faith-a-la-carte-july-august-2005

REFORMATION AND EMERGENT? ❘ MCLAREN ON EMERGENT ❘ TOURIST OR PILGRIM?

MODERN REFORMATION

FAITH A LA CARTE? THE EMERGENT CHURCH VOLUME

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FAITH A LA CARTE? EMERGENT CHURCH

11 The Emerging Church What is the Emergent Church? The movement is spreading through different denominations and across the world.

The author uses the life stories of Emergent’s leaders to paint a picture of this new expression of Evangelicalism.

by D.A. Carson Plus: An Interview with Stanley Grenz

19 Settlers, Pilgrims, and Wanderers What sort of modern tendencies does the Emergent Church movement share with its megachurch heritage?

The author identifies most-modern characteristics that threaten to scuttle the aspirations of the movement.

by Michael Horton

28 Experiencing Emergent The Emergent movement has been described as an ongoing conversation. This report relates the experience our correspondent had at a recent Emergent conference in San Diego.

by Shane Rosenthal

36 Roundtable Discussion Are Reformation-minded churches closed off to the concerns articulated by the Emergent movement?

Three pastors talk with Michael Horton about their efforts to meet the challenges identified by Emergent in their local churches.

COVER PHOTO BY CORBIS

In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Between the Times page 5 Preaching from the Choir page 8 | Speaking Of page 48 | Interview page 49

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MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Managing Editor Eric Landry

Cool Kids Church

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Assistant Editor Brenda Choo

ost of us here at Modern Reformation like the Emergent Church folks. Frankly, it’s a bit of a relief to have someone within Evangelicalism making the same points we’ve been trying to make for the past fourteen years. We also like

their interest in liturgy, in church history (prior to 1972), and in engaging with Scripture in ways that take it beyond the “handbook for living” genre that so many of our own churches have adopted. And, truth be told, we were always the nerdy kids in the youth group, so now that the cool kids with their cool hair, tats, and body piercings are saying much the same thing we do we can’t help but look around with some appreciation.

But the appreciation is a nervous one. As much as we are warmed by their insightful criticism of Evangelicalism, we just can’t shake the sense that these children of the megachurch are taking their postmodern angst and marketing it to the urban jungles just like their chinowearing, cool hair dads did in middle America.

That, of course, leads us to wonder if Emergent will really offer anything substantially different than what they are critiquing.

After reading their books and blogs, conversing with them, and attending their conferences most of us just want to grab a beer and talk with these men and women. I think we would find that we have much in common and I would hope that our own like-minded efforts might serve to keep the Emergent folks from swinging the pendulum too far in an unhealthy direction. We’re grateful to New Testament scholar D.A. Carson for making the same point in his article, which we’ve adapted from his new book Becoming Conversant with Emergent. Carson’s article is a good overview of the Emergent movement’s concerns with a few pointed observations about evaluating the movement as it grows into maturity. Shane Rosenthal, the executive producer of the White Horse Inn, had a chance to visit the Emergent conference that was held in San Diego this spring. His firsthand report also helps those who are curious about the movement get a better idea of its strengths and weaknesses. Turning to critique, Reformed theologian and editor in chief Michael Horton takes a hard look at the

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theology and practices that characterize the Emergent movement. We’ve also included a transcript of a discussion by younger Reformed and Lutheran pastors on how our own churches are responding to the concerns we hold in common with the Emergent movement. To make sure that we’re not dealing with caricatures we’ve included interviews with Brian McLaren and the late Stanley Grenz as well as extensive reviews of the seminal books in the movement.

Will the Emergent Church be anything other than another passing evangelical fad? We hope so. But in order to be such the movement will have to acknowledge how their history as an evangelical institution (as the Young leaders Network and Terra Nova Project, arms of the Leadership Network) continues to shape their present course. In order to be a real force for good within Evangelicalism the movement will have to go beyond Evangelicalism and appropriate a churchly tradition that gives it real depth, not just an ecclesiological field guide. Otherwise, their efforts at reform will be truncated, for Evangelicalism can’t be reformed.

By its very nature the movement is shaped not by confession or doctrine but by personality, culture, and circumstance. And thus far, that seems to be what is shaping the efforts of the Emergent Church as well.

Eric Landry Managing Editor

Next Issue: September/October: A New Pope and the Prospects for Catholic Christianity

Department Editors Brian Lee, Ex Auditu Diana Frazier, Reviews Shane Rosenthal, Between the Times William Edgar, Preaching From the Choir Staff ❘ Editors Ann Henderson Hart, Staff Writer Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Celeste McGhee, Proofreader Contributing Scholars David Anderson Charles P. Arand S. M. Baugh Gerald Bray Jerry Bridges D. A. Carson R. Scott Clark Marva Dawn Mark Dever J. Ligon Duncan Richard Gaffin W. Robert Godfrey T. David Gordon Donald A. Hagner John D. Hannah Gillis Harp D. G. Hart Paul Helm C. E. Hill Hywel R. Jones Ken Jones Peter Jones Richard Lints Korey Maas Mickey L. Mattox Donald G. Matzat John Muether John Nunes John Piper J. A. O Preus Paul Raabe Kim Riddlebarger Rod Rosenbladt Philip G. Ryken R. C. Sproul Rachel Stahle A. Craig Troxel David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith William Willimon Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation © 2005 All rights reserved.

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“The Islamization of Europe” (Between the Times) in your March-April 2005 issue (“Around the Block, Around the World: Evangelism and Missions”) reminds me of A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee in which he documents various civilizations and their disintegrations. Capitulation to an internal proletariat and the vulgarization of religion are a few examples of this trend. Thank you for highlighting the problem. I also enjoyed doing my own research on who Santiago Matamoros was.

Rob Anders, Member of Parliament Calgary, Alberta Canada

Two editorial notes for the March/April 2005 issue (“Around the Block, Around the World: Evangelism and Missions”). In the article “The Islamization of Europe” (Between the Times), there are two spelling errors: “Matamorros” should be spelled “Matamoros,” and “Compostella” as “Compostela.” One too many letters in each!

Thanks for all you labor in putting together the magazine. It is a blessing to us here in Spain.

Matt Leighton Barcelona, Spain

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As a long-time reader of Modern Reformation, I have always admired the balance and restraint you demonstrate in discussions of American politics. I was dismayed, therefore, to read in your MarchApril 2005 issue (“Around the Block, Around the World: Evangelism and Missions”) a shocking article purporting to discuss Islam in Europe, “The Islamization of Europe” (Between the Times). This article contained several inaccuracies (such as placing the March 11 Madrid bombings in November): One especially concerned a statue of Santiago Matamoros in the cathedral of Saint James of Compostela. Far from being withdrawn due to Islamic pressure, the eighteenth-century statue of Santiago Moor-killer had been scheduled to be moved to the cathedral museum by the cathedral chapter as part of an effort to distance the church from the more violent aspects of its counter-reformation heritage (a goal many of us Modern Reformation readers should probably view with some sympathy—in other countries, he might be portrayed lopping-off Protestant heads), and was in fact maintained in place because of fears that its withdrawal would be seen as a gesture toward Islam. It is disappointing that you would print pronouncements from someone obviously not completely familiar with the facts. By misrepresenting both the status of Islam and Islamic attitudes in Europe, this particularly ideologically-driven piece precludes any serious theological discussion of Islam in Europe, and I found it a particularly disturbing approach to Muslims in an issue devoted to evangelism and missions. There are many Christians in Europe seeking to bring people of Muslim origin to a knowledge of the gospel. They do it through talking to them, not by implying that they are all aggressively “invading” Europe and seeking to [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 5 2 ]

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Fools for Christ?

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ay 22, 2005, is a date few people at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway in New York City will soon forget.

Trinity Church hosted a Clown Eucharist in the famous Episcopal sanctuary. The rector, Dr. James Cooper, greeted parishioners in a red and white clown suit, red wig, rubber nose, and big floppy shoes. The Clown Eucharist was such an important production it required the directing services of a professional actor, Gerry Becker, whose credits include Spider Man and The Game.

The service began with circus music during the normally reverent Episcopal processional.

In the traditional processional, the Bible leads the clergy toward the altar. On this Sunday, a Ring Master led the choir, acolytes, and clergy into the church to the tune of “Entry of the Gladiators.” The Old Testament and Gospel lessons were mimed by various members of the clown troupe. After the Offertory and the blessing of the gifts and people, the people responded with their noise makers, which were distributed to the several hundred worshippers at the beginning of the service. The noise makers were in use again in response to the breaking of the bread during the Communion service. The Communion wine was dispensed out of a punch bowl, complete with ladle.

Hail Mary

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n yet another decision that weakens their ties to Reformation orthodoxy, an official study group of the Anglican Communion now says that the veneration of Mary and the saints are “authentic expressions of Christian belief” according to a new document, “Mary: Hope and Grace in Christ,” introduced by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. Not only are prayers offered to Mary acceptable, the Commission’s document also states that

After the service, still wearing her clown makeup, one parishioner reflected on the unorthodox service by saying, “It’s okay to be happy.”

The rector, James Cooper, wrote on the Trinity website that the Clown Eucharist was intended to “tease out the foolishness themes of Christianity,” by presenting the clowns as symbols of “divine foolishness.”

The service bulletin gave several principles to guide the clown minister to ensure that the clowning was truly “clown ministry”: “We are called to be ‘fools for Christ’s sake,’ to be weak so that others can be strong. What an honor and privilege that calling is!”

“Perhaps laughter is a gift of the Spirit and a necessity for the Christian life.”

“God works through principles of comedy.”

Conservative and confessional Episcopalian blogs were quick to call the event a “mockery” and “unspeakably repugnant.”

David Virtue, an Episcopal watch-dog, also informed readers that Dr. Cooper, the presiding clown, used to fire up chain saws and ride motorcycles down the aisle to illustrate his sermons in his previous church in Florida. Pictures of the farcical “worship” service can be found at Birmingham’s Cathedral Church of the Advent’s website: www.adventbirmingham.org.

the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (the belief that Mary was born without sin) and the Assumption (the belief that Mary upon death was assumed, body and soul, into heaven) are “consonant with the teaching of the Scriptures.”

Although the document is not authoritative—but apparently neither are the Thirty-Nine Articles—it does provide a basis for further talks of unification between the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church. All talk of reunion, however, seems to require significant shifts in the Protestant

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stance on Marian devotion since the document does nothing to soften the Roman Catholic view on Mary. While concern over Mary’s unofficial status and the fervor of Roman Catholic devotion to Mary once seemed to be a major sticking point in ecumenical discussions, this current document seems to suggest that such issues may not be insurmountable. The most controversial aspects of Marian devotion did not achieve canonical status until the modern era (Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950). ■

On the Web

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eriodically the editors of Modern Reformation venture out onto the World Wide Web to look for sites that might be of interest to our readers. (We usually just end up playing online games, but that’s another column.) Having just finished an in-depth analysis of your comments on our recent survey, we feel even less qualified to offer our suggestions.

Please note that the editors have wildly divergent views on politics, technology, and scotch. Thus, not all of our recommendations are to be taken as endorsements. So please do not write us with complaints. Instead, feel free to email us your suggestions for news, blogs, or resource sites that you just can’t live without at info@modernreformation.org.

Magazines christianitytoday.com firstthings.com touchstonemag.com byfaithonline.com opc.org/new_horizons.html oldsolar.com newpantagruel.com Religious News zondervan.com/desk/newslink.asp dallasnews.com/religion beliefnet.org stnews.org religionnews.com religionjournal.com wwrn.org christianweek.org lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=75 crosswalk.com

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Blogs getreligion.org worldmagblog.com/blog merecomments.typepad.com confessingevangelical.blogspot.com evangelicaloutpost.com theologica.blogspot.com killingthebuddha.com emergent-us.typepad.com ■

Culture Wars Continued

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he North Carolina Baptist pastor who allegedly kicked out members of his congregation who refused to support President Bush resigned on May 10, 2005.

