Recently I received a letter with a rather withering criticism of CRM for being “sympathetic” to the emerging church movement. I think portions of my response are worth posting here so there is no misunderstanding as to our perspective on this movement.

Regarding the “emerging church” and CRM’s relationship to this renewal movement, I believe it is important to understand that this movement is not monolithic. It is very diverse. It should also not be confused with “Emergent” which is a specific organization here in the U.S. but which does not, however, represent the totality of “emerging churches” by any means.

The emerging church movement as a whole reflects a variety of theological perspectives, some of which I would agree with and some that would give me pause. But overall, I personally believe this is a movement of God which stands squarely in the flow of the great, historical renewal movements of the past 2000 years.

As in almost all renewal movements throughout the history of Christianity, it’s messy. That’s to be expected. There are always excesses,muddy thinking, and some level of deconstructionism that takes place when such change occurs. That was even true of the Protestant Reformation. I saw it myself in the Jesus Movement of the sixties and seventies in the U.S. and astute observers see many interesting similarities to today’s situation. Regardless, CRM is committed to serve the emerging church and to help in any way possible to develop and empower the leadership of this movement.

What God is undoubtedly doing is raising up, on the cultural fringes, a new generation of people who are faithfully and wholeheartedly followers of Jesus and true to the bible, but they are committed to living that faith out in an increasingly secular, postmodern world. From my experience, what I believe is most unsettling to the traditional Christian establishment is not primarily the theological nuances and questions that emanate from emerging churches, but forms and ecclesiological expressions that are outside the acceptable box. While some would attack the emerging church on theological grounds, my suspicion is the real backlash is primarily cultural. In many respects, the emerging church movement is profoundly biblical.

I recently spent several days with these skuzzy characters in Germany to get acquainted with a missional community south of Heidelberg.

What we saw and experienced is a fascinating case study of an emerging church uniquely crafted for Europe. It is led and populated by young, urban, cultural creatives.

Every generation has had men and women like this, but as Western culture staggers into the 21st century, the magnitude of this demographic is significant and growing. The future of the Christian movement in a setting such as Europe depends largely on how historic faith leans into, and is absorbed, by this cultural milieu.

• It is all about the creative arts …music, design, graphics, film, art, dance …


• Music particularly is the lingua franca. It is the poetry and vehicle of emotional expression that crosses culture and speaks to the heart. Luther may have changed the world because of the printing press. In our day, it’s the iPod.


• Media reigns. Film and video are no longer elitist but accessible to all in a flat, virtual democracy which provides unbounded outlets to creativity


• It’s a profoundly urban phenomena influenced by all the swirling complexities of “the city” in which the majority of the population in the West now live.

No generation in human history has had the leisure time or the affluence that allows for young, urban, cultural creatives to become such a sociologically dominating class. Even when such individuals were elitist and in the past lived on the margins of Western society, the effect on the culture was powerful. How much more so today when the margin is now the center and by sheer numbers dictates the direction of popular culture?

For serious followers of Jesus, the real issue has become how expressions of the imago Dei are fully integrated into the missio Dei. The future of the West hangs in the balance.

“Our ‘community/organic church’ has been working to define ourselves, our mission, and overall purpose. In the meantime, we are trying to work through some tough issues with one of the local churches that all of us have been previously associated with to one degree or another.

They approached us about a month ago requesting us to consider taking on the responsibility of starting a ‘postmodern’ church service, under their umbrella. Basically, they’re stuck and realize that they aren’t effectively reaching people under 35.

All us have close relationships with various people in the leadership of the church. However, all of us in our ‘community’ are very reluctant to fall under the umbrella of such a local church and we’ve been fairly vocal about that.

Just last night my wife and I had one of the couples in our community over and they informed us that they were given the boot from participating in one of the ministries of this church because they are no longer formally attending “CHURCH” on Sunday morning, which I interpret of as the institutional church, and what we are doing as community doesn’t count.

