There’s a lot of clamoring lately about the terminology surrounding the emerging church movement, the labels that people use to explain some things that are happening in Christianity, and determining who fits under various umbrella terms.
I don’t think it’s a silly conversation. I feel strongly that words matter, and that, as context determines meaning, we need to constantly revisit language to determine if we’re using our words to paint the most truth-telling pictures as possible.
Incredibly respectable church leaders are chiming into the conversation. Over the past month I’ve digested the viewpoints of Tony Jones, Bob Hyatt, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Andrew Jones, Julie Clawson, and Dan Kimball on this subject. At the heart of each person’s view was a desire to make people comfortable with their association to labels – protecting people from categories with which they don’t wish to align. I find that a very pastoral concern.
I want to contribute my viewpoint here, in the cozy confines of my blog, on this conversation of terminology. I don’t have the platform or experience of those people whom I mentioned, but I approach this as someone who has engaged with the movement through plenty of personal and academic research, long before I was participating in any emergent community.
HOW I’VE USED THE TERMS
I’ve always made the distinction between Emergent (as referring to Emergent Village, the organization) and emergent (the faction of the Church that is asking new questions and is particularly engaged with the work of God in the world today). I think the casing is a fair enough distinction between Emergent and emergent, but to those who are unfamiliar with either term and its context, it does seem to be a hang-up. A lot of people end up evaluating emergent Christians on the basis of Emergent Village, their words and actions.
QUESTIONS ARE CENTRAL
In the YouTube video he created to express his view on this topic, Pagitt makes a point worth noting when he says that emergence is far greater than even emergent churches. People are asking emergent questions – new questions – in churches that are anything but emergent (just don’t tell the leadership of those churches). So not only are there emergent churches that aren’t part of the Emergent Church, there is emergence happening outside of explicitly-emergent churches.
(It’s really not that complicated, if you pay any attention to the terms whatsoever. The problem has been that people don’t pay attention to the terms, yet feel confident enough in their assessment to write long-winded articles and books critiquing the movement. Windbags, I say.)
Questions are at the heart of the change that is taking place, I believe. And while a lot of churches have acted on those questions with ecclesiological change – forming ‘missional’ communities and changing the feel and locale of the congregation – a change in method is far different than a change in message.
GUESS WHAT NEW QUESTIONS LEAD TO
A change in method does not address the shortcomings of Christian theology in its various strands. A change in method does little to appease the person who attends church and sits through the sermon and says, “I believe in Jesus but not in much of what this guy up front is trying to sell me.” Nor does a change in method address the non-Christians who are aware that Christians don’t possess the answers to which they claim.
There is a fundamental difference between dressing the message differently and admitting that we’ve screwed up the message. One type of change requires hip, culturally-savvy pastors who can set the right mood and generally make good decisions, while the other type of change requires a group of people to listen to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit’s voice transcends their own assumptions.
That’s not to say that our message is altogether wrong. The typical reaction to emergent-type questions isn’t to deny the lordship of Jesus. If anything, people are flocking to Jesus and abandoning all of the peripheral fluff. We’re not talking about a denial of Christ’s teaching, or a line of thinking that detracts from the importance of his incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
We are, however, suggesting that we revisit the assumptions and conclusions of past Christ-followers, even those who are most revered in our denominational traditions. Doing so is not a criticism of these persons’ love for Christ; it is simply an acknowledgement that we have more information available to us now than in the fourth and sixteenth centuries, and we’re suspicious of their conclusions.
Again, that’s so radically different than being suspicious of Christ’s teaching. It’s an acknowledgement that Christ was and is Emmanuel, “Christ with us,” and ever since his birth people have been commenting on him. That’s what it is – commentary. Commentary is never a closed canon. Commentary is perspective.
Just as the Reformers used an increased availability in information to approach assumptions of their contemporary church, so too are emergent Christians revisiting the assumptions of Christians past and present. That doesn’t make emergents liberal. It makes them serious.
CHICKEN OR THE EGG
Also, I think it’s important to say that the Electronic Age itself is not the cause for change in the Church. It’s the excuse. Let me explain.
I believe that questions on the table now, ideas that are changing, are not necessarily things that God’s Spirit is all of a sudden interested in calling to our attention. No. No. No! They are things that the Spirit has been screaming at us, but we’ve been too disinterested or unwilling to heed. Sometimes it takes a major shift in greater culture – where the entire world revisits information – to finally get Christians to come back to the table of their theology. This is not an issue of God being on the leash of greater culture, only transforming the Church when shifts in technology and information occur. It’s an issue of a usually ignorant Church – or a small minority of it – being awoken by cultural change enough so that they finally listen to a God who still speaks.
AN EXAMPLE IN RE-APPROACH
To share my opinion further, let me say that I believe that some of the things God wanted to do through the Reformers happened, while others didn’t. If Luther and the Reformers would have obeyed and applied every last idea of which the Spirit was convicting them, Christian theology would not have continued down its Holocaust-bound path. I am believing more and more these days that the Spirit was trying to explain to the Reformers their place in the olive tree and their relationship to Judaism, and, for the most part, they missed it.
Can I prove this beyond the shadow of a doubt? Nope. But I think that Luther’s documented teetering opinion toward Judaism indicates that this was something with which he was wrestling. (I think that one of things which stalled his theology was a false assumption, based on false information, regarding first-century Judaism and the role of grace within Jewish sects.) The conclusions of his head were in the way of the Spirit’s conviction of his heart. (Again, just my opinion.)