Under the advice of his lawyers, Rev. Chan Chandler is not talking about the incident except to say that the incident is related to his stance on abortion. Nine members were voted out of the congregation during a deacon’s meeting on May 2, 2005. Another forty members resigned in protest, according to the Associated Press. Chandler—under pressure from within the congregation, from local Baptist convention authorities, from church-state separation watchdog groups, and possibly the Internal Revenue Service—drove away from the church under police escort while supporters gathered outside the church building in tears. A majority of Americans, according to a recent Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll, consider actions like Chandler’s appropriate. Over fifty percent of Americans feel comfortable with churches expressing views on political matters. Those from a younger demographic—eighteen to twenty-nine year-old respondents—were more likely than their older counterparts to support such actions. ■

Worship Preferences and…

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ND you can even bring your coffee with you into the service!” That line helps introduce a new selection of “worship venues” at a popular southern California megachurch. What’s a “worship venue”? It’s a different location on the church campus that carries a live feed of the pastor’s message but features different styles of music, different levels of audience participation, and different décor.

Here are some of the venues from which you can choose: Overdrive: “Overdrive is worship with guitars, drums and lights in a concert-like setting.”

Ohana: “Our island-style venue, complete with hula and island-style music. Get away to the islands for a time of worship with the same message!”

Elevation: “E1-current Venue Tent 2 (ASL Interpreted):

Edgy Christian radio hits and cool lighting effects! E1basic Plaza Room: Progressive praise & worship with an introspective delivery. Designed for young single adults.”

Passion: “Passionately encounter God through a more intimate atmosphere in Venue Tent 2. The whole service has a younger feel... and we have plenty of parking!”

Worship Wars The worship-war weary leaders of CUE, an alternative worship service previously connected to Hollywood Presbyterian Church must be jealous. The mainline Presbyterian church has been shaken up by the removal of the senior minister and executive minister. At first glance the issue seemed to be related to worship wars. On one side: the outward facing, contemporary music loving, nightclub-based alternative service. On the other side: the traditional, stodgy, monied, powerful old-line congregation. But the PC(USA) reform-minded newspaper, The Layman (published by the Presbyterian Lay Committee) calls the issue theological and political: a fight between the “evangelical” pastor and the “liberal” presbytery. The historic church, home to Billy Graham and Bill Bright among others, has been the center of national news coverage since the fight began in late April.

Making the battle lines more clear: during the May 10, 2005 regular presbytery meeting (where an unsuccessful vote was taken to reinstate the pastors) a reading from the Koran and prayers to Allah took up part of the allotted time. The evangelicals associated with CUE have disassociated themselves from the PC(USA) citing concerns with the denomination’s fidelity to Scripture as well as the current fracas. ■

SUM + of the = TIME

the top five percent of 250 major corporate brands, competing for the attention of the American market with the likes

of Nike and John Deere. (BusinessWeek, May 23, 2005)

Christian Video Games

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he New York Times calls them “PlayStations of the Cross.”

Christian video games are struggling to make an impact in a business where it takes millions to develop a game for the most popular systems (Xbox, PlayStation, GameCube).

Game developers are gathering in Portland, Oregon in late July to talk shop and strategize on marketing opportunities with Christian-friendly retail giants like Wal-Mart. Word in 2004 that Mel Gibson was planning on bringing “The Passion of the Christ” to the gaming world brought increased media attention to this nascent industry. You won’t find too many slasher games or morally ambivalent games (like the popular “Grand Theft Auto”) on the game shelves of Christian stores. Instead, “Adventures in Odyssey,” “Spiritual Warfare,” and “Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land” are the standard fare. Soon to join them are the “Left Behind Games” in late 2005. ■

Bible Literacy

Driving with Jesus

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he Bible Literacy Project released a report on April 26, 2005 that shocked the world. No, it wasn’t that a substantial minority of American teenagers didn’t know some of the most basic information about the Bible; it was that forty out of forty-one high school English teachers said Bible knowledge conveys a distinct educational advantage to students. Drawing on references from literature as diverse as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the teachers were nearly unanimous in their view that since Western literature was steeped in biblical allusions, it was educationally necessary for schools (whether public or private) to instruct students on basic Bible knowledge. One teacher from Illinois quoted in the study commented that while it was necessary to explain the biblical allusions to students who were unaware of them, he did not have time to do so and thus the students were missing part of the author’s message. For more information on the report, visit www.bibleliteracy.org. ■

5% Willow Creek ranks in

ith Jesus Christ behind the wheel, drivers in West Virginia should have nothing to fear, right? Peter Robert Philips, Jr. has applied for a West Virginia driver’s license under the name of “Jesus Christ.” Reportedly, he already has a passport, social security card, and Washington D.C. driver’s license using the divine name, but West Virginia authorities want to see official name change documentation before issuing a local license. Philips’s attorney told the Associated Press that the name change flap was the consequence of Philips’s attempt to express his “faith, love and respect” for the Son of God. Frankly, we just think it sounds nutty. ■

Correction The May/June 2005 “The Lighter Side” feature listed an incorrect phone number for the Jesus Loves You punch ball.

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Modern Trailblazer

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Ninety Years Old (1977), where he uses slow, minimal accessible to the listener, they should consider an important composer who has not knocking on the older semantron, the long wooden followed any preset path. Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) is a reserved Estonian whose style board used before metal bells were introduced.

This has been called minimalist and who must be ancient instrument symbolizes Sarah’s patience credited with helping to reestablish the primacy of while waiting to give birth to the Messiah’s distant choral music in our times. Not only because he ancestor, Isaac. But it also serves as a reminder of wrote so much of it, but because he has helped to how long God has been present in Russia, despite recent times of Soviet oppression, and so a call to put it back on the musical map.

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) is the first Estonian patient endurance. His De Profundis (Out of the composer to have received international acclaim. Depths) is a slow-developing meditation on Psalm After the Second World War Estonia was subjected 130, moving from the quiet sadness of distress to to Soviet domination for twenty-five years. Pärt the triumph of liberated praise, all punctuated by (pronounced “pairt”) found his music censored by bell sounds.

Much of Pärt’s music is meant to encourage the authorities for two reasons. The first is that as a young composer he moved away from traditional hesychasm. From the Greek word, it means tonality into abstract serial technique (associating quietness, restfulness, silence. An ancient practice notes with numbers, rather than harmonic centers). in the Eastern branch of Christendom, it stressed This was considered Western decadence. The the analogy between God and the light, and taught second is that much of his music was sacred, believers to meditate on the light, saying the Jesus specifically Christian. The Soviets fostered atheism. Prayer repeatedly: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Pärt’s life was changed in the 1960s, when he have mercy on me, a sinner.” One can sense this felt he should search for a new compositional style. appeal to quiet communion with the Lord in He withdrew from the active musical world and Miserere, which declaims Psalm 51. It begins with a studied ancient forms, particularly Gregorian chant lone voice singing regular, alternating syllables, and the music of the Renaissance composer Josquin with a pause between each word, engaging the des Prez, whose sacred music was unsurpassed for listener to pray through the first verse. Gradually its depth, its complexity, and its faithfulness to the increasing the voices, adding instruments, still, text. Pärt emerged a new man. He created a style very slowly, the piece moves from the cold reality he called tintinnabuli because he used simple triads of the human condition to the warm assurance of in succession, whose overtones suggested the God’s loving kindness.

Slow does not mean sad. The Cantate Domino, sounds of bells. The bell has many meanings for Pärt, from the signal in a church service, to the based on Psalm 96, while streamlined is animated monastic hours, to the call to worship throughout and joyful. Indeed, the paradox of Pärt’s music is the countryside. Known as “aural icons of past and that it may be minimalist (a term that he doesn’t future trumpeting” (Edward Williams), the bell like), the drama of it is maximal, though subtle. quality is woven into the fabric of the music in Like Sarah, whose patience ended in laughter, Pärt’s music moves from darkness to light, from ways that picture the Christian message.

The first piece in this genre was Sarah Was mourning to dancing. est anyone think the story of modern music to be a monolithic decline, less and less

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Resources Many musicians work alone. This can be unhealthy, and, as it happens, unnecessary. A number of associations and affinity groups exist that serve to nurture, encourage, challenge, and even open doors of opportunity for their participants. For musicologists, two, at least, are worth knowing about. The “Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship” (FMCS) exists to promote musicology with a Christian sensibility. This may mean the subject is a religious subject, or it may mean a certain biblical perception is involved in the research. At the annual meeting, papers are read on such topics as Messiaen scholarship, Bach’s interpretation of a Gospel passage, contemporary Christian music as a market commodity, Kittel’s arrangement of a Schütz motet, and more. Loosely patterned after the typical learned society, for example, the American Musicological Society, this emerging group has a life of its own. Visit www.fmcs.us for more information.

A somewhat different group is the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA), based at St. Mary’s College, the Divinity School at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The spearhead is Jeremy Begbie, whose book, Theology, Music and Time, was mentioned in the May/June 2004 issue of Modern Reformation. Music is a large part of what they do, but it includes all of the arts.

The core conviction of the project is that the arts help us understand theology, and not just the other way around. Seminars, colloquia, publications, at the highest level of scholarship, are the mainstay of the ITIA. In addition, they have a wider churchbased profile, and sponsor public lectures, summer schools, among other events. Visit www.standrews.ac.uk/institutes/itia/ for more information.

On a lower key, yet equally important to its purpose, the Alliance of Christian Musicians (ACM) exists to promote excellence in the ministries and performance of music in the church.

It does so through education, fellowship, a newsletter, and conferences meant to support biblically committed musicians in their work. For further information, and to receive the newsletter, contact vince.treadway@proclamation.org.

Finally, let me commend the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers (CFAMC).

This somewhat rarefied group helps foster the more highbrow tradition from Bach through Stravinsky to Scottish composer James MacMillan.

As their mission statement puts it, “CFAMC strives to be a place for evangelical concert composers to come together to discuss the joys and disappointments, the issues and struggles of bringing their work and witness as redeemed

creative individuals to the arts music world.” You may not only visit their website: www.cfamc.org, but purchase their sample CD to hear what sorts of compositions their members create.

Seasonal This summer I recommend you listen to, and have your choir perform, “Lord, Lord,” by the great Dave Brubeck. The tune has appeared in various forms in his music since the 1950s. It was once an introduction to a blues in a minor key. Then, Dave’s wife, Iola, heard it and penned the following words to it, which were sung by Carmen McRae for a recording: Lord, Lord, what will tomorrow bring?

Today I felt an arrow stinging in a wound so deep My eyes refused to weep What will tomorrow bring?

Several versions of it are published, notably a beautiful choral setting (St. Francis Music Co., and Malcolm Music, Ltd., Delaware Water Gap, PA 18327). On one recording I have, Dave’s son, Chris, plays the melody on his gorgeous trombone.

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FA I T H A L A C A RT E ? | The Emergent Church

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Emerging Church What Are We Talking About? t the heart of the Emergent Church movement—or as some of its leaders prefer to call it, the “conversation”—lies the conviction that changes in the culture signal that a new church is “emerging.” Christian leaders must therefore adapt to this emerging church. Those who fail to do so are blind to the cultural accretions that hide the gospel behind forms of thought and modes of expression that no longer communicate with the new generation, the emerging generation.

One reason why the movement has mushroomed so quickly is that it is bringing to focus a lot of hazy perceptions already widely circulating in the culture. It is articulating crisply and polemically what many pastors and others were already beginning to think, even though they did not enjoy—until the leaders of this movement came along—any champions who put their amorphous malaise into perspective.

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What Characterizes the Movement?

Protest t is difficult to gain a full appreciation of the distinctives of the movement without listening attentively to the life stories of its leaders. Many of them have come from conservative, traditional, evangelical churches, sometimes with a fundamentalist streak. Thus the reforms that the movement encourages mirror the protests of the lives of many of its leaders.

