Scot McKnight: October 2005 Archives

Two of the highlights of our weekend were seeing Napoleon Dynamite with Luke and Annika, and then during the worship service the worship band, led by Jay Baehr, was outstanding. And the band, whom I've named Jay Baehr and the Bo-dagitts, just got together. Jay Baehr, a North Park grad, played guitar and sang his heart out; his wife Betsy (a former student of mine) played piano. (A bit of a reminder of Paul and Linda McCartney -- Paul was a Beatle.) My son, Lukas, played electric guitar and a math teacher named Scott played bass. A youngster was the other vocalist and then an excellent drummer -- and I don't know these last two blokes names. They were very good, too.

Of course, Jay Baehr and the Bo-dagitts got some sound going and it livened us all up some, and then everyone started clapping and, truth be told, I've got no rhythm whatsover. So, when just about everyone was into it, I got to where my clapping was off and I felt like a "decroded piece of crud" (to quote Napoleon). My decroded state didn't affect how much I enjoyed it.

Yesterday we were at Zion Covenant in Jamestown, NY. Brad Bergfalk, the pastor, gave what was for me a memorable sermon on the classic text from Exodus 17 on Moses raising his arms while Israel battled. His points are worth thinking about for the week:

1. Not all of our battles require conventional methods -- raising one's arms in prayer.
2. Sometimes we don't have the strength to fight battles alone -- we need others to hold us up.
3. We need physical reminders of when God prevailed in our lives -- the altar Moses built.

My conversation last week with a pastor of a mega-church, with my contention that a caricature was being used and his and others' justifiable question, "Well, then, what is it?" leads me to a few posts this week that will attempt to sketch the movement in three categories: praxis, protest, and postmodernity. I am speaking for no one else and not for the Emergent Village or Emergent US or Emergent UK. This is my take on the movement.

Three Terms

There are three principal terms used here and each is preferred by one or another: the emerging church, the emerging movement, and the emerging conversation. I prefer "movement." There is no real "church" as a separate entity, and I do think that "conversation" is at the heart of what is going on, but because I think there are so many involved (Barna's claims are that there are 2o million such, but I'm not sure he is talking just about those in the emerging movement) that I think it is best to call it a "movement." Of the three terms, the most accurate is conversation [for that is indisputable], then movement, and only third is "church" appropriate. Some call it the "emerging movement church." Seems fair to me.

Definition: Start with Wikipedia

In spite of the number of times we ask others to consult the dictionary, the easiest place to begin is read carefully the Wikipedia definition and explanation:

The emerging church or emergent church is a diffuse movement which arose as a "conversation" (in emerging church terminology) in the late 20th century in Western Europe, North America, and the South Pacific. The emerging church is concerned with the deconstruction and reconstruction of Protestant Christianity in a postmodern cultural context.

It goes on:

During recent centuries, Western Christianity was influenced significantly by Modernism in the sense that it sought to take the individual narratives of the Bible and from them extract a set of underlying truths or meta-narratives. Using methods borrowed from scientific reductionism it was hoped that a grand truth and worldview would be attained. In practice, the modernist approach led to additional schism within the Church.

Postmodern church expressions, in turn, encouraged followers to deconstruct each element of their faith experience, and reassemble the pieces in light of his or her own unique journey through this deconstruction process.

One definition of the Emerging Church is that it is the collective term for the individuals who are emerging from this process of deconstruction and reconstruction of Christianity, or those who have joined groups being led by such individuals.

In an alternative perspective, the Emerging Church may be seen as both a reaction to, and a continuation of the Saddleback/Willow Creek movement which achieved such great success in the 1990s using a "seeker-friendly" approach. The "seeker-friendly" approach practiced a ‘come-to-church’ evangelism while the emergent church thesis is ‘come-to-Jesus.’ Every follower a missionary for Christ. Both models are marked by a willingness to retool the church experience as necessary to meet the goal of evangelism, but the resulting church experience can be quite different. The Saddleback/Willow Creek movement sought to forego the "irrelevant trappings" of the traditional church, such as stained glass and candles. The emerging church movement, however, tends to value these same symbols as sacred expressions of faith and creativity. The Saddleback movement is comfortable applying the tools of modern American marketing (focus groups, advertising, polling, etc.), to deliver a highly polished product to a typically baby boomer target demographic. The emerging church movement recognizes that their own target audience has been bombarded and over-saturated with advertising their entire lives and thus places a higher value on authentic personal interactions and the power of the timeless truths themselves.