Earlier today I talked with one of the leaders of the church, whom I respect and admire, and tried to communicate about our attitude, paradigm, perspective, for what needs to emerge. As you might well imagine, it got pretty heated and intense. I am frustrated, pissed-off and confused about what approach to take and how to handle the situation.

I am frustrated about the refusal to accept any different expression of the church if it doesn’t fall under their umbrella or institutional definition of what “church” is. And yet I feel a certain sense of responsibility to love and serve the institutional church even though we may not fit into their box. Basically, aren’t we all on the same team? I’m not quite sure how to approach the situation.”

What is so incredibly frustrating is that such an incident is not isolated or unique. It is far too common in the ecclesiological landscape of North America today. Part of my response included:

“So sorry you are facing this type of ecclesiological narrowness. It is this type of stuff that bruises and wounds people from authentically walking with Jesus. Any wonder why people want to follow him but are fed up with “church” as we see it around us. You and the folks whom you are journeying with are in good company. There was a guy we know who got hung on a cross for not being able to conform to the status-quo.

How sad. If the leader from the existing church was worthy of your respect, he should be supportive and ask “How can we help you succeed, expand, and reach others like you?” and not feel that they have to coral you into their thing or control you by what is.

Loving those in the institutional church is not the same as getting squeezed into their mold and doing things their way and under their control. It’s like relating to dysfunctional parents and going through detox.

They don’t own the body of Christ …Jesus does. You are free, like every other new church expression throughout history, to see new wineskins develop. Such expressions will almost always be a threat to a status-quo that has stagnated. If the status-quo was healthy, they would be doing everything possible to help you and yours succeed and bless you in the process.

Being a new expression of the church that may take on creative forms relevant for the participants has always been threatening to those whose definition of “church” is not biblical but cultural. So they called you a cult? Virtually every new movement in the history of Christianity has been labeled aberrant at one time or another. Again, you’re in good company. Press on!”

“What those thinking about emergent churches grasp is that the Bible is the most exciting book in the world, and we need to present it in ways that speak today. We’re no longer the culture of the orator; we’re the culture of the artist.” – Eddie Gibbs in Theology New and Notes, Winter 2007

Gibbs is absolutely right. We live in the age of the artist. It’s one of the great cultural/technological shifts of the latter half of the 20th century. All of the senses must be employed for communication to be effective.

May God produce multitudes of the artistic who can traffic with ease—and with spiritual authority—in the social currency of our day.

The major presenters for the event were Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost, authors of The Shaping of Things to Come (both pictured above) along with our own Hugh Halter.

CDs of these sessions can be ordered directly from Fuller Seminary or will be available through CRM online.

“The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21 Century Church” (Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch)

“The tragedy is that Christianity has become ayes-man for the culture,” says Boston’s University’s Prothero. Non-prosperity parties from both conservative and more progressive evangelical camps recently have been trying to reverse the trend…. a sprinkling of Protestant groups known loosely as the New Monastics is experimenting with the kind of communal living among the poor that had previously been the province of Catholic orders.”- TIME, September 18, 2006, “Does God Want You to be Rich?”

However, neo-monastic movements among Protestants are nothing new. Even though the reformers in the 16th century threw the proverbial baby out with the bath water when they overreacted to Catholic orders, Protestants have repeatedly reinvented and reintroduced such apostolic structures throughout the past five hundred years. The most notable thrust came with William Carey, popularly known as the “father of modern missions,” in the 1790s and every succeeding generation has repeated the process, often oblivious upon whose shoulders they stand.

For example, an editorial in Christianity Today, first published in 1988 and republished since, made a compelling appeal to “re-monk the church.” A cover story in the same magazine in September, 2005 gave a fascinating overview of such contemporary movements.

CRM’s InnerCHANGE is just such a neo-monastic structure, a present day “order among the poor.”

Presently, a fascinating issue is what direction will the “emerging church” go? Some of these new missional expressions are evolving toward such neo-monasticism and others toward the church in local form, two structures which are distinct from one another but equally “church” in the biblical, historical and missiological sense. I believe the health and vibrancy of the emerging movement may well depend in part upon its ability to recognize and embrace the distinctives inherent in both structures.