The place to begin is the book Stories of Emergence, edited by Mike Yaconelli.

Most of these “stories of emergence” have in common a shared destination (namely, the Emergent Church movement) and a shared point of origin: traditional (and sometimes fundamentalist) Evangelicalism. What all of these people have in common is that they began in one thing and “emerged” into something else. This gives the book a flavor of protest, of rejection: we were where you were once, but we

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emerged from it into something different. The subtitle of the book discloses what the editor sees as common ground: Moving from Absolute to Authentic.

An example may clarify what the book is trying to accomplish. Spencer Burke used to sit in a plush third-floor office, serving as one of the pastors of Mariners Church in Irvine, California—“a bona fide megachurch with a 25-acre property and a $7.8 million budget.” Every weekend 4,500 adults use the facilities, and the church ministers to 10,000 people a week. But Burke became troubled by things such as parking lot ministry. (“Helping well-dressed families in SUVs find the next available parking space isn’t my spiritual gift.”). He became equally disenchanted with three-point sermons and ten-step discipleship programs, not to mention the premillennial, pretribulational eschatology on which he had been trained. Burke came to realize that his “discontent was never with Mariners as a church, but [with] contemporary Christianity as an institution.”

Burke organizes the causes of his discontent under three headings. First, he has come to reject what he calls “spiritual McCarthyism,” the style of leadership that belongs to “a linear, analytical

world” with clear lines of authority and a pastor who is CEO. Spiritual McCarthyism, Burke asserts, is “what happens when the pastor-as-CEO model goes bad or when well-meaning people get too much power.” These authority structures are quick to brand anyone a “liberal” who questions the received tradition.

The second cause of Burke’s discontent is what he calls “spiritual isolationism.” Under this heading he includes the pattern of many churches moving from the city to the suburbs. Sometimes this is done under the guise of needing more space.

Nevertheless, he insists, there are other motives.

“It’s simpler for families to arrive at church without having to step over a drunk or watch drug deals go down in the alley. Let’s be honest: church in the city can be messy. Dealing with a homeless man who wanders into the service shouting expletives or cleaning up vomit from the back steps is a long way from parsing Greek verbs in seminary.”

Indeed, megachurches out in the suburbs sometimes construct entire on-campus worlds, complete with shops and gyms and aerobics centers.

The third cause of his discontent Burke labels “spiritual Darwinism”—climbing up the ladder on

An Interview wit Stanley Grenz died of a brain aneurysm in March 2005. He was one of the principal theologians on hand at the February 2005 Emergent Church convention in San Diego. Modern Reformation had an opportunity to discuss some of his thoughts about this new movement just weeks before his death.

MR: What is Emergent Church all about, and what are some healthy aspects of it from your perspective?

SG: When someone says Emergent, they really haven’t said anything because this network is so diverse. There are so many different styles and agendas that it’s hard to get a handle on what holds it all together. I think if one were to ask what’s the scarlet thread, I would say these are folks who are taking seriously the context in which they find themselves, which many of them would consider postmodern. They’re trying to take seriously the transitions and changes that they see going on in North American culture, and they want to embody the gospel in a manner in which people in this changing climate can see it, understand it, and respond to it.

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MR: Do you think another healthy aspect of the movement is that it is so self-critical?

SG: Certainly, because there’s no program. These people are willing to talk to one another and engage with each other with questions such as, How do we do this?, and What will bring glory to God? What I find especially gratifying as a theologian is that so many of the people in Emergent are interested in theology, whereas my generation tended toward the attitude that, once we’ve been to seminary and had our theology course and so forth, we no longer have to bother with theology anymore. And so the question always became very pragmatic: How do we go about winning the world? building the church? and so on. But what I find with the Emergent folks is that so many of them are keenly interested in theological questions and bringing theological questions back on the table, which is healthy, I believe. It’s also dangerous, which means that what is needed right now is a number of mature voices who can assist them in the process of sorting things out.

the assumption that bigger is better. The zeal for growth easily fostered “a kind of program-envy….

Looking back, I spent a good part of the 1980’s and ‘90s going from conference to conference learning how to ride high on someone else’s success.” To shepherd a congregation was not enough; the aim was to have the fastest-growing congregation. “It was survival of the fittest with a thin spiritual veneer.”

In 1998 Burke started TheOoze.com. The name of the active chat room is designedly metaphorical: Burke intends this to be a place where “the various parts of the faith community are like mercury. Try to touch the liquid or constrain it, and the substance will resist. Rather than force people to fall into line, an oozy community tolerates differences and treats people who hold opposing view with great dignity. To me, that’s the essence of the emerging church.”

Protest Against Modernism The difficulty in describing the Emergent Church movement as a protest against modernism is partly one of definition: neither modernism nor postmodernism is easy to define. Even experts in

intellectual history disagree on their definitions.

The majority view, however, is that the fundamental issue in the move from modernism to postmodernism is epistemology—i.e., how we know things, or think we know things. Modernism is often pictured as pursuing truth, absolutism, linear thinking, rationalism, certainty, the cerebral as opposed to the affective which, in turn, breeds arrogance, inflexibility, a lust to be right, the desire to control. Postmodernism, by contrast, recognizes how much of what we “know” is shaped by the culture in which we live, is controlled by emotions and aesthetics and heritage, and can only be intelligently held as part of a common tradition, without overbearing claims to being true or right.

Modernism tries to find unquestioned foundations on which to build the edifice of knowledge and then proceeds with methodological rigor; postmodernism denies that such foundations exist (it is “antifoundational”) and insists that we come to “know” things in many ways, not a few of them lacking in rigor. Modernism is hard-edged and, in the domain of religion, focuses on truth versus error, right belief, confessionalism; postmodernism is gentle and, in the domain of religion, focuses

th Stanley Grenz MR: Do you think one of the reasons why this generation is asking more theological questions is because nature abhors a vacuum? In other words, perhaps the current generation is reacting against the fact that the kind of Christianity that has been served up over the last few decades has been seriously lacking in theological depth.

SG: That may be a part of it, and it’s a good perspective to bring to it. But I think it may even be a little deeper. These people are realizing that a packaged program is not what you can take with you. There’s no universal “applicable in every situation” program that you can get from somebody, which if you apply, you’ll have a successful church. So, many of these people are going back and asking, what does it mean to be the church, theologically? What is God’s program? Who is God? What is our message? What is the human condition? And these are all theological questions.

SG: Wherever something is happening that is interesting and new and fresh, the marketers will come along and try to market it. I’m not sure if that is so much a critique of Emergent itself as much as it is a critique of the consumerist evangelical establishment that would really like to market it.

MR: And so is the danger that the sincere and honest questions may get buried under “hip revivalism”?

SG: Yes, and suddenly people get co-opted. So someone has fresh insights and is talking in a fresh way, and someone else comes along and says, “Hmm, I think I can market that.” And the temptation for the first person is always going to be that he gets starry-eyed over the thought of being the poster boy for the movement, and that’s a real temptation.

MR: Do you think the movement could be criticized for being basically a marketing movement, similar to that of the move from a simple cup of coffee to a double mocha latte cappuccino at Starbucks?

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ralism, the stance that asserts that no single outlook can be the explanatory system or view of reality that accounts for all of life. Even if we Christians think we have it, we must immediately face the diversities among us: are we talking about Baptist views of reality? Presbyterian? Anglican? And which Baptist? Philosophical pluralism denies that any system offers a complete explanation.

The second definition is of relativism. It is the theory that denies absolutism and insists that morality and religion are relative to the people who embrace them. Lest Christians think none of this applies to them, McLaren draws attention to the ethnic cleansing of the Old Testament, to David’s many wives, to injunctions against wearing gold rings.

If both philosophical pluralism and relativism are given free play, McLaren asserts, it is difficult to see how one can be faithful to But there is a danger in constantly exploding the certainties of the past: if we are the Bible. Yet absolutism cannot be allowed to rule: not careful, we may be left with nothing to hang on to at all. the criticism of absolutism is too devastating, too convincing to permit it to stand. So perhaps a culture plagued by Brian McLaren, probably the most articulate absolutism needs a dose of relativism to correct speaker in the emerging movement, has empha- what is wrong with it—not so much a relativism sized, in both books and lectures, that postmod- that utterly displaces what came before, but a relaernism is not antimodernism. The telling point for tivism that in some sense embraces what came McLaren and most of the other leaders of the before, yet moves on. If absolutism is the cancer, it Emergent Church movement is their emphasis on needs relativism as the chemotherapy. Even the discontinuity as over against the continuity though this chemotherapy is dangerous in itself, it with modernism. When McLaren speaks through is the necessary solution.

If absolutism is not the answer and absolute relthe lips of Neo, the postmodern Christian protagonist of his best-known books (the New Kind of ativism is not the answer, what is the Christian way Christian trilogy), he can use “post-” as a universal ahead? Here McLaren finds himself heavily category to highlight what he does not like: “In the indebted to the short work by Jonathan Wilson, postmodern world, we become postconquest, post- Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World: Lessons for the mechanistic, postanalytical, postsecular, postobjec- Church from MacIntyre’s After Virtue. This is surely tive, postcritical, postorganizational, postindividu- what we want: we want to learn to live faithfully in alistic, post-Protestant, and postconsumerist.” a fragmented world. Absolutism plays by one set These books show how much what McLaren of rules. Real pluralism is like a large field where thinks “a new kind of Christian” should be like today many games are being played, each game observis determined by all the new things he believes are ing its own rules. This sort of pluralism is coherent. bound up with postmodernism: hence “a new kind But we live in a fragmented world: we are playing golf of Christian.” with a baseball, baseball with a soccer ball, and so Much of McLaren’s aim in his writing and lec- forth. This is not real pluralism; it is fragmented turing is to explode the certainties that he feels existence. have controlled too much of the thinking of Doubtless a few small, coherent, communities Western Christian people in the past. But there is exist—Hasidic Jews, perhaps, or the Amish—who a danger in constantly exploding the certainties of manage to play by one set of rules, but the rest of us the past: if we are not careful, we may be left with are mired in fragmentations. As a result, there is no nothing to hang on to at all. Recognizing the dan- coherence, no agreement on where we are going. ger, McLaren takes the next step by providing us Our accounts of what we are doing maintain the with two definitions. lingering use of the older absolutist language, while The first of his definitions is of philosophical plu- we find ourselves, not in genuine pluralism, but in upon relationships, love, shared tradition, integrity in discussion.

How then do those who identify with the Emergent Church movement think about these matters? The majority of emerging church leaders see a very clear contrast between modern culture and postmodern culture and connect the divide to questions of epistemology. Some think that we are in a postmodern culture and therefore ought to be constructing postmodern churches.

A few acknowledge that not everything in postmodernism is admirable and therefore want to maintain some sort of prophetic witness against postmodernism at various points while eagerly embracing the features of postmodernism that they perceive as admirable.

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fragmentation. In North America we have a memory of absolutist totalitarian Christianity and experience fragmentation. So our choice is whether to go back to this absolutist heritage or forward to something else. Can we weave a fabric that is not totalitarian and absolutist but avoids absolute relativism? The former returns us to the barbarities and is unconvincing in a postmodern age; the latter simply leaves us open to the marketers, for there is no coherent defense against them.

The way ahead, McLaren suggests, is very helpfully set out in David Bosch’s Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Toward the end of the book, Bosch lists eight perspectives that speak to our situation and give us some direction: 1. Accept co-existence with different faiths gladly, not begrudgingly. It is not their fault if they are alive.

2. Dialogue presupposes commitment to one’s position, so it is surely not a bad thing to listen well. Dialogue should be congruent with confidence in the gospel.