This definition reflects a broad spectrum (so far as I understand) of the emerging movement.

I could leave it here, but I want to point once again to Emergent Village's "Order" as a clear place to understand the movement. There are here four features of the movement that need to be seen as unifying:

1. Commitment to God in the Way of Jesus
2. Commitment to the Church in all its forms
3. Commitment to God's World
4. Commitment to One Another

Each of these is fleshed out and actions inherent to their meaning are explained.

Praxis: A Central Concern

It is this last dimension, action, that concerns me in my comments today about the Emerging Movement. The EM is deeply concerned with the "character" of the Church for there are far too many of those who call themselves Christian and who go to church weekly (or more often) who are not following God in the way of Jesus and who see "doing church" as "going to a service on Sunday morning."

The Emerging Movement is a summons or an invitation for the Church to live like followers of Jesus in everything they say, do, and think. The Emerging Movement seeks to model that in its emphasis on relationships as the core of the work of God in the world today.

One of the reasons so many are frustrated with the Emerging Movement's definition is found here: it is a movement concerned with praxis and not simply theology. If the older fashion was to define others by their theology, the Emerging Movement wants to be defined by its behavior. This is a dramatic challenge to the Church.

I see three emphases in the Praxis element of the Emerging Movement:

First, the Emerging Movement calls people to goodness. Not in the sense of just being nice or being politically correct or being inoffensive, but reflecting the goodness of God in this world for the good of others and the good of the world. There is a commitment to do what is right (or to try to do what is right), to loving others as the Jesus Creed calls us to do, to exhibit moral goodness in all the relationships of life. This goodness is exhibited most especially in relation with the community of faith and its relationship to society. Goodness and community are connected. Goodness and being missional are connected: you can't be good and be holed up on your own. Goodness compels relationships with others for their good.

Second, the Emerging Movement calls people to graciousness. Grace in the sense of knowing that each of us, in one way or another, is a sinful, cracked Eikon (my term from Embracing Grace), and in knowing ourselves in such a way that we can comprehend others as made as God's Eikons who are also in need of grace. So, God's grace embraces us so we can embrace others for their good and for the good of the world. There is much talk among the emerging folk about "authenticity" and sometimes one gets the impression that the Emerging Movement has a corner on authenticity: such a claim, if it is made, is inconsistent with its central affirmation that no one is completely authentic and no movement is completely authentic. But, striving for such transcends, so we believe, what is often on display in many churches in the world. Because grace animates the movement, there is less of a border between the "church" and the "world" and more of a fluid recognition of a common humanity where each person is in need of God's restoring grace and it is the task of the local community to be that grace.

Third, the Emerging Movement operates with a summons to glorify God by being a manifestation of the way of Jesus in this world. Sometimes we all lose sight of this, but my sense of the Emerging Movement is that, though it may tire of old, hackneyed language that is tossed about by Christians in order to say the right thing at the right time, this summons to glorify God by living out the way of Jesus in this world for the good of others and the world is the Church's only and deepest opportunity in this postmodern age: to be the grace of God for others and the world, to be the blessing of God to others and the world, not just to say it -- but to be it.

Tomorrow: I will look at the Emerging Movement as a Protest.

Just in case you know how this operates: I used to have www.jesuscreed.blogspot.com, but moved over to www.jesuscreed.org. I recently deleted my old account. Now some porn site is using that address. Suggestion: go to that site and "flag" it (top right bar).

The recent blog debate about what the emerging movement is and what it isn't brings home to me what can be and can't be accomplished in the blog world. I learn from many of the individual posts, and I learn about the various views that are held about the subject I choose to post about. I learn that off-handed comments come back to haunt you, as I am learning now with what I think was a misguided choice to use P-Bics. I retain the view that pastors of big churches can swing their weight behind various subjects, sometimes for the good and sometimes not, and sometimes as experts and sometimes as misinformed. But, I should not (and I apologized for this in a previous comment) have suggested that James MacDonald was doing this: like other pastors of mega-churches his influence is considerable and I think that means he needs to be careful with what he says. I have learned as well that many may perhaps think the same about professors, and I'm sorry if he thinks I've done what I am suggesting has been done by others.