Any hope for the renewal of authentic Christianity in the West will require a plethora of such neo-monastic movements. As in each of the eight great epochs of the Christian movement since Pentecost, such sodalic, apostolic expressions are designed by God as necessities that infuse life, vitality and spiritual power into the broader church and society. They are not aberrations. They are essential.

“...both the emergent and traditional churches need each other and have much to learn from one another; that in our willingness to struggle together, we will be given an imagination from the Spirit that is bigger than all our assumptions, positions, and strategies; and that if that spirit of working together is compromised, all of us will lose.”

It is a important read. He prescribes a much needed synergistic ground between the church that is and the church that is to come during this chaotic era of “discontinuous change” in which we live.

“The Sky Is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition” (Alan J. Roxburgh)

What I wrote in yesterday’s post (9- 2-06) is mostly aimed at the church in its traditional, modern setting.

But what about the “emerging” church? How can those within these creative, emerging expressions of the church who have a passion for the world beyond their own communities be effectively stifled? What could be done to straight jacket what God wants to do with them?

1. Believe that the necessity for such workers and such ministry is passe’, doesn’t exit, or is “too modern for us.”
2. Be so enamored with social justice and a holistic gospel that we fail to embrace the clear commands of scripture regarding the evangelistic mandate or reject such categorization out of hand.
3. Have a lack of appreciation and understanding of the doctrine of spiritual gifts and be unable or unwilling to help identify those emerging leaders who may be gifted and called to ministry across social, linguistic or cultural barriers.
4. Convince them that just because they are enjoying life as a missional community in one cultural milieu, they can then duplicate the same forms of community in another.
5. Help them buy into the theological and historically naive concept that structurally the church in its local expression is the same as the church in its cross-cultural missionary form.
6. Encourage them to bury their heads in the sand and ignore the past 500 years of missionary activity and missiological understanding. Write it all off as modern, institutional or non-organic.
7. While astutely helping them apply missiological eyes to their own mono-cultural settings much better than their modern brethren, simultaneously fail in helping them to apply the same understanding to the international and cross-cultural dimensions of the missio dei.
8. Embrace a theological posture that says only “presence” is necessary for kingdom influence.
9. Consider hell a repulsive, outmoded concept for the postmodern mind and work to erase any motivation that could stem from the biblical reality that people without Jesus risk eternity separated from God.
10. Be like many of those committed to the radical discipleship movement or the Anabaptist tradition who have been so concerned for the purity of the church and living counter-culturally that they are rarely able to engage contemporary culture and instead, remain irrelevantly on the fringes.
11. Encourage them to read, think, write and blog about being missional but don’t empower them to do much in practice.
12. Write off mentors from the over 50 crowd as out of touch and irrelevant.
13. Inculcate such an anti-institutional bias and suspicion of authority that they become useless in a neo-monastic or sodalic ministry context which will require discipline, followership and sacrifice.

I was impressed then, as I am now, by his grasp of historical themes. The attached audio file of Brian (McClaren.mp3) is a wonderful macro view of how we evolved to postmodernity in the West. While a couple of years old, this talk is still an excellent primer on the influences that are shaking the foundations of Western culture.

It saddens me as I have watched Brian increasingly become a lightening rod for criticism of the emerging church, some of which has been vehement. When I read his books, 95% of what he writes I wish I could say with as much skill and clarity. Then there is the 5% at which I cringe and wonder, “Who is helping vet these comments? He doesn’t have to say that to make his point!” From where I sit, it seems that some of the wounds he is experiencing may be self-inflicted.

This seems odd to me as I write these words, since I am no stranger to the same dynamic but on a much less visible scale. I know the feelings. And I know that it is easier to comment on someone else’s dilemma when I am not in the middle of that fray and when I have been the object of blessed obscurity.

However, being an effective change agent does not require being a martyr.

Brian, may the God of all steadfastness bless you in the role he has thrust upon you. May Proverbs 3:3 characterize your posture and conversations, where “truthfulness and kindness” are yours in abundance (even if you have to wrestle with how “truthfulness” is perceived, like we all must, in the reality of a postmodern world!)