3. We assume that the dialogue takes place in the presence of God, the unseen Presence.

In such dialogue we may learn things, as Peter does in Acts 10–11. Similarly, Jesus learns from his interchange with the Syrophoenician woman.

4. Missional dialogue requires humility and vulnerability. But that should not frighten us, for when we are weak, we are strong. It is surely right, for instance, to acknowledge earlier atrocities committed by Christians, even as we remain careful not to disparage those earlier Christians.

5. Each religion operates in its own world and therefore demands different responses from Christians.

6. Christian witness does not preclude dialogue.

7. The “old, old story” may not be the true, true story, for we continue to grow, and even our discussion and dialogues contribute to such growth. In other words, the questions raised by postmodernism help us to grow.

8. Live with the paradox: we know no way of salvation apart from Jesus Christ, but we do not prejudge what God may do with others.

We must simply live with the tension.

I have taken this much space to summarize McLaren’s views (articulated at a recent lecture) for a couple of reasons. One is because most sides would agree that McLaren is the emerging church’s most influential thinker (or, at the very least, one of

them). Another reason is because while most leaders of the Emergent Church movement set up a relatively simple antithesis—namely, modernism is bad and postmodernism is good—McLaren is careful in this piece to avoid the obvious trap: many forms of postmodern thought do in fact lead to some kind of religious relativism, and McLaren knows that for the Christian that is not an option.

He clearly wants to steer a course between absolutism and relativism, and he is more careful on this point than some of his peers.

Nevertheless, for McLaren, absolutism is associated with modernism, so that every evaluation he offers on that side of the challenge is negative.

Indeed, it is difficult to think of a single passage in any of the writings of the Emergent leaders that I have read that offers a positive evaluation of any element of substance in modernism. But McLaren does not connect relativism with postmodernism.

He appears to think of relativism as something more extreme (perhaps postmodernism gone to seed?), while postmodernism itself becomes the uncritiqued matrix in which we must work out our theology. So while he dismisses absolute religious relativism (it cannot be said that he critiques it; rather, he recognizes that as a Christian he cannot finally go down that avenue), I have not yet seen from McLaren, or anyone else in the Emergent Church movement, a critique of any substantive element of postmodern thought.

Protesting on Three Fronts The Emergent Church movement is characterized by a fair bit of protest against traditional Evangelicalism and, more broadly, against all that it understands by modernism. But some of its proponents add another front of protest, namely, the Seeker-sensitive church, the megachurch.

The degree to which this element stands out varies considerably. It is certainly present, for instance, in Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. His recent book is praised by not a few pastors in the Seekersensitive tradition, doubtless because Kimball casts his work, in part, as the way forward to reach a new generation of people who have moved on, generationally and culturally, from the kinds of people who grabbed the attention of the Seeker-sensitive movement three decades ago. Although there are differences, the Emergent church leaders, like the Seeker-sensitive leaders in their time, are motivated, in part, by a desire to reach people who do not seem to be attracted to traditional approaches and stances—and the Seeker-sensitive movement is now old enough to be one of the “traditional” approaches. Pastors in the Seeker-sensitive tradi-

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tion, then tend to see in the emerging church leaders a new generation of Christians doing the sort of thing that they themselves did a generation earlier.

Kimball’s book sets out how to go after the postSeeker-sensitive generation. Much of his material goes over common ground. He offers a kind of popular profile of what he thinks postmodernism embraces: it accepts pluralism, embraces the experiential, delights in the mystical, and is comfortable with narrative, with what is fluid, global, communal/tribal, and so forth. Kimball then turns to how we should go about things rather differently. This includes an appendix on post-Seeker-sensitive worship. Here we must have much more symbolism and a greater stress on the visual. We should have crosses and candles. There might be an entire communion service without a sermon. The entire geography of the room may be different, with the possibility of different groups within the assembly engaging in different things at a time, and perhaps

someone going off for a while to a quiet desk for a bit of journaling. The entire experience should be multisensory; the prayer corner may well burn incense. “Worship in the emerging church,” Kimball writes, “is less about looking out for what is on the cutting edge and more about moving back into our spiritual center with Jesus as our sole focus.”

Kimball offers us antithetical visions of modern preaching and postmodern preaching. In modern preaching, the sermon is the focal point of the service, and the preacher serves as the dispenser of biblical truths to help solve personal problems in modern life. Sermons emphasize explanation—explanation of what the truth is. The starting point is the Judeo-Christian worldview, and biblical terms like “gospel” and “Armageddon” do not need definition. The biblical text is communicated primarily with words, and this preaching takes place within the church building during a worship service.

By contrast, Kimball writes, in the postmodern

Book Church Re-imagined

by Doug Pagitt emergentYS, 2003 163 pages (paperback), $16.99 Church Re-imagined reads like a collection of journals. While the bulk of the material is by Doug Pagitt, the journal entries by some of the members of Solomon’s Porch, the missional Christian community in Minneapolis where Pagitt pastors, give the reader a broader perspective than the personal view of the pastor.

Each chapter focuses on one day of the week, highlighting a different aspect of the church’s communal life. This format lies in the conviction that “community is where real spiritual formation happens” (26). Pagitt contends that many churches focus too much on an educational approach to discipleship, rather than on a holistic approach. There is more to Christian formation than simply giving information to people. “I do believe that the knowledge-based spiritual formation of the twentieth century has so reduced the call of Jesus to right belief that many become confused about why mere profession of belief does not bring about life change” (23). Solomon’s Porch is reacting against the Industrial-Protestant mentality of product-based discipleship.

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The community is seeking to move to an understanding of discipleship where spiritual formation involves a whole-life approach to the Christian faith. Pagitt suggests seeing spiritual formation develop through practices such as worship, physicality, dialogue, hospitality, belief, creativity, and service. While Solomon’s Porch would not limit themselves to these practices, they shape the way we are asked to see the life of the church.

I appreciated Solomon’s Porch’s commitment to community, and they successfully show that one cannot be a Christian without the community of faith. Solomon’s Porch also has given significant thought to how they do what they do. Deep reflection is given on how to bring the ancient faith into a postmodern context. Solomon’s Porch highlights that discipleship is not to be construed as being in opposition to mission. Rather, the community of faith, when it is truly living as a family, becomes committed to mission and community renewal.

As is the case when a new movement arises in reaction to deficiencies in an older model, Solomon’s Porch fails to be a true biblical model of a Christian community. While much of the book tries to be irenic, I sense an unspoken suspicion against a Reformational understanding of Christian formation while openly embracing Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Quaker, and pietistic theology and spirituality. Solomon’s Porch seems to be a perfect example of what happens when postmodernism, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and the Twixter generation collide.

Emergent Church movement, the sermon is only one part of the experience of the worship gathering. Here the preacher teaches how the ancient wisdom applies to kingdom living; the preacher emphasizes and explains the experience of who the truth is. The starting point is the Garden of Eden and the retelling of the story of creation and of the origins of human beings and of sin (cf. Acts 17:22–34). The scriptural message is communicated through a mix of words, visual arts, silence, testimony, and story, and the preacher is a motivator who encourages people to learn from the Scriptures throughout the week. A lot of preaching takes place outside the church building in the context of community and relationships. Such preaching will be deeply theocentric rather than anthropocentric, and care should be taken not to insult people’s intelligence.

What cannot be overlooked in Kimball’s book, I think, is how much of his analysis is specifically

directed against churches in the Seeker-sensitive tradition. For example, some of his suggestions— such as insistence that sermons should be theocentric and not anthropocentric, that they should not insult the intelligence of the hearers, that instruction in the Word should go on throughout the week and not be confined to public services on Sunday, and what we should aim for in kingdom living, one could easily find in Reformed exhortations, perhaps in the pages of a magazine such as this.

Other parts of Kimball’s advice, of course, could not similarly be aligned. Yet the fact that so much of what he has to say can be aligned with many serious voices within traditional Evangelicalism suggests that most of the time the “implied reader” of his book is not the more traditional evangelical church, but Seeker-sensitive churches. In Kimball’s view, they too are out of step with the culture and fall under the curse of modernism. Moreover, if, as we have seen, several of Kimball’s individual sug-

Review Scripture’s authority is subsumed under the authority of the community. “Our trust in the Bible does not depend on information that ‘proves’ the Bible to be credible. We believe the Bible because our hopes, ideas, experiences, and community of faith allow and require us to believe” (123). Scripture is not the normative voice in the church—people’s experiences and desires are.

This is the position of Catholic and Quaker spirituality, not the hallmark of classic Christianity.

Not only is sola Scriptura tacitly rejected, the gospel is confused. Pagitt makes this confession in his opening chapter: “I had always understood the ‘Good News’ as summed up in the life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and promised return of Jesus. . . . Could it be that the ‘Good News’ Jesus talked about was less a call to believe in things that happened to him or would happen to and through him than an invitation into Kingdom life?”

(32). Although the gospel is about the Kingdom of God, I fail to understand why people feel the need to create a false either/or scenario between truths that are complementary. Further, does not the rest of the Bible affirm what Pagitt himself questions—the heart of the gospel is the doing and dying of Jesus Christ; it is more about what happened to and through him (1 Cor. 15:3–5)?

Sadly, this emphasis on a gospel that imitates Christ rather than rests in Christ is more the hallmark of modern Catholic and traditional liberal spirituality than classical historic Christianity.

Solomon’s Porch describes their community as open and toler-

ant. Pagitt insists that when they began Solomon’s Porch, it was not their intention to focus on “a demographic approach to meeting the felt needs of the coffee-house-visiting, cell-phoning, . . . [I]nternetaddicted, body-pierced children of the ‘me’ generation that so many of [them] are.” They think that it just happened. Besides that being a rather naïve statement, and while they are trying to avoid being “culturally chic” (44), Solomon’s Porch is a community comprised, it seems, of people who represent a specific demographic. I seriously doubt that Solomon’s Porch would be truly open to an urban, nonwhite, Reformational Christianity—where discipleship is formed not only in community, but under Scripture, by faith in Christ, and with a spirituality that does not cater to the shifting whims of either modern or postmodern thought.

I would recommend reading Church Re-imagined, if only to challenge those who are comfortable with an approach to discipleship that fails to see Christian formation as more personal and community-driven than informational and program-driven. For those who are smug in thinking that theological correctness is all that is needed, this book helps in challenging us to think more holistically about being propositionally correct but practically conformed to this age.

Suler Acosta Coalition for Christian Outreach (www.phillytrend.org) Philadelphia, PA

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gestions as to the way ahead are reminiscent of stances taken within parts of traditional Evangelicalism, the structure of his thought, taken as a whole, is distinctively postmodern.

What Should We Be Asking? his is but a sketchy introduction to the Emergent Church movement. What have we learned so far and what questions should we be asking?

From these summaries of the stories of many of the leaders of the emerging movement and the survey of some of their publications one point stands out rather dramatically. To grasp it succinctly, it is worth comparing the Emergent Church movement with the Reformation, which was, after all, another movement that claimed it wanted to reform the church. What drove the Reformation was the conviction, among all its leaders, that the Roman Catholic Church had departed from Scripture and had introduced theology and practices that were inimical to genuine Christian faith. In other words, they wanted things to change, not because they perceived that new developments had taken place in the culture so that the church was called to adapt its approach to the new cultural profile, but because they perceived that new theology and practices had developed in the church that contravened Scripture, and therefore that things needed to be reformed by the Word of God. By contrast, although the Emergent Church movement challenges, on biblical grounds, some of the beliefs and practices of Evangelicalism, by and large it insists it is preserving traditional confessionalism but changing the emphases because the culture has changed, and so inevitably those who are culturally sensitive see things in a fresh perspective. In other words, at the heart of the emerging reformation lies a perception of a major change in culture.

This does not mean that the Emergent Church movement is wrong. It means, rather, three things.

First, the Emergent Church movement must be evaluated as to its reading of contemporary culture.

