Emerging Is A Noun?

When I read Brian McLaren's book, "A New Kind of Christian", my response was,

Ho Hum...(sigh)...

From my perspective, there was nothing particularly shocking in the book. Oh...I'm certain that I disagreed with this or that, but overall I had been thinking along these lines for some time. I had been at the world's largest Baptist university and watched as these good-hearted Christians attempted to evangelize the Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists (and even Catholics) and I had seen how ineffective - and sadly offensive - their efforts were.

Let me say again - these were good, kind, well-intentioned Christians - they wanted to do good, but their actions had (I believe) extremely negative effects.

Which isn't to say that they were completely ineffective - just mostly ineffective.

So, all that to say McLaren didn't shake my world. So I effectively forgot him and his book and went on living, until...

The Emergent Church

I began to hear about this movement called Emergent. I should correct - I originally heard people speaking of the Church as emerging - a verb. In otherwords, the Church was recognizing that it was not speaking to (what may generically be referred to as) the "post-modern culture."

So, yeah, the Church who is called to be salt and light should have something to say to the culture, and what the Church says should be relevant. In otherwords, the culture is asking certain questions - we should be able to answer their questions. And it has seemed to me (and McLaren and others) that the Church was tending to sadly miss the real heart of the questions asked.

For example, the post-modern culture says "How can people (who are so full of mistakes) know truth?"

The Church's response (in general) has been something like, "You can know the truth by reading the Bible" or listening to the pastor or whatever.

This is absolutely NOT the answer to the question the post-modern culture is asking.

They are observing the general state of "screwed-up-ness" found in humanity and saying how is it possible for these messed up folks to understand what is true? There question is about human ability. To read the Bible still involves human ability - so that answer is, at best, only partial.

So this is how I originally heard the word "emerging." However, in the last six months or so, I've discovered that "emerging" has emerged from verb to noun - and Proper Noun at that: Emergent Church.

So We Began a Book Club...

We began a bookclub at the coffeshop I frequent. The members of the bookclub (it's not closed, so come if you want!) includes a retired missionary, a retired professor at Reformed Bible College, a pastor of a church plant meeting in a movie theatre, a minister of education in a local United Church of Christ...and your humble servant. The book that got picked (against my protests) was "Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church" by D.A. Carson.

Today was our first meeting.

Here are two things I wished I had said (because I don't believe they were understood clearly.)

1) "Post-modern" and "Emergent" are not interchangeable words. This is not to say they haven't been used this way, this is to say they should not be used this way, because there is a difference.

Post-modern is the descriptive of a segment of the culture. It is descriptive a movement within our culture. It has been assumed that this movement will eventually replace the current culture. What exactly the movement consist of - and how one would describe it - is currently unavailable in any authoritative statement (ha!) because it is still in the process of becoming. Currently, it seems to only be reacting against "modernity." An example would be that post-modern people are reacting against science as authoritative - thus many post-moderns are very open to spirituality because they are not concerned with the problem of the scientific provability (or not) of God.

Emergent is the name of the Church within the post-modern culture. Emergent attempts to be relevant to the post-modern culture. So, in our example above, Emergent would tend to agree with the post-modern culture and say that science cannot prove God - and in fact, we cannot prove God at all. However, they would say, the inability to prove God does not negate God. And then they would go on to talk about experiencing God, joining the story, taking a journey, etc.

The point being, Emergent is the name of the Church (a segment of it anyway) in the post-modern culture, but it is not the same as the post-modern culture.

2) There are - I believe - two main thrusts of the Emergent Church. The first being essentially what I stated above. Emergent is determined to learn how to speak to the post-modern culture.

The second thrust, though, is reformation. Emergent is saying to the "modern" church, "You have blind spots. You have missed the point." This, I believe, is where there are going to be some sore spots.

In fact, there may already be sore spots.

More discussions to follow on Emergent and on Mr. Carson's book.

posted by Headless-in-GR @ 7/26/2005 11:30:00 AM