Answers on the Emerging Church

Dear Frank,

I've been reading a lot of emerging church literature lately, and I understand that you are part of the emerging church movement. My question has to do with you and Brian McLaren. It seems to me that you both are provocateurs who are challenging the status quo and provoking Christians to rethink many of their long-held evangelical assumptions about Christianity and the church. Both of you are compelling writers whose books I've enjoyed a great deal. I'm wanting to know what the difference is in your work and his.

Over the last few months, I've received this question or a derivative of it a number of times. 

Despite the unfair (and often malicious and misguided) criticism he has received, I believe Brian is spearheading a very important work today. While I've not read everything he's written nor have I heard everything he's taught, I've never heard him say or write anything that wasn't in line with the spirit and attitude of  Jesus Christ.  

Our Lord said, "Beware when all men speak well of you." Those of us who call into question status quo beliefs and challenge sacred cows are no candidates for global praise. So the onslaught goes with the territory. But let's be careful that we aren't the one's guilty of firing the salvos! It's one thing to disagree respectfully with someone. It's quite another to demonize them and impute evil motives to their hearts.

Now for the differences. To my mind, Brian's ministry is more focused on apologetics. He's exploring fresh approaches to presenting the gospel to postmodern people (which includes grappling with questions of epistemology). He has the heart of an evangelist, and he's done some brilliant work in making Jesus Christ and His message accessible and attractive to contemporary intellectuals who aren't impressed with the old apologetics of Josh McDowell and C.S. Lewis.

He is also functioning as a "culture-vulture" -- and he's operating in somewhat of a prophetic role when it comes to restoring to the church a consciousness of some of the neglected dimensions of the Kingdom of God. In addition, he's done marvelous work in the area of how Christians who disagree with one another can dialogue in the spirit of Jesus Christ and listen to each another instead of verbally slaughtering one another. (The latter is the story of church history .  .  .  and, tragically, some of the slaughtering hasn't just been verbal.)

On that score, Brian has written two articles that I believe are without peer on the subjects that they treat. I resonate with them so strongly that I can pass them on without reserve to both my readers and critics. The great bulk of what is said applies perfectly.

One is called A Note to My Readers.
Another is called A Friendly Note to My Critics.

I'm sure that Brian is doing more than the above, but these are the contributions that I'm presently aware of. His books "The Secret Message of Jesus" and "A Generous Orthodoxy" are, to my mind, brilliant reads for any thoughtful Christian. His apologetics-styled books are also quite helpful.

While I touch on some of the same themes as the above, my ministry isn't really centered on them. (The exception is on how Christians treat one another. Brian and I have strong overlaps there.) 

My main focus deals primarily with ecclesiology and its connection with Christology. 

One thing to keep in mind is that neither the emerging church conversation, "the Revolution" (to quote Barna), nor the house church/simple church movement are monoliths. None have a headquarters stationed in some well-known (or ill-known) city. None have a statement of faith. And none publish a newsletter that represents everyone in the movement. There is very wide diversity in each.

To unfold that a bit, Mike Clawson has written a helpful article on the three streams of emerging church on his blog.

(The following is lifted directly from Mike's discussion of the topic. I've put a link to the entire article at the end of my answer.)

Stream 1. "Relevants" -  These have focused on worship styles. It was assumed that to reach postmoderns we would have to make church "cool" (e.g. coffee, candles, fine art, hip music, ancient liturgical elements, etc.) However, the point wasn't to be "trendy" so much as it was the missionary impulse to contextualize the gospel and worship to the local culture - in this case, early 21st century postmodern culture.
 
Stream 2. "Reconstructionists" - These are more concerned with the structures and methods of church as a whole, not just with what we do in worship.

Stream 3. "Re-Envisionists" - These are re-envisioning our faith and what the gospel is really all about. There is an openness to diverse viewpoints, and a willingness to question traditional evangelical assumptions, though there is still a deep commitment to the historic Christian faith as expressed in the early ecumenical creeds (e.g. Apostles Creed, Nicene Creed, etc.)

If someone wanted to find my canoe in the emerging church stream, they would locate it in Stream 2 (Reconstructionist) and Stream 3 (Re-envisionist). Let me see if I can unpack that.

N.T. Wright and Stanley Hauerwas have done a lot of fresh work in the area of seeing the Bible as a narrative. Post-conservative theologians like Stanley Grenz and Rodney Clapp have argued that the narrative of Scripture can only be rightly understood and accurately interpreted by the church (that is, the community of the believers) . . . opposed to the isolated individual.
 
I have tipped my hat strongly in their direction. My two books "The Untold Story of the New Testament Church" and "God's Ultimate Passion" have sought to identify the governing narrative of Scripture. 

"The Untold Story" seeks to reconstruct a narrative ecclesiology of the entire New Testament. In so doing, readers are given the "big picture" and rescued from a cut-and-paste mentality that relies on lashing together out-of-context verses ("proof texts") to build floatable doctrines. 

"Ultimate Passion" seeks to unlock the grand narrative (or the metanarrative) of the whole Bible, both Old and New Testaments. That narrative is embodied in three words that Paul pens in Ephesians: "The eternal purpose."