Most of its pleas for reform are tightly tied to its understandings of postmodernism. The difficulty of the task (granted the plethora of approaches to postmodernism) cannot exempt us from making an attempt.

Second, as readers will have already observed from this short survey, the appeals to Scripture in the Emerging Church literature are generally of two kinds. On the one hand, some Emergent church leaders claim that changing times demand that fresh questions be asked of Scripture, and then fresh answers will be heard. What was an appropriate use of Scripture under modernism is no

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longer an appropriate use of Scripture under postmodernism.

On this gentler reading of Evangelicalism’s history, traditional evangelicals are not accused of being deeply mistaken for their own times, but of being rather out of date now, not least in their handling of the Bible. On the other hand, the Emergent Church’s critique of modernism, and of the Evangelicalism that modernism has produced, is sometimes (not always) so bitter that Evangelicalism’s handling of Scripture can be mocked in stinging terms. This is not meant to imply that this is true of all emerging pastors.

Third, granted that the Emergent Church movement is driven by its perception of widespread cultural changes, its own proposals for the way ahead must be assessed for their biblical fidelity. In other words, we must not only try to evaluate the accuracy of the Emergent Church’s cultural analysis, but also the extent to which its proposals spring from, or can at least be squared with, the Scriptures. To put the matter differently: Is there at least some danger that what is being advocated is not so much a new kind of Christian in a new Emergent Church, but a church that is so submerging itself in the culture that it risks hopeless compromise?

Even to ask the question will strike some as impertinence at best, or a tired appeal to the oldfashioned at worst. I mean it to be neither. Most movements have both good and bad in them, and in the book from which this article is taken I highlight some of the things I find encouraging and helpful in the Emergent Church movement. I find that I am more critical of the movement because my “take” on contemporary culture is a bit removed from theirs, partly because the solutions I think are required are somewhat different from theirs, partly because I worry about (unwitting) drift from Scripture, and partly because this movement feels like an exercise in pendulum swinging, where the law of unintended consequences can do a lot of damage before the pendulum comes to rest. ■ D. A. Carson is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.

This article was adapted from his new book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Zondervan, 2005). It is excerpted here by permission of the author and publisher.

FA I T H A L A C A RT E ? | The Emergent Church

Settlers, Pilgrims, and Wanderers ravel writer Pico Iyer confesses that he likes airports a lot. Part mall, part border-crossing, they buzz with the ambient noise of postmodern consciousness, representing an “everywhere” that is really no actual place at all. Those of us who can’t remember when we were not always on the go, repeatedly uprooted growing up, living in the fast lane with computers and cell phones, catching planes and channel surfing, know deep inside ourselves what it means to be a wanderer in these “everywhere” places.

The Emergent Church movement is as much the product of this postmodern condition as the megachurch movement from which it recoils, but whereas the latter has seemed obsessed with the novel, the ephemeral, the immanent, and the practical, the next-generation Emergent groups evidence an interest in the ancient, the authentic, the transcendent, and the mysterious.

While there is much to appreciate in the Emergent movement’s instincts that should be celebrated and encouraged, is there a characteristically modern tendency that it shares with its megachurch heritage—a tendency that may finally threaten the noble aspirations of these bright, energetic, and hopeful followers of Christ?

First and foremost, Emergent identifies with postmodernism, although its celebration of postmodernism is often as sweeping as its critique of modernity. In many respects, Emergent reflects these most-modern rather than postmodern tendencies.

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In fact, to gain any real insight into the Emergent movement (as about any other in our day), one has to visit its websites. There, one enters a world in which theology and church practice are decided largely by democratic conversation: like a 24-hour live streaming Oprah show.

Once upon a time, churches had an established way of deliberating on its faith and practice together, which included creeds, confessions, catechism, and Bible teaching at home and church, the training, testing, and ordination of church officers, visitation in homes, care for those in distress, and so forth. For a variety of reasons, these practices have been undermined in modernity. Emergent’s leaders prize reconnecting with the past. However, they share with their Boomer parents more of the pickand-choose approach to life than they might realize. In fact, even more so, if their websites are any indication. I’ve met many of these brothers and sisters and am routinely impressed by their honesty and interest in encountering God rather than sim-

ply themselves in worship. They are interested in reciting the creeds regularly, along with frequent administration of Communion, recovering space for communal prayer, and service to each other in life’s concrete circumstances. They are hungry to read books about God, not just tracts or books about how they can use God to get what they want out of life.

At the same time, they display an eclectic approach that one might expect from “surfing the Net,” often revealing a naïve acceptance of completely contradictory views and practices. The mystical usually wins out over anything that smacks of systematic theology or doctrine. The latter, after all, is a modern way of thinking, despite the fact that the classic systems are premodern and rejecting them was the pastime of modernity. Brian McLaren is illustrative of both the honest longing and confusion that I think Emergent represents. In his recent book, A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan), McLaren strikes a magnanimous pose as a great

Book Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of the Christian Faith

by Richard J. Foster HarperSanFrancisco, 1998 272 pages plus appendices & endnotes (paperback), $15.00 Martin Marty’s forward to Richard Foster’s book raises an interesting challenge to modern-day Christians. How do we present a moored spirituality, rooted in truth to New Agers who create their own self-centered spirituality grounded completely in their own personal experiences? The book never really answers the question.

Rather, Foster’s anecdotal collection of Christian spirituality runs the gamut of doctrine and experience, meandering across the vast array of Christian experience, providing interesting tales of religious experience. As apology and polemic, it is merely postmodern experience sharing.

The opening chapter, “Imitatio: The Divine Paradigm” calls Christians to follow Christ by studying the Gospels to see how

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he lived. While the doctrine of salvation is not the point of the book in a narrow sense, it gets little reference, and the good news is described in mostly generic terms such as “God’s kingdom of love.”

That being said, congenial, warm Christian experience and sentiment are Foster’s forte in this and his other books. The majority and balance of the book outlines six main streams of Christian experience: the contemplative tradition (the prayerfilled life), the holiness tradition (the virtuous life), the charismatic tradition (the spirit-empowered life), the social justice tradition (the compassionate life), the evangelical tradition (the word-centered life), and the incarnational tradition (the sacramental life).

As anecdotal encouragement to follow Christ in our lives with a brief analysis of the strengths and weaknesses found in each stream, this is an interesting book and a challenge to the complacency of many modern-day Christians who have placed themselves in often too limited a focus in their Christian living and experience. In the contemplative chapter, for example, Foster reminds us that our faith is more than just a “cerebral religion.” The holiness tradition “gives us hope for genuine progress in character transformation” (87).

The charismatic tradition “offers an ongoing correction to the impulse to domesticate God” (129). The social justice tradition

reconciler of the various traditions. In fact, the subtitle is as telling as it is long: Why I Am a Missional+Evangelical+ Post/Protestant+Liberal/Conservative+ Mystical/Poetic+Biblical+Charismatic/Contemplative+Fundamentalist/Calvinist+Anabaptist/Anglican+Methodist+Catholic+Green +Incarnational+Depressed-Yet-Hopeful+ Emergent+Unfinished Christian.

While the subtitle might suggest that he tries to adapt even traditions usually regarded as polar opposites to a united orthodoxy, he rejects, for example, Calvinism, Fundamentalism, Lutheranism, and even key aspects of Evangelicalism, by redefining them until they are actually the opposite of what they say they are. As illustrated in his description of Calvinism (186–190), the “generosity” is as selective as its “orthodoxy.” Both Calvinism’s “TULIP” and its commitment to guarding the so-

called solas reflect a reductionism that must be abandoned, he insists (198). So much for letting Calvinism have a spot in the food court! “But I am interested, very interested, in identifying with the Anabaptist movement that arose in the sixteenth century,” because they “emphasize personal commitment … see the Christian faith primarily as a way of life” and “have taken a radical posture in relation to modernity” (204–205). In addition to their “practice of compromise” and “practice of beauty,” Anglicans are celebrated for, “in their best moments,” rejecting sola Scriptura in favor of a “dialogue” between Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience—none of which can stand alone as a norm (210). Remarkably, he adds that Anglicanism as well as Anabaptism “withheld their full allegiance from modernity” and therefore “have much to offer all who seek a generous orthodoxy beyond modernity” (212). (None of my Anglican friends, at least, would automatically associate their denomination with resistance to modernity.)

Review calls us to “right ordering of society” (76). We are not to deny the poor and oppressed their fair place in this world.

The evangelical tradition section focuses primarily on the story of Billy Graham and his commitment to evangelizing the world, along with his conflicts with fundamentalists like John R. Rice. He does, toward the end of the chapter, spend several pages discussing Scripture and doctrine. “As the Protestant reformers put it, sola Scriptura, the Scripture alone. This important confession gives us a standard or a norm for discerning faith and practice” (222). He encourages us that it has primacy over everything else in that regard. Having read others of Foster’s works, this is not a confession of his Calvinism, but rather a statement of his warm-hearted affinity for the Word.

The last chapter is the incarnational tradition, which Foster says “focuses upon making present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit” (237). Incarnation comes in corporate worship and liturgy, the latter of which he asserts occurs in all traditions. It also comes in the arena of everyday life, which he connects to the Reformation concept of “the priesthood of all believers” (266). It bears some resemblance to Herman Dooyeweerd’s concept of sphere sovereignty. This chapter is the least clearly defined and developed.

The two appendices, over 100 pages, cover critical turning points in church history, and an alphabetical section of notable figures and

significant movements. They seem unnecessary to the book.

This book is best perused as a purely devotional read. While Christians of all traditions will find sections they like, as well as those with which they will disagree, find ambiguous, or occasionally self-contradictory, this could be a useful book to drop in the lap of a Starbucks-sipping New Ager, or spiritually dead Gen-Xer or Boomer church member. There is probably something here that would motivate them, as well as those who have Christian faith, to evaluate their Christian experience or lack thereof.

This book is not recommended for clarifying theological issues, as that is not its purpose. Indeed, Foster tells us he has strong opinions on issues such as women in ministry and speaking in tongues, but never shares them. Such action would selfcontradict his warm-hearted ecumenical spirit. I would, even as one against the ecumenical movement, agree with Foster on one point. We can learn from all true Christian traditions, even those with which we find significant theological disagreement. This is a pleasant, leisurely read that should not be taken as any kind of a theological statement. It could be described as Guideposts magazine-style writing for the more pensive.

Lin Cook Pittsburgh, PA

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He is also a Methodist. We are told that Luther and Calvin never replaced the Catholic hierarchy with “a new system of spiritual formation and nurture”—this was left to Wesley (218). Spiritual formation simply cannot be attained by “systematic theologies or biblical knowledge,” but requires a new search to recover “Catholic contemplative practices and medieval monastic disciplines (which, coincidentally, were also being rediscovered by many mainline ‘liberal’ Protestants with great blessing)” (220).

McLaren is Catholic because “Catholicism is sacramental.” “Start with three sacraments—or even seven—and pretty soon everything becomes potentially sacramental as, I believe, it should be” (226). But if everything is a sacrament, then what

tification. Faith in Christ is not necessary, since the point of the gospel is to follow Christ. This has a long pedigree in modern theology, of course.

McLaren displays genuine respect for the integrity of liberalism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Anabaptism, WesleyanArminianism, and the mystical traditions, which he does not exhibit toward all of the “isms” he tries to absorb.

The question, therefore, is twofold: first, does his own version of Christianity end up being sufficiently orthodox and, second, is it really generous to redefine traditions that one does not like until they say what one thinks they should say? One of the key tenets of postmodern theory is to recover respect for “otherness”—letting those who are different from oneself be who they are without trying to force them into playing a role Before Emergent brothers and sisters reject Reformation orthodoxy, they should at you’ve scripted for them. To fit with McLaren’s definition least know what it is and what it is not. of generous orthodoxy, a Calvinist, for example, would have to reject Calvinism and accept McLaren’s redefined distinguishes Baptism and the Lord’s Supper? version. Agreement is reached only when we agree McLaren seems to think that a sacrament is anything with the new definition—that is, with McLaren’s that points to God, but at least Orthodox, Catholic, own theology. Is this not its own form of dogmaand Reformation churches, despite their differ- tism?