McClaren.mp3

“There is a fundamental schism in American cultural, political, and economic life. There’s the quicker-growing, economically vibrant …morally relativist, urban-oriented, culturally adventuresome, sexually polymorphous, and ethnically diverse nation …and there’s the small town, nuclear-family, religiously-oriented, white-centric other America, [with] ...its diminishing cultural and economic force …[T]wo nations …” – Michael Wolff, New York, 2/26/01, pg. 19.

1) The new won’t be influenced by imposing cultural norms from the old.
2) The old, like nearby cultures the world over, will only be marginally effective, if at all, in influencing the new.
3) The new requires fresh, indigenous expressions of authentic biblical reality.
4) These new expressions, if they are effective, will probably not be recognized as stereotypical “church” by both the secularists of the new or the religionists of the old.
5) These new expressions will require missionaries, in the classic sense, who can cross language, cultural, and in some cases, socio-economic barriers to incarnate the gospel of Jesus in a holistic way and stimulate the emergence of these new expressions.
6) Not every follower of Jesus is a missionary, i.e., not everyone has the skills, gifts or calling to do this.
7) Missionaries need missionary structures if they are to be effective.

8)Missionary structures are not the same as followers of Jesus gathered in these new expressions for community, mission, and nurture (i.e., local churches in the truly biblical sense).
9) Therefore to have a sustainable movement in the new, both the church in its local form and the church and its missionary form must be present and play interdependent roles.

One of Ryan Bolger’s observations from the research that he and Eddie Gibbs did of emerging communities of faith, both in the UK and the US, is that many of these communities are morfing toward a contemporary form of monasticism. Some are increasingly taking on the form of orders.

As the emerging movement has picked up momentum from is beginnings in the UK in the 90s and after 2000 in North America, it faces the same dilemma that confronted the Protestent reformers and many other renewal movments throughout the history of the Christian movement. Are emerging churches apostalic structures/entities or are they churches in local form? Are they orders or are they contemporary “parishes?” Are they sodalities or are they modalities? They can’t be both.

In our zeal to live out incarnationally the life of Jesus and be the presence in word and deed of the Kingdom, we can’t ignore the differences in these two structures. They are biblically, historically, sociologically, and missiologically not the same. These two equally valid and essential expressions of the body of Christ have never have been the same in 2000 plus years of the Christian movement and never will be. They are, as missiologist Ralph Winter so aptly calls them, the “two structures of God’s redemptive mission.”

In our hurt and disappointment of what institutional Christianity has become in the West and in our desire for a more pure, missional, expresion of historic Christian community, not understanding the inherent and endemic differences in these two structures will only inhibit what we seek and long for.

Such misunderstanding is what the Protestant reformers did to great peril. They threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater when they rejected monastic structures in their reaction to the abuses of medieval Catholisism. It took almost 300 years for Protestants to recapture the very structures through which renewal and authentic spiritual vitality most often flows and through which most apostolic vision and giftedness is most naturally expressed. It took Protestants from the time of the Reformation when orders were rejected until the time of William Carey in 1792 to recapture the essentiality of an effective apostolic ecclesiology.

More on this to come …

As has been true with other renewal movements, this not a new perspective. While powerfully articulated at various junctures throughout the history of the Christian movement, one of the more interesting case studies of such holism is the English Puritan movement of the 16th and 17th century.

LeLand Ryken calls them “…worldly saints – Christians with earth as their sphere of activity and with heaven as their ultimate hope.” Few in Christian history have lived out biblical holism as fervently where all of life belongs to the Lord and His kingdom rule permeates all.

For example, the Puritans believed in “two callings.” First was a general calling which was true for every follower of Christ. Such a calling focused on the biblical requirements of discipleship which were universal and lived out in community.

Secondly, however, was a particular calling, a vocation, dependent upon gifts and skills, which a person did to make a living.