Is this a criticism of Luther as a person or a Christian? Not really. (I think Luther had a lot of things to say regarding the priesthood of believers, the reality of spiritual warfare, etc.) It’s a caution to us, Christians who have woken from slumber, that we can prevent a future Holocaust. We can find our identity in the olive tree, to learn what it means to be adopted and grafted in (rather than being the replacement, the one and only). How much does God have to teach our heads before we’ll listen with our hearts? How obvious does the Spirit need to make it that we’ve lost our way – and began to do so at the very moment when we pushed away our heritage, our identity, our story, our spiritual parents? Who has ears to hear?
LIBERAL… OR PROPHETIC
When I talk about a change in message, I am talking about issues like this. I’m accusing some of what is considered conventional Christian teaching of being false teaching based on false assumptions. I’m claiming that God is willing to revive the Church, but Christians will have to release their renditions of the gospel, in some components, for the Spirit to bring correction.
I don’t know that what I’m saying is “liberal,” but it is radical. It is a dangerous undertaking, stocked with potential mistakes. Reconsidering theology opens the door for a lot of erroneous ideas. But keeping the door slammed shut leaves its share of heresy on the inside. What I’m talking about is so much bigger and more important than making church “relevant.” It’s much more prophetic than that.
What I’m talking about is a group of people who are asking new questions – enough questions to get them on their knees – and a Spirit of God who says, “Finally, you’ll listen.”
THINKING CATEGORICALLY (TO SOME EXTENT)
A lot of people can nod their heads and get excited about abandoning the fluff, but what they have in mind as they nod in agreement are the mega-church buildings and the pastor who looks like a Men’s Warehouse commercial. They’re ready to take to the streets with the “orthodox” message in an “organic” model.
For this reason, I think it’s best to differentiate between ‘missional’ ministries and those which are emergent. I don’t think that taking poor theology and making it into a social gospel is going to help very much. Yes, there are some homeless folks who will get some good meals out of it, but a social gospel has existed before and will exist again, regardless of whether we improve our theology.
But in the bigger picture – the tremendous scale of identity and destiny – being missional cures very little of what I’d like to see cured. If some people don’t see the sickness, I don’t expect them to respect my insistence on finding a cure. Let them be as missional as they wish to be, with whatever rendition of theology they possess. Evangelical, Mainline, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic – I don’t care. Knock your socks off. I’ll even help you in your missional action. You’re working as Christ’s hands and feet, and that’s great.
MY PRIMARY CONCERN WITH A CHANGE IN TERMS
I’m going to be pretty blunt about this – not to come across as a jerk, but because the language in which my mind has processed this thought is, well, blunt.
As more and more people move away from “emergent” as an umbrella term, they’ll crawl beneath other terms (that’s inevitable) and find their own identity (possibly strict, in the form of a particular creed or statement of faith, or maybe characteristics will slowly be attributed to them, as has been the case with emergent Christians).
My fear for them is that they’ll succumb to cowardice and greed. I’m concerned that they’ll create watered-down versions (in the form of networks and churches) of what emergent Christianity has been about – moderating and making safe all of the risks of the emerging movement.
I’m concerned that this will happen as an accommodation to others, the colleges and seminaries that pay them, the denominations that financially equip their churches, or friends and colleagues that have never felt the prophetic stirring which they’ve experienced.
I cringe at the idea that a move away from the “emergent” term is a step away from risk, a mindset which says, “In case these people end up with egg on their faces, I won’t be tossed under the bus. But if the movement picks up steam, I can come back into the fold.”
It’s worrying that security, money, influence, and power – all of the usual offenders – might keep someone from identifying with the emerging movement, in all its diversity, through the upcoming storms and shifts. (They certainly wouldn’t be the first Christians to forsake high pneumatology for the attractive benefits of adhering to an existing ecclesiastic power.)
Just as I perceive the Reformers to have missed out on some of the best of what God had for them, I worry that Christians who are waking up today will fall asleep all over again, never accomplishing the Kingdom-building actions (and thoughts, which lead to actions!) of which the Spirit is currently convicting them.
My faith isn’t in my own obedience, or the obedience of other Christians. Instead it is placed in a God who is working all things together for good. But obedience matters; it makes “good” happen sooner than later; it makes us the agents of “good.”
Obedience and kairos work together in dynamic tension.
CONCERN IS MET WITH HOPE
I don’t want to give the impression that any move away from the term “emergent” or “emerging” is an initiative that is doomed before it even begins. Even a cynic like me has to balance concern with hope and optimism. After all, we’re resurrection people. Let’s make room for hope.
If creating networks and churches under different umbrella terms helps people to continue to ask good questions, multiplicity in terms could lead to different groups which capture equally-real facets and depictions of the work of God here today. Maybe people who would have never been impacted by Emergent will be shaped by a new network.
It’s possible that new networks will maintain their conviction to change in method and message alike, and will never cave in to the enticement of selling prophetic vision for personal comfort.
Maybe in fifty years, the Church will be comprised of diverse, flexible networks and not competing denominations. Each network will be about seeking truth rather than defending it. Maybe the Spirit will say, “This is great; I still have their attention.”