McLaren applauds liberals for “their desire to ences, have understood sacraments as means of grace to which God attaches his promise. Multiplying live out the meaning of the miracle stories even sacraments and portals of “the sacred” ended in the when they don’t believe the stories really happened idolatry and superstition of medieval Christendom. as written” (61). Just as we enjoy a rich diversity of “Mystery” and “the sacred,” like “community,” must cuisine for our food, we need not reject any of be defined by Scripture, not by reaction against our these traditions: “Why not celebrate them all?” experiences growing up in the fast-food “seeker” (66). It’s hard to know how exactly a Christian might celebrate apostasy, which liberalism certainchurches of our parents.

“Catholicism respects tradition,” we are told. ly is.

McLaren may have a more sophisticated palate, “The Protestant Reformation separated two brothers: Scripture and tradition” (227). But this is pure but his religious food court is essentially the caricature, not to mention, a somewhat odd criti- “Protestant smorgasbord” or “cafeteria Catholicism” cism to hear from a movement made up largely of of the Boomer era. “This is why, for starters, I am a independent congregations that do not subscribe Christian: the image of God conveyed by Jesus as the Son of God, and the image of the universe that to any particular tradition.

McLaren’s “generous orthodoxy” extends to resonates with this image of God best fit my deepnon-Christian religions, since there is “wheat” as est experience, best resonate with my deepest intuwell as “weeds” in all of our gardens (255). We ition, best inspire my deepest hope” (77). Starting encourage people to follow Jesus, but not to neces- with our own experience, intuition, and hope is the sarily become Christians. “ I don’t hope all Jews or very essence of modern foundationalism! More Hindus will become members of the Christian reli- importantly, it means that religion is, as modern gion. But I do hope all who feel so called will atheism persuasively argued, nothing more than a become Jewish or Hindu followers of Jesus” (264). projection of the felt needs of its adherents.

This is possible because Christ’s person and work Starting with our own experience and intuitions, are reduced primarily to “following Jesus”—his we end up with idols. moral example, more than his having fulfilled the So what’s the nature and role of Scripture? law, atoned for our sins, and been raised for our jus- When we talk about the Bible, it should be to use

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it “with the goal of becoming good people,” not getting into disputes over words like “authority,” “revelation,” and so forth, which after all (according to McLaren) are attributed to the Bible only in modernity (164–165). While Emergent leaders like McLaren encourage us to investigate the wisdom of the past, their versions of orthodoxy and their generosity are as selective as any other tradition. One might even gain the impression that the author is still working with the categories of heresy and truth firmly in place, but correlated to “modern” and “postmodern,” respectively. Whatever he doesn’t like is dismissed as modern, while his own version bears the postmodern imprimatur.

Pilgrims on the Way f moderns thought of themselves as settlers having arrived in the “promised land” of autonomous reason, ideas, experience, or choice, postmoderns see themselves as wanderers engaged in endless play, always deferring the arrival of Truth. It’s the journey, not the destination, that makes it worth the trip. However, Christians are called to be pilgrims—not tourists out for a joyride, but travelers on their way to the eternal city.

Long before Emergent adopted the language of pilgrimage, the old Protestant orthodox theologians—both Lutheran and Reformed—used to begin by identifying “our theology” as “the theology of pilgrims on the way, not of the glorified saints in heaven.” They also called this “humble theology.” In contrast to modern foundationalism, they distinguished sharply between God’s knowledge and ours. Yet they also affirmed a destination with a clear route. Not that everything in Scripture is “equally plain or equally important” (Westminster Confession), but it is our sufficient map for leading us to God as he has revealed himself in Christ by his Spirit for our salvation and restoration. A cursory reading of these old systems reveals an amazing breadth of knowledge of the whole Christian tradition and an attempt to appropriate whatever they could of ancient and even medieval theology.

Unlike Fundamentalism, Protestant orthodoxy was ecumenical, happy to acknowledge the vast areas of agreement, while defending its own understanding of a genuinely catholic orthodoxy. That is exactly what McLaren is trying to do, but apparently under the impression that he and his postmodern colleagues are doing it for the first time, and thus with much less clarity. Before Emergent brothers and sisters reject Reformation orthodoxy, they should at least know what it is and what it is not. This they will not learn from Brian McLaren, at least thus far in his voyage.

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This is not an attack on McLaren’s character. I have found him and many of his Emergent colleagues to be quite generous on a personal level.

Furthermore, I resonate with many of his criticisms of one-sided, reductionistic, and in some cases, unChristian positions. Rather, my chief question concerns his approach to Christian conviction and practice. When it comes to issues like global warming, militarism, poverty, and following Jesus’ example, McLaren is as full of uncompromising conviction as any tent-revivalist.

Perhaps McLaren is reacting against his fundamentalist upbringing. I can identify with that.

Many of us joined up with this “Reformation” cause in reaction to the same legalism, narrow-mindedness, suspicion, right-wing politics and triumphalism that bothers McLaren. We discovered a rich tradition, with a wide-open vista for appreciating the greatness of God, the seriousness of our sin, the staggering measure of God’s grace in Christ, a new understanding of the church, preaching, sacrament, and covenantal nurture. We learned that God the Redeemer was also God the Creator and that the proper horizon for redemption is not simply “me and my personal relationship with Jesus,” but the cosmic renewal of all things. We rejoiced to find a reading of Scripture that was, as J. I. Packer calls it, “world-embracing” and “worldaffirming” without denying the seriousness of sin and the world’s captivity to it apart from Christ.

Small-mindedness and exclusiveness are rife in our confessional Reformed and Presbyterian circles, and we need to listen to the challenges of our Emergent brothers and sisters, but my fear is that such sweeping, confusing, and unorthodox statements as we’ve seen in this book will simply confirm a lot of folks in a smug dismissal.

While in the past, humility was the opposite of pride, in modernity it has become the opposite of conviction, and postmodernism can be exploited to give a new lease to such doctrinal indifferentism.

Today, being sure of something is considered a character flaw, and sometimes that is because strident figures (especially in the “culture wars”) confuse their own voice with the voice of God. There is always the danger of a reverse arrogance. In the name of humility, constantly refusing to dethrone ourselves as well as others from autonomous certainty-that-there-is-no-certainty, we can be “always learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). In his debate with Erasmus, who enjoyed toying with the heady topics of grace and free will but finally couldn’t take them seriously, Luther exclaimed, “Take away assertions, and you take away the Christian faith, for it is full of assertions … Erasmus, the Holy Spirit is not a skeptic!”

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Fundamentalism had more “certainties” than can be justified from Scripture, as if we possessed the knowledge of settlers in the City of God rather than pilgrims toward it. However, the danger is to overreact with equally arrogant assertions of uncertainty when and where God has clearly spoken (“Has God really said … ?”). In fact, postmodern skepticism can be the flip side of modern certainty, both confusing their own subjective state of affairs (pride vs. humility) with the nature and accessibility of reality itself. In both ways, we can become prisoners of our own experience, which is narcissism. Do we have the humility to doubt ourselves while having the courage to witness to the truth as it has been revealed? We simply cannot incorporate into our beliefs and practices whatever we find spiritually interesting. That’s how we get golden calves.

Precisely because we are by nature idolaters, we need to be constantly tested by the external authority of God’s Word. After all, McLaren has not remained silent or interminably uncertain. His books are also full of confident assertions, including polemically charged criticisms. This debate is not finally over whether we will speak, nor even over how we will speak (since arrogance and humility can be found on all sides), but what we will say.

The White Zone is for Loading and Unloading of Passengers Only …

No Parking! he latchkey children are now doing church. A generation that in many respects raised itself while its parents were enjoying themselves, is craving authenticity and genuine community. But will these communities reflect simply another niche market? Will these communities, too, reflect the natural communities of this passing age, this time mirroring the coffee bar of TV’s Friends? Or will it really be an expression of the communion of saints created by the Spirit through Word and sacrament, with young and old, rich and poor, enriching each other’s Christian walk? Will children be raised in it, will the middleaged be sustained in it, and will the elderly be respected and buried in it? Will it be a communion of the saints or the community of the market?

These are questions, of course, for all of us. Many of the things that Emergent’s leaders and followers want are right, but they will not find them on the Internet. Only a concrete community created and united by the Spirit to the Living Word through the written Word can resist the temptation to become just another social community united by shared demographic affinities.

It is a great opportunity for the church to be the church again. However, it is time that we all stop

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reinventing the church and join it again. This means submitting to the discipline of Christian speech in concrete, embodied, living spaces. It gives us a language that we did not invent or paste together from the pooled ignorance of chat rooms.

We would never let a physician operate on us without a pretty solid understanding of the pathology he or she is treating, and the ministry of ordained pastors, teachers, elders, and deacons was established by our Living Head as a gracious provision for his body, not as a legalistic authoritarianism. In fact, American history teaches us just how authoritarian entrepreneurial religious movements can become, as they are united around charismatic leaders rather than the charism that rests in the church as it is under the authority of Scripture.

We can’t live in airports. They can only be transitional meeting places. We are not settlers or endless wanderers, but pilgrims. Not yet at our destination, we are also not bouncing around from booth to booth at Vanity Fair, where everything is equally “interesting.” We know where we are going. The real division is not between generations created by niche marketing or even between being “modern” or “postmodern,” but is, as Jesus said, between “the children of this age” and “the children of the age to come” (Luke 20:34). In the spirit of mutual correction and admonition, it’s time that we all developed the right kind of humility— and the right kind of conviction that flows from it.

The Emergent movement can be thanked for helping to draw our attention afresh to that task of our common discipleship today. ■

Michael Horton is Professor of Apologetics and Theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California).

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Book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

by Leslie Newbigin William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1989 244 pages (paperback), $20.00 Leslie Newbigin’s book, a well-thought-out and well-intentioned attempt to relate the gospel to the postmodernist movement, brings to bear the hopes and frustrations of Newbigin fostered by three experiences and motivations: his work in missions in India, his leadership role in evangelism with the theologically deteriorating World Council of Churches in the 1950s, and his desire for a church united in the truth of the gospel. He correctly sees the weakness in modern Western culture that splits what we can know in terms of “facts” taught, for example, in the public schools, against doctrine, or what we can only hold as personal experience or belief that is “good for us,” a personal decision. While there are scientific truths in postmodern culture on which everyone can agree, there are no moral rights or wrongs that are not completely personalized and therefore completely relative, mere internalized values instead of facts. As Newbigin says, But what are facts? It is certainly not more than a hundred years since children in Scotland learned at an early stage that “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” This was as much a fact as the movement of the stars…. Today it is not taught as fact. It may be included in a syllabus of religious studies … for it is a fact that some people do have these beliefs. (15) “The language of values has replaced the traditional language of right and wrong” (17). This is the basis for the radical religious and moral dualism, founded on the work of Descartes, that makes “ultimate reality unknowable” (18). “The unknown god is a convenient object of belief, since its character is a matter for me to decide” (21).

This is also evident in the split between Christians who believe in propositional truth, as the reformers did, and liberal Christians who create their own god through inward spiritual experiences and doctrine as a reflection thereof (24). The plau-

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sibility structure of modern culture no longer imparts Christian truths as being self-evident in the Western world. It is now a personal choice that we make instead, not as before where “one could be a Christian without conscious decision because the existence of God was among the self evident truths” (64). This Constantinian, “state church” type of “conversion” to which he refers is not the type of conversion discussed in Scripture: repentance from sin and acceptance of the finished work of Christ on the cross for our salvation. Therefore, this previous “plausibility structure” of Christianity to which he refers having preexisted in the West, was actually of little or no value in bringing about true conversion.

