I like Andrew Jones. He's a missionary who's been around for ages, and probably has the most complete history of the emerging church movement (blogged, not in a book).
I'd like to draw a few quotes from him, firstly from Emerging Church Movement (1989 - 2009)?:
"In my opinion, 2009 marks the year when the emerging church suddenly and decisively ceased to be a radical and controversial movement in global Christianity. In many places around the world, the movement has already been either adopted, adapted, or made redundant through the traditional church catching up or duplicating EC efforts."
"In 2009, the emerging church either grew up, stopped being offensive, switched gear from experimental to normal, became the new mainstream, or a bit of each."
Andrew fleshes it out a bit more in his 10 types of emerging church that will no longer upset your grandfather, which he lists as:
- Culture-based communities
- GenX, Postmodern, and "Emergent"
- The new-monastic orders and intentional communities, as well as Celtic churches
- House churches, simple churches, organic churches
- Cyberchurch and virtual online communities
- Alternative worship/fresh expression/new-liturgical churches
- Pub churches and coffee shop churches
- The contemplative prayer movement
- Christians who dont go to church, sometimes called "Churchless" Christians" or "believers who don't belong"
- Social enterprises leading to missional communities
Andrew is wondering what the contribution of the emerging church is now, or if its contribution has already been made (by affecting the mainstream) and that now there isn't a necessity for its existence.
I've always thought that the value of the emerging church conversation is because it operates at a higher/more abstract/more general level than theology/church/practice. The conversation (at its best) is about how we have a conversation with others who are different to us, about how we hold our faith, about how we approach our theology, and about how the bigger stories which we live within shape us and our faith.
I'm glad the conversation has helped contribute to new forms of church, but the conversation isn't done.
Technorati Tags: Emerging Church
Roger Saner's blog: Journey
Graeme Codrington: Regeneration
Influencing the mainstream
I remember Graham Codrington saying some time ago (perhaps at the conversation we had with Tony Jones in Melville) that as the Charismatic movement shifted worship (and perhaps some other things) in the mainstream church so the emerging church would shift the mainstream church in some significant way but that by and large the mainstream church would march on and perhaps some smaller emerging church groups would remain. Andrew Jones seems to confirm this some years later.
I like that idea. I've never been quite as drawn to the more abstract side of the conversation but can imagine that there is still a place for it. A significant question for me is our response to #9. More and more I see people leaving the church but still deeply desiring to follow Jesus. Even alternative emerging type churches don't seem to create a sense of belonging for them. I wonder what this means and what might emerge from it.
More and more I see people leaving the church
I'd like to think that they as I did, are not leaving the church as much as they are freeing themselves from religion!
Interesting comment, Roy. Now
Interesting comment, Roy. Now that you're free from religion, what have you moved towards?
Free from Religion
I am moving toward a deeper understanding of the Kingdom and also much more spiritual authority! I feel that by and large the Institutionalized Church is bound by a "Catholic' Spirit it suppresses the search for understanding and insists on controlling people, to name two symptoms.
Stray expectations
It was Richard John Neuhaus who said something to the effect that "the Church is daily being left by many people who are disappointed that they have not reveived there what they had no right to expect in the first place"
That's probably true, Willem
That's probably true, Willem - but that's not been my experience, anyway. I expected to find the church to be grappling with theology and life in the wake of post-Apartheid South Africa. I expected to find white people working through their whiteness and their white privilege. I expected to find mass repentance over decades of oppression, and decades of silence which let that oppression continue. What I found was a spiritualised understanding of reality which was so first-person specific, it perpetuated the very thinking that got us into Apartheid (and did nothing to critique it) in the first place.
Why should I continue going to an institution that ensures that my relationship with God is fine, while that institution doesn't even realise it was part of a (very evil) problem in the past, and so does nothing to correct? That incongruity (particularly in the Baptist churches I've been a part of) disturbs me to my very core. Where are the others who are disturbed by it? Where are the pastors who are disturbed by it? Or are we still training people who excel at expositing Biblical Greek, and who don't know why cultural genocide perpetuated by missionaries is a problem?
Truly sorry
Roger,
I do not really know where to start to reply to these comments. They strike me as somewhat emotionally charged blanket accusations, already met (with justice, in many respects) with guilty verdict and sentence. They leave hardly any room for anything except further pleas for forgiveness which I forward with true remorse and contrition. More I cannot do. From here on I wish for little more than walking the way of grace with all my fellow sinners of all races who have their hands in their own bossom and who are together letting God work, by his love and grace, at the planks in their own eyes. I am quite happy with that as long as I know that the basis on which I am assured that my relationship with God is fine is the basis provided by the God who saves sinners Himself.
Kindest regards,
Willem
I wasn't aiming anything
I wasn't aiming anything specific at you personally, Willem. I was responding to your quote from Richard John Neuhaus. It seemed to me that you were responding to number 9 on the list of 10 new kinds of churches, "Christians who don't go to church" - and that your point was that people had left those churches because they were expecting to receive something they had no right expect in the first place.
I was making the point that in so many cases people leave the church because they didn't find what they had every right to find there. What's the point of a church which doesn't provide that which it should? What's the use of a church which points people towards a personal relationship with Jesus, and simultaneously participates in oppression because its own privilege is invisible to it (and goes unchallenged)?