The result of such practical integration of theology and life was that all work was considered holy. Both general and particular callings came from God and therefore the spiritual life was integrated fully into the warp and woof of everyday reality. Work was a “calling,” – a “vocation” – and therefore just as sacred as the requirements inherent in one’s general calling. And such work automatically involved the Puritans in fervently serving their fellow human beings. Theirs was a profoundly integrated paradigm.

The result? It was as spiritual to clean out a stable or a latrine as it was to pray or read the bible. All was considered part of God’s calling and all was done under the Lordship of Christ. All were legitimate roles in Kingdom life where Jesus was head over all.

Ryken comments that “Such integration is one of the most attractive features of the Puritans. Their goal was an ordered and disciplined daily life that integrated personal piety, corporate life, every day work, and the worship of God.”
———————
Pictured above: Panel #1, L-R, Richad Baxter, most prominent English Puritan pastor, Oliver Cromwell, famed parlimentary political leader, John Owen, theologian.

Panel #2, John Bunyan, author of Pilgrims Progress, the most widely read Christan book next to the Bible which was penned during time in prison (next illustration), and John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, considered the greatest epic poem in the English language.

Along with Tom Middleton (back row center) I spent an afternoon with this remarkable group of people in Singapore. They wanted to interact about the “emerging church.”

I had no idea I would find such understanding or interest in Asia. Among the questions we delved into together were:

1.What are emerging churches? What are the characteristics and commonalities?

2. To what extent is it a western/urban phenomena with western values and does it look differently in Asia and in their culture?

3. What’s are the consequences and the reach of globalization and the secular, postmodern elements of such?

4. How do fresh expressions of “church” occur in their context? Will these expressions be within existing evangelical instititutions or something new?

5. What price may they have to pay as they cooperate with God to engage their own generation with the Gospel, living it out in forms of community that are authentic, creative and missional?

6. What is apostolic giftedness and calling? How does that affect each of them as they discover God’s kingdom purposes, particularly as it relates to finding their niche in some form of the church local as well as some form of the church missionary or apostolic?

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“Many emerging churches have experimented with the idea of leaderless groups ….Whatever the roots of the leaderless group, be it Scottish Presbyterianism, the 1960s, postmodern deconstruction, a reaction to controlling charismatic leaders, or the desire for respect, some within emerging churches believe the leaderless option may be going too far.” – Gibbs and Bolger in Emerging Churches , pgs 196-197.


The modern era, as many others, has had its share of leadership deficiencies and failures: control, hierarchies, big egos, prestige, competitiveness and the shameless use of power.

Unfortunately, in a reaction to such a lack of genuine servant leadership within the Christian movement, there can be a swing to no leadership, or leadership gets redefined in way that essentially guts it and renders it impotent. How sad.

It’s a common dynamic throughout the history of the Christian movement. There is an abuse and an overreaction: Epicureanism produces asceticism …the misuse of charismatic gifts faces cessationism …sexual lasciviousness results in abstaining from all sex …and the list can go on and on and on.

An emphasis on godly, servant leadership is never passé. Unless we want to take out a razor blade and slice out passages of the NT text that clearly deal with the gift of leadership, it’s there. However we may want to construe it, label it, or deny it, leadership is necessary. And its healthy exercise is essential for the vitality and life of any expression of the body of Christ.

If we look to Jesus as model, we cannot escape John 17:4. In the midst of this passage where he prays and pleads for those who are his kingdom followers in present and future generations, there is this stunning, oft overlooked sentence where Jesus states:

“I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.”

This is pre-passion talk. It is before God’s redemptive purposes were fulfilled. So what is “the work?”

While there are many right and true things we could attribute to being “the work” in terms of Jesus’ kingdom presence and ministry the preceding three years, good hermeneutics compels us by virtue of the context to the inevitable conclusion that “the work” to which Jesus was clearly referring was the calling and development of the 12 disciples. His selection, training, and impartation of life and vision to the 12, and even more focused on a sub-group of 3, was “the work.”

Jesus, the master missionary, knew that the future of the movement he was launching depended on those who would lead in his physical absence. Those who would follow him as leaders for the masses were his priority. They were “the work.”

If so for the Master, how so for us?

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