The balance of the book reinvents many biblical concepts away from the historic Presbyterianism which the author would probably claim if asked. Newbigin is a Barthian process theologian where the experience of the “story” of Christ is more important than the story actually being true. Newbigin states that we are part of the experience of the story as history when we are elected by God to be part of the unfolding story of the church to which we attest in faith, not chosen so much in the sense of receiving forgiveness of our sins through the atonement of Christ into oneness with him for eternity. Newbigin states, “One way of seeing how the particularity of those acts of God which we celebrate in the Christian tradition is related to the continuity of God’s revelation of himself throughout all history, including the history of which we are now a part” (77). This is a church chosen primarily to witness, which he later in the book in essence demeans as being unable to relate effectively to those of other religions because of its weakness. This is a major internal conflict found in the book.

He continues with a redefinition of election: “They (the early disciples) are chosen (elected) not for themselves, not to be the exclusive beneficiaries of God’s saving work, but to be the bearers of the secret of his saving work for the sake of all” (86).

Newbigin resonates with the theology of hope of Jorgen Moltmann that we move toward a positive future in process away from the empty materialist existential trends of modern Western culture (111–112). The church needs to move away from a focus on personal conversion and a “privatized

Review eschatology” which “encourages us as we grow older to turn our back on the struggle and conflict of public life and to withdraw into a purely private kind of piety” (113). This is a neo-Calvinist, neoorthodox perspective that moves away from the full-orbed sphere sovereignty of traditional Calvinists Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd, which stressed Christian experience, conversion, and doctrine, as well as involvement in the world.

Indeed, Newbigin’s concept of mission seems devoted primarily to the sharing of the gospel in its most basic kerygmatic form translated into each culture by an indigenous church. “It will not be by the universal application of an unchanging pattern of personal and social behavior as laid down in the faith and practice of Islam. It will not be in a series of abstract moral and political principles. It will be in the life of a community which remembers, rehearses, and lives by the story told in the New Testament” (147). For Newbigin, it is all about how the gospel comes across in the story through personal exchanges. It, in a very Barthian sense, becomes the gospel when it hits someone right and resonates with him or her: “Being saved has to do with the part we are playing now in God’s story and therefore with the question whether we have understood the story rightly. It follows that our dialogue with people of other faiths must be about what is happening in the world now”(179).

Newbigin goes so far into contextualization that he winds up, not unexpectedly, in a type of universalism. He has too great a respect for non-Christian religions: “There is something deeply repulsive in the attitude, sometimes found among Christians, which makes grudging acknowledgement of the faith, the godliness, and the nobility to be found in the lives of non-Christians” (181). “The Christian must tell it (the story), not because she lacks respect for the many excellencies of her companions— many of whom may be better, more godly, more worthy of respect than she is” (182). It should not be about us as the message bearer, but about the gospel of Christ. This attitude of witness should be a statement about the need for humility for the sharing Christian, not about the supposed superiority of many of the unsaved in their false religions.

Yet, he continues to describe his modified universalism: “The position which I have outlined is exclu-

sivist in the sense that it affirms the unique truth of the revelation in Jesus Christ, but it is not exclusivist in the sense of denying the possibility of the salvation of the non-Christian” (182). While Newbigin does state that he does not believe that nonChristian religions can offer a way of salvation, he does believe that adherents to them can be saved if they faithfully follow those religions apart from knowledge of Christ. This is a contradiction.

Newbigin does the church a great service in a clear statement of the understanding of the key issues presented by postmodernism, and the need for connection with others in our identification of ourselves as Christians as part of the human race, not some super-spiritual arrogant elect. However, he does a disservice by the lack of clarity, or, in many cases, the vague or inaccurate redefinition of key points of evangelism and doctrine. While we may connect better to people we meet with anecdotal personal experiences, we should remember that the point is to teach the historical Christ and him crucified. “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). It is not about who has more moral superiority in the debate, or whether we can make a better connection by sharing warm personal experience, although both of those can help make a witness certainly more effective in some way. It is about what each man and woman will do with the resurrected Christ who came in real history to save mankind. It’s more than just an existential story for now, and it has to do with more than just this life: “If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of most men to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19, NASB). Leslie Newbigin was an intelligent, well-intentioned man who let his compassion take the best of his theology of evangelism and strip his Calvinism of its power in the historicity of the work of Christ as the power of proclamation.

Personal experience and our “story” are one thing, but wasn’t that one of his concerns, insufficiency in the delivery by sinful man, inept and arrogant Christians? It’s all about the work of Christ in history for salvation and God’s work of irresistible grace in the Holy Spirit quickening the heart of the unsaved to bring them to himself.

Lin Cook Pittsburgh, PA

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FA I T H A L A C A RT E ? | The Emergent Church

Experiencing Emergent t started out a cold and snowy day in L a n c a s t e r, Pennsylvania. I was heading to the airport, where I was to fly to a significantly warmer San Diego in order to attend an Emergent Church convention. Once there, my job was to secure an interview with Brian McLaren, attend various seminars, and talk to attendees—all with one goal in mind. Try to figure out what the Emergent Church movement was all about.

Once I arrived at my hotel and received the conference packet, I quickly thumbed through the list of conference functions.

There were numerous live music events, worship experiences (including communion), and late night discussions groups I could attend. McLaren was to give a number of lectures and there were multisensory “learning communities” to experience. Some of the seminars that I could choose from included:

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• “No more top down: New ways of leading” by Dave Fleming • “Karl Barth for the emerging church”

by John Franke • “Women pastors: Why or why not?” by Stan Grenz • “Reckoning with intuition: developing and fostering the creative impulse in self and community” by Tim Keel • “Sacredspace:Creating prayer stations and interactive art worship experiences” by Dan Kimball • “Public worship as spiritual formation”

by Brian McLaren • “We speak art: Rituals and celebrations from a neo-monastic postmodern tribe” by Rachelle Mee-Chapman • “Candle meltdown: What comes after wrought-iron, euro-icons, and Van Gogh mouse pads” by Sally Morgenthaler

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• “Theology for a new world— Reconstruction in theology” by Doug Pagitt • “What the bleep do we know!?” by Chris Seay • “Text in a TXT world: Postmodern communication” by Steve Taylor • “nu Monasticism” by Karen Ward • “Physiology of spirituality—Making your body your ally in spiritual formation” by Dieter Zander The average conference attendee appeared to be a suburban white male, between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Of course, he was a little more hip than average, often seen sporting a tattoo, body piercing, and mustache-free goatee. I asked some of these individuals what they thought of the Emergent movement. One, Andrew, told me, “The thing that sold me on it was the opening line to their advertisement, ‘Re-thinking church,’ and it’s just been something … I don’t know … I see a lot of tools in my toolbox that aren’t broken, but they’re not being used.” He went on to say that he didn’t think the Church was failing in everything, but that before too long “the world is going to keep breaking and we’re not going to be able to fix it at all.” A youth pastor told me he was attending because he wanted to get a handle on the changing culture. “The kids in my youth group are interacting differently than they did five years ago, and so for me, I’m just trying to get a handle on where they’re going so I can help the timeless message become relevant to them.”

The convention music was tribal and suburban, eclectic with a tendency toward techno pop. At our first orientation meeting, we were shown a series of sarcastic videos of spoof auditions for the would-be worship leaders for the convention. In one clip, Tim (a slightly effeminate man) said, “I think I should be the next Emergent Idol, because I like to take music that’s right from our culture and transcend it into worship.” Another simply began singing, “I’m proud to be a Republican, because at least I know I’m free ….” Also included were spoofs of Keith Green, Veggie Tales characters, and a worship leader who changed the lyrics of a popular Neil Diamond song to, “We’re coming to you Lord … Today!”

At the end of the first meeting, we were divided into groups and brought to our own particular learning communities. In these smaller, more intimate settings about one hundred to two hundred of us were encouraged not merely to listen, but also to interact with the discussion. The room I entered had the smell of burning incense and a collection of modern art. Once the technician got the bugs out of the system, we were also treated to a projection on the wall of looping images, like a finger scrolling down the page of the Bible. In this seminar, Brian McLaren

and Stanley Grenz led a postmodern discussion of biblical interpretation. Before our speakers began, we were encouraged to question whatever they said.

“There is a tendency,” we were reminded again and again, “for all speakers to condense a life of messiness into a clean one hour presentation.” After McLaren and Grenz finished their discussion, we split up into groups of three to five people for discussion and interaction. We were also encouraged not merely to take notes on the presentation but to draw pictures on pieces of cloth that were provided. At the end of the seminar, these cloth tiles were to be glued on to a big board at the back of the room.

Arts and crafts, projectors, and small group share sessions? I asked Sally Morganthaler, a popular author and worship leader in Emergent circles, about the use of these learning techniques that reminded me of elementary school. She said, “Yes, it’s a constructivist methodology, so we’re utilizing some of the newer adult learning theory that’s out there now.” I asked whether she would encourage this interactive approach for churches and she replied, “I think it could be a really exciting way to go about things. But it would be a challenge because of people’s expectations.”

After leaving the learning community, I decided to check out the prayer chapel upstairs. In it there were various prayer stations each with an eclectic assortment of art, photos, or symbols of some kind.

Smelling strongly of incense and with “photo darkroom” mood lighting, the room’s center feature was a station at which visitors were encouraged to “paint or sculpt a prayer.” I also had the option of signing up with a spiritual director who would help me “explore [my] own relationship to God.” The next morning I walked past the Emergent yoga class to check out the labyrinth where visitors, guided along a mazelike path, listen to soft, comforting music while pondering encouraging words and suggestions for prayer. A convention representative told me that this was an ancient prayer practice that grew out of medieval pilgrimages. “At one point people stopped taking pilgrimages because it was too costly, so the cathedrals decided to build these labyrinths in their basements so the people could do the same type of journey in an enclosed space and without the expense.” I caught up with two Southern Baptist pastors on their way out of the labyrinth who told me that they were very moved by the experience. “It was very powerful,” one told me. “This forced me to walk through my life, to empty myself out, and to really reflect on those things that are important to draw closer to God.” When I asked if this was something they might consider doing in the context of their own churches, the other pastor replied, “We were just talking about

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that. We’re going to try and figure out how to get the CDs or whatever and just do that for a service.

We’ll send the kids off somewhere and take an hour or two without anything else except that.”

The Seminar That Explained It All … Almost hus far all my experiences were very interesting, but I still needed to get a grip on exactly what the movement was. Tim Keel’s seminar, “What Is Emergent?” seemed to be the answer I was looking for. Keel is pastor of Jacob’s Well, an Emergent church in Kansas City, Missouri. There were only about twenty of us who needed to know, so Keel pulled up a stool and began by asking why each of us had come to the Emergent convention. Juliana spoke up first, “I grew out of Evangelicalism and now I’m a die-hard Episcopalian who loves ritual, smells and bells, and whatever.” She commented that in her view, the Emergent movement appeared to grow out of youth ministry, which she could see in all the “glitzy displays and that fact that everyone has cool hair.”

“But beyond that,” Juliana inquired probingly, “is there something from the inside that can define what the Emergent church is? I mean, it has to be more than cool hair and deconstructing texts.”

Jeff told the group that he leads worship for a college-age Sunday night meeting at his communi-

T

ty church. “I’m in that age group where I feel like I don’t fit in with the real traditional mindset and I’m not really sure what the Emergent mindset is, so I feel like I’m in between the two, trying to figure it all out.” Jeff felt he would be better prepared to lead his group in worship if he had a “better handle on what Emergent meant. I know it’s not just a bunch of cool songs and candles.”

Jim, a self-described fundamentalist Baptist, came to the conference in order to help him “reach the thirty-eight thousand postmodern students” at the university near his home. He asked, “How do I take the belief—that I don’t want to compromise—and pair it with a method that is Emergent (if I knew what that was)? That’s why I’m here.”

