will be because of love. The kind of patient, unpretentious love that little old church ladies have been trying to teach us since Easter morning.