But I will say this: what he says about the emerging movement is a caricature and not indicative of either what the movement intends or what it is doing in general. That is what I want to emphasize. I can't think of a better place to work out what one thinks or what is going on somewhere than the blog world.

I want to glorify God with the calling he has given me to teach and to write and to think and to help pastors and lay persons to live more responsibly before God for the good of others and the world, and because I feel called to focus on Jesus of Nazareth (in an academic field, but even more personally), I tend to want to see more of our faith expressed in Jesus' categories. I do work hard at having a biblical balance in my theology, but being limited and fallen and all that I know that I find myself imbalanced at times. But, more than anything else I want to balance my academic calling with my ecclesial calling. I hurts to think I fail at these things, but I do.

What I've also learned is that the emergent and emerging leaders need to make some things clearer than they perhaps have. But, I will state what I have stated before: this emerging movement is diverse and all over the theological map. But, it needs perhaps to be noted again that theology is not the distinguishing mark of the emerging movement (again I appeal to Emergent-US for its orientation -- and it is not theology but something both theological and beyond simple theological articulation). It refuses to reduce its "faith" to a statement, partly because the Church has done this for all of us and partly because it wants to wed theology and praxis -- and a statement can't do that. A summons to a new life can.

When it comes to what the emerging movement is, though, I think there is a need for some clarification. First, it cannot be narrowed to a theological view (neo-orthodoxy or anything else) or to any one leader or even to a group of leaders. Most tend to operate with a leader=movement procedure. For instance, I hear this frequently about four leaders though there are others -- McLaren, Pagitt, Kimball, and Tony Jones. Others will point to others. The tendency is to identify the movement with one of these leaders. Or, to say "so and so believes this, therefore the movement believes this." Since the term "neo-orthodox" has now been used for one of its leaders, let me say something about that.

Before I do that this needs to be said: no one is suggesting the whole movement is neo-orthodox and no one is suggesting that I am neo-orthodox (that I know of), but by using this term perhaps we can shed some light on the emerging movement.

There is one thing that ought to be made clear: the emerging movement is not neo-orthodox in it central senses. Neo-orthodoxy, spear-headed as it was by Karl Barth, fought against Protestant Liberalism's theory that religious experience was the defining core of the Christian faith and that the Christian faith could be embedded in a cultural matrix, and Neo-orthdoxy posited in its stead a radical transcendence of God and clear distance of God from humans and his creation and, on top of this, a more radical challenge of the world with the Christian faith and God's redemptive grace. (This is why so many Evangelicals, both conservative and not so conservative, have found Barth to be an ally rather than an opponent.)

If there is anything the emerging movement is theologically it is not neo-orthodoxy: it argues, instead, for a more radical identification of God with creation and culture rather than over against creation and culture. In other words, part of the issue that is challenging the emerging movements is their lack of an emphasis on transcendence, and therefore holiness and purity and separation and the like. In other words, the emerging movement could learn from neo-orthodoxy. (No, I don't think the "Neo" character in Brian's novels is a cipher for "Neo-orthodoxy" but for "Neo-kind-of-Christian.")

Neither would I want to say that therefore the emerging movement is theological Neo-Liberalism. In fact, while it might be more "incarnational" than Neo-Orthodoxy and more "liberal" than evangelicalism, what I see so exciting in the emerging movement is the possibility of another way that transcends the older lines of division that have brought us to where we are. The search for a new paradigm, which means working hard and fumbling at times, is beginning to take its shape around the Kingdom vision of Jesus, and I want to be a part of the discussion if I can. So, I like what I see and I see great possibilities here. I don't agree with everyone who is a leader or with everyone who has a voice, but that is part of what the emerging movement is: a group of like-missional people who are offering a variety of models of thinking and practicing but who do not always agree with one another.

Because emerging is neither neo-orthodox nor neo-liberal, and not even simply old-fashioned evangelicalism, it will have features from each of the movements behind it -- including (God be thanked) classical creedal Christianity. The frustration of many in trying to define it is, in my judgment, the fault in part of emerging itself for it is both in process and unwilling to let itself be defined by a theological system.

Instead, it seeks to be faithful to the summons of Jesus to live as followers of Jesus, to live out the Kingdom in everything we do and say, and to let the chips fall where they may.