Will, who was raised Seventh-day Adventist, came to check out the conference because he kept hearing about Emergent from the college group at his six-thousand-member nondenominational church. “It’s a pretty happening church … I mean they’re headed to a huge building and they’re gearing up for television eventually.” Ultimately however, Will didn’t find solace amidst all this success, “It’s becoming more like a show, so I’m wondering what else is out there. I’ve been feeling for a long time that something is wrong … you know, that our church is missing a real sense of community.

We just don’t have that. We’re all disjointed.

Book Soul Tsunami

by Leonard Sweet Zondervan, 1999 261 pages (paperback), $16.99 “There is a tendency to overestimate the impact of phenomena in the short run and underestimate it in the long run” (Roy Imara of the Institute for the Future [IFTF]). This is the balancing act that Christians are called to in regard to the cultural tidal wave that Leonard Sweet describes in this unfortunately named book. If we overestimate the impact of the cultural “tsunami” of postmodernism’s impact and make adjustments that are really “sellouts,” the church could truly lose its very soul. “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world,

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yet forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36).

On the other hand, if we underestimate the impact of the philosophical, technological, relational, and spiritual tsunami waves of postmodernism, we will not make vital adjustments in how we explain and call fellow sinners to respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we simply write off the many cultures and faces of postmodernism as kooky and faddish, we risk making idols of cultures of the past that happen to suit our tastes, and we will miss out on the growth and joy that could be ours.

This is the tightrope that Sweet tries to walk. This book is a deluge of information that seeks to paint a picture of the massive changes taking place in our world—a picture of the environmental, technological, biological/genetic, relational, institutional, and philosophical changes that have happened in the last fifty years and are still happening at an increasing speed. As I said, it’s overwhelming. Yet this is Sweet’s point. It’s overwhelming change— both in content and pace. The quotes and bits of information

We’re this huge church that comes together for an hour on Sunday, and that’s it!”

Tim Keel followed these testimonies with his own autobiography. He had a broad ecclesial background: United Methodist, Southern Baptist, and evangelical Presbyterian. He interned at “a PC (USA) college ministry thing,” served in an Episcopal youth group, and spent a lot of time in parachurch ministries such as Young Life. Keel became a follower of Christ his senior year in high school, a time when his family life was totally falling apart. “The church really rescued me … it became my family and now I have a passion for the body of Christ.” In college he began a completely student-led campus ministry, “Icthus Christian Fellowship,” which was both “messy and together” and gave him a “profound experience of Christianity.” The difficult thing for Keel was watching this wonderful community of faith dissolve as people graduated and moved out into a “segmented and disintegrated suburban American life.”

He was greatly troubled when he observed friend after friend functionally lose their faith as God became less and less significant in their lives.

Keel eventually went to seminary and was involved in a number of church plants, but all of this was unsatisfying. Something just wasn’t right. He was continually haunted by the question, “Are the best years of my life in Christ behind me?” At about

this time Keel was involved a Willow Creek model church plant that was trying to reach out to a GenX demographic. But, he said, “At one point they realized that it was not really a GenX deal. There was a massive shift happening in our culture, and GenX was merely the vanguard of that shift. It was the first generation that was postmodern, post-Christian, post-Enlightenment . . . all these things.” Keel felt that they were putting words to his experience.

Later, Keel connected with a youth pastor by the name of Doug Paggit, who was beginning to assemble a group of young leaders under the umbrella of Leadership Network. “Doug began to gather all the rabble-rousers from around the country to create spaces for us to talk about what we were experiencing and recognizing culturally, and how the Church might begin to respond to some of these changes.”

According to Keel, the Emergent movement basically came out of that early network. “We began to really believe that it wasn’t just an issue of methodology that needed to be reexamined, but there were deep theological issues at stake.” So, as he explained, many of these young leaders began reexamining their understanding of salvation, the gospel, and the Church and her mission because “all these things had been deeply and profoundly misshaped by modern Enlightenment sensibilities.” In short, Emergent was a large community of people from var-

Review come at high speed and from every angle, and the book contains summaries and quotes from physicists, poets, futurists, pastors, politicians, doctors, laymen, dancers, historians, artists, and more.

Sweet puts forward ten “life rings for you and your church”— ten ways to avoid sinking and learning to swim and flourish in the new millennium culture. He aptly notes than many of our present cultural moments are “double rings”—great challenges to the church and yet great opportunities at the same time.

For instance, Sweet points out the paradox that, as a society, we are both “cocooning” (according to Faith Popcorn) and “decocooning” (according to Richard Celente) at the same time. We are simultaneously more isolated and more connected with technology. Postmodern folks are simultaneously “bored but hyper” (Andy Warhol). Amidst this culture of the busy yet empty, as Sweet points out, the church is called to be a community of genuine love where the hurting and isolated are welcomed and loved in the name of Christ.

Overall, Sweet does a much better job at describing the changes than prescribing the solution. “Postmodern culture is a sucker for the serpent’s lie: ‘You will be like God’” (289). Right on!

Yet then Sweet gets wimpy with ideas like “truth” and Reformed Christians will pick up on and rightly be frustrated with this. Yet I believe that we do need to heed his call to be more humble than we have been. The need of the hour is to humbly yet boldly preach the Lordship of Christ—the one who dethrones sinners and heals them at the same time. And I would agree with Sweet in this: Whatever cultural waves are hitting us, “[p]eople want to know God. They want less to know about God or know about religion than to know God. People want to experience the “Beyond” in the “Within” (420).

Rev. Steve Huber Liberti Church (PCA) Philadelphia, PA

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ious denominations and church traditions attempting to discover authentic forms of Christian faith amidst the ruins of the church in the postmodern world.

Keel, who sports his own ponytail and cool beard, told Juliana, “I understand the comments about the hair and stuff but it is so not about that.

It’s just an easy characterization, because I defy you to hang around here and go toe to toe theologically with anybody in this community, and you’ll be amazed at how much it’s not about surface stuff.”

The reason people are so image conscious, Keel argued, “is because most of the people in this community are trying to be missional since we live in a culture where we are visually driven.”

Authentic or Eclectic? t one point in the conversation I asked Keel if the Emergent movement could be labeled “eclectic” since it picks and chooses what it determines to be authentic Christian truth or practice from sometimes competing faith traditions.

And, if this was correct, could the movement be criticized for merely skimming the surface of all traditions rather than getting to know any of them well?

He thought about it for a moment, and gave a lengthy response:

A

This is something we are dealing with in our community at Jacob’s Well. Because people call and they want our doctrinal statement and I refuse to give one out. You know why? Because it is shorthand. It says, Oh, that’s the kind of community you are. And people in our culture today shop church. In other words, we’re so concerned with orthodoxy [right belief] that we don’t care about orthopraxy [right practice]. And there’s a way of being a Christian that I think is destructive: you can have all the right beliefs in your head, you can have all the right information, but if your life is shaped by twenty-first-century American materialism and the church becomes one more thing that you consume, then what the hell does it matter what you believe if there’s no community that shapes your salvation? And so I tell people, come to our church, spend six months with us, and then you tell us what we believe.

Dallas Willard has this great quote where he says that doctrinal statements are prepared by people who are worried about something.

So what if I’m not worried about anything?

Book “Church Time” in A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity

by Stanley Hauerwas Brazos Press, second printing 2001 288 pages (paperback), $19.99 Over the last few decades, Duke ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has been a thorn in the side of his colleagues both in the church and academy, mainline and evangelical, who would endeavor to make the Christian faith a friend rather than an enemy of American civil religion. Allies will not be disappointed with A Better Hope, although if they are familiar with After Christendom, Against the Nations, and Resident Aliens (coau-

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thored with William Willimon), this book may seem repetitive.

It is the third section of the book, “Church Time,” that deals with issues touching on the emerging church. The section begins with an illuminating chapter on the importance of memory in the light of suffering and evil. Modern Reformation readers will find chapter 10 worth the price of the book. Here Hauerwas seeks to restore the relatedness of worship, evangelism, and ethics.

“Tents—I think the problem began with tents,” he says. One “got saved” in tents and “worshiped” in churches. The only difference now is that the tents have become stadiums and they have become the churches (155–156). This breaks up worship, evangelism, and ethics. People aren’t getting saved, so we need the tents (now “user friendly worship”); church wasn’t changing people morally, so we invented “ethics” as a distinct discipline (157).

But what we need more than anything today is “truthful worship.”

“The church’s worship, therefore, is evangelism” (157). The form, not just the content, matters. We seem to need more ethics and more evangelism because our churches are not truly worshipping communities where God is rightly known and praised.

Not that there aren’t things to worry about, but I trust in Christ’s presence and the Spirit’s animating life in the context of our community. I think you would find that we hold to a generous orthodoxy and that everybody can affirm the Apostle’s Creed. All these theological traditions are wonderful, but were each born in a context. And what if we felt like we are finding ourselves in a context that might birth a tradition?

Keel then returned to his personal life journey, outlining his background in the fine arts, his intuitive personality, and his interest in “spiritual formation in the life of the soul.” He appeared to be quite frustrated with the fact that Richard Foster and Dallas Willard were the only two authors he could find who adequately treated the subject. He also told a story about feeling wiped out a few years back from church planting work, and heading to a Benedictine monastery to “get a room and die for a week … to recover from the burnout.” At this monastery, Tim developed a strong relationship with a monk who has since become his “spiritual director” and one of his very close friends. That mentoring relationship, says Keel, “has had an

enormous impact on our community.”

Keel returned to my question and said, “Not only do we have fifty years of evangelical history or 450 years of Protestant history, I get the whole church. And I think part of what forms Emergent is this sense that we’ve got this rich tapestry of experience to draw on.” He agreed that it was a bad idea to misrepresent or prostitute a tradition for one’s own use, but he also argued that Protestantism greatly limited our spiritual experience because, in his words, the tradition largely says, “I define who I am by who I’m not. Our belief is simply what we do. We can describe what we do, but the reality of what we believe is simply what we do. So, if you want to know what we believe, come to Jacob’s Well. Come see how we live our lives.”

Did I Miss the Answer? s I looked around the room I got the sense that many, if not most, of those present still couldn’t really grasp what Emergent meant.

One person inquired, “Is there a denomination that you are close to, so I can understand what you are.

It’s hard because I don’t feel like there’s a foundation. Is that the point, there isn’t a foundation?”

Keel responded with his own question, “What if

A

Review Therefore, we are no longer formed as disciples through Word and sacrament. Good order, music, and words are displaced by carelessness and pandering attempts to attract “seekers.”

Hauerwas notes the irony of conservatives scandalized by the pagan worship of Sophia in some mainline churches while their own churches “are more than ready to distort the proper order of Christian worship in the name of evangelism. They, of course, say they use the name of Jesus, but they fail to see that how Jesus’ name is used makes all the difference. Without the Eucharist, for example, we lack the means to know the kind of presence made possible by Jesus’ resurrection” (158). Not only must the Word be transformed by the demands of the market, crucial elements like the Eucharist that make us a community of Christ are relegated to secondary status or removed from ordinary worship completely (159). “The problem with churches that make ‘evangelism’ (that is, the continuing acquisition of new members) the purpose of their worship is not whether the worship is contemporary. The question is whether they are worshiping the God of Jesus Christ” (159). Despite the Arminian emphasis (“Worship is what we do

for God,” though he admits “this may sound Pelagian” apart from acknowledging that we do it together with God), he is correct to suggest that the real service we can perform for the world is to worship: “That is, after all, why we believe that there is nothing more important in a world that does not believe it has the time to worship God than to take time to worship God truthfully” (161).

We desperately need to address the issues Hauerwas puts before us and even learn from some of his answers, but the evangelical temptation has always been for quick solutions and stark either/or options. The very fact that the book closes with a manifesto for the Ekklesia