This is John Caputo's very point in "What would Jesus deconstruct?" The answer to that question: the church.
So damn right it's an emotional response from me! The day it stops being an emotional response is the day that I've stopped caring about why the church should be better than it is, why it should be engaging issues larger than personal salvation.
You write:
"I am quite happy with that as long as I know that the basis on which I am assured that my relationship with God is fine is the basis provided by the God who saves sinners Himself."
That's what got us into this mess in the first place, isn't it? It's kind of thinking that says, "What I care about is making sure my relationship with God is ok, that I am saved, and my salvation is secure." That's the same thinking that white South Africans Christians used during Apartheid. It's the same sort of thinking that makes it difficult to stand back and understand why we were (and often are) blind to injustice within the church, particularly when that injustice is not "out in the world" but within Christianity itself.
That said, I'm glad your relationship with God is fine. It's just not the whole story. Until we can understand how it's possible for individuals to have a reconciled relationship with God, and simultaneously participate in mass oppression without even being aware of it, we, unfortunately, have not learnt the lesson of Apartheid. And the rest of the world - atheists and non-Whites - stand back and shake their heads because of our blindness. "Ever seeing, but never comprehending."
There are many other ways of talking about and describing what I'm seeing here. One is the multiplicity of perspectives model (I will post on this shortly). Another is Ken Wilbur's Integral Model. Another is Spiral Dynamics. Each of these models has given me tools to interrogate our (and my own) blindness, and to understand how it's possible for Christians who read their Bibles every day to simply ignore God's preferential option for the poor, or the calls to justice all over Scripture. I'd love to continue a conversation with you about what some of these tools give us, particularly because you're in a place where you're training the leaders of the Baptist church.
The way you responded above told me that you may well have felt attacked by what I said. That's not my intention. My own journey has been about exactly what you said, "becoming aware of the planks in my own eye", and I'm far past pointing fingers at individuals (and I don't know you well enough to point fingers at you anyway!). This isn't an individual problem, it's social and it's systemic. I've been discovering tools that let me play in those areas, and I have so much to learn. Join me! :)
Hi Roger, Thank you for
Hi Roger,
Thank you for taking the trouble to reply so promptly and so extensively.
No, I did not sense a personal attack at all. Although we have not met personally, I am quite convinced, judging from the way in which you communicate, that you are not into attacking people personally. Besides, sometimes I can do with some attack on some of the affirmations and attitudes allow myself to adopt and I truly would rather have it come from you than from some of the brothers I do know.
I would like to show you respect with a more detailed and engaging response to the points you raise. Let me just say, for now, that I do believe that everything starts with assurance of personal salvation in Christ. But if that assurance is not lived out in challenged consciences and changed characters and conduct, its basis is probably false.
This, I acknowledge is indeed a problem more widespread in Evangelical churches (including Baptist ones) that is more widespread than we as leaders have the courage to probe. For this reason I welcome the challlenges you issue.
When I quoted Neuhaus I did not wish to imply that people leave churches only for wrong reasons. But I do believe, even in cases where churches and their leadership are not even close to what Christ has called them as saved sinners to be, we must be careful, when we see their failures and lacks, to not so self-righteously up and go at such regular intervals. This, I believe, does more harm than good. I often remind my family, my congregation and my students that we are seldom more de(con?)structive than when it dawns on us that we are RIGHT and everyone else is wrong. This is not to say that we must not act on conviction when we do see what is wrong. I do see the challenges that face us in Baptist churches. I do see, for instance, the lack of a preferential option for the poor (Sr. Susan Racokzy and three years of Catholic studies made sure of that! It is thanks to her that I have just prescribed to my pastoral care students a portion of good old Gutierrez).
At the same time, I really do love the people in common old garden variety conservative evangelical churches. I love them AS THEY ARE. I opt to stick with them, love with them, grapple with them, grow with them, cry with them, laugh with them and often fail with them until Christ gives us the victory. Christ died for their sins too- sins of commission as well as of ommission. And then, I also see their virtues...and their are many. They do make a contribution- a greater one than many care to see or acknowledge- to authentic Christian spirituality in this world. I just get a little restless when I see all their plenty dirty washing getting piled on top of the grace of Christ in their lives all the time.
On the other side of this coin I see the risk of hagiography rather than biography when we hold up in the faces of Western Evangelicals faces the heroes and celebrities from other ways of being the church in this world.
Enjoying your company as always,
Willem
Thanks, Willem. These issues
Thanks, Willem. These issues are complex because they involve people, and there are no simple "one size fits all" solutions. I know I could do with more of an acceptance of people as they are, for God accepts me as I am - thank you for the reminder.
My hope is that people leaving the church do not do so lightly, and they do so as a conviction from God, rather than a reaction against something they don't like, or because it's just the easier option. After all, we are called to relationship with each other, and with those we don't like (and who don't like us).
I'm increasingly being challenged, in my post-church state, as to what kind of community I should be a part of and can belong to.
Grace to you on your journey :)
Grace to you too, Roger
Grace to you too, Roger