We live in a day when terms like "mission" and "being missional" are in vogue right now. But when was the last time you heard a message or read an article on the eternal purpose of God?  

Incidentally, one of the objectives of my books is to smoke out the fact that most Christians read the Bible with a controlling story in mind. That story is typically "God's purpose is to save us from hell, and man's purpose is to save others from hell." But that's only a subset of the grand narrative of Scripture. And saving souls is not God's ultimate passion.

I agree with Wright and Grenz that systematic theologies, no matter how seemingly air-tight, will invariably fail us. We need a fresh understanding of the narrative . . . the story . . . the big picture to understand the little pieces within it. We also require an "interpretative community" to grasp the amazing richness of the text.
 
Myself and others have taken this concept a step further by suggesting that the New Testament documents were written to Christian communities that possessed a certain spiritual environment. For them, "church" was not filing into a building and sitting like a pillar of salt during a worship service officiated by a clergyman (pastor or priest). The modern "audience church" historically evolved (or devolved) from cultural elements that, in my view, replaced the organic expression of church life that the early Christians knew.

That said, I believe that understanding the grand narrative is only a piece of the puzzle toward rightly grasping Scripture (as well as the incredible Lord that Scripture presents). Another important piece is to live in the same spiritual context in which the early Christians lived. This includes face-to-face community as well as Christ-centered, open participatory gatherings.

For instance, try applying Paul's teachings in 1 Corinthians 14 to a typical church service. It can't be done. What congregant, for instance, sitting frozen in a pew is going to interrupt the pastor or priest during his sermon? And what pastor or priest will yield the floor to the person who interrupts? Hence, 1 Corinthians 14:30 has no relevance at all in such a setting. 

However, if a group of Christians are living in a face-to-face community that practices, as the early Christians did, open-participatory church meetings, then that passages makes perfect sense and all of the instruction applies. I don't speak as a theorist as I've been in hundreds of meetings like this. Hence, I (and many others) don't understand 1 Corinthians 14 as a rusty, historical text only applying to Christians two thousand years ago. Instead, the text lives and breathes and speaks to us today, for we are living in the very same spiritual context in which its original recipients lived. I can multiply example after example of this same principle. It can be extrapolated to the rest of the New Testament. For the vast bulk of the New Testament was written to shared-life Christian communities, not to individual believers.

In that regard, I believe there is a great need to freshly examine how we have been "doing church" since the Reformation. I also believe that a new look at the New Testament narrative along with the historical origins of our church practices can teach us a great deal about ecclesiology . . . if we are willing to be instructed by it. The fact is, what we are presently doing is not getting the job done nor is it meeting the needs of scores of contemporary Christians. (I receive a steady stream of letters from people who tell me that they had to leave the traditional church in order to survive spiritually!) Your mileage may vary; but we can't ignore the masses where this holds true.

To use a metaphor that comes from my school teaching background, some in the emerging church conversation view Kingdom work and theology as a required class, while they view ecclesiology and church form as an elective class. To wit, church form and structure doesn't really matter. There's no such thing as a perfect church so that translates into the belief that church form/structure/leadership/meetings, etc. is optional and up for grabs. So the thinking goes.

I believe this view is profoundly flawed. How we "do church" is vitally connected to our Christian life and spiritual progress as well as the displaying of Jesus Christ in the earth. It is my opinion, therefore, that if the entire Christian family understand the social dimensions of the Kingdom of God and got along with each other in doing Kingdom work in the world, God's ultimate passion still wouldn't be realized.

For this reason, I have been labeled by some as a "radical ecclesiologist" in the emergent church conversation opposed to a "traditional ecclesiologist."

(By the way, for those who may assume that I'm under-handedly suggesting that the house church "form" is the only way to do church, let me make clear that there doesn't exist a monolithic house church form. In addition . . . I'm quite unimpressed with many house churches, as they are often no more than glamorized Bible studies or social support groups.)
 
For me, ecclesiology is vitally connected to Christology. The form of the church, what goes on in our church meetings (services), what kind of leadership we practice, what community life is like outside scheduled meetings, etc. is critical because of this reason: It will either make wide room for the functioning Headship of Jesus Christ in His Body or it will make little to no room for it. In addition, it can dramatically influence the level of spiritual transformation that is experienced by the members.

Consequently, ecclesiology has everything to do with the centrality and the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ as well as the measure of His transforming work in the lives of God's people. For that reason, it cannot be ignored. So it seems to me anyway. 

In this connection, I believe it's a false disconnect to separate the Kingdom of God from the church. The two aren't identical, but they are intimately and organically connected. The church relates to the Body of Christ and the Kingdom relates to the Headship of Christ. And what God has joined together, man should not put asunder. A holistic reading of the entire New Testament, I believe, will yield that the broader reality of the Kingdom of God cannot be disconnected from the ekklesia. 

In that regard, there are more points of contact betwixt the emerging church conversation and the "Revolution" than is typically noticed at first blush. And to my mind, there needs to be more work on integrating the values of each.

My hope is that the dialogue on these points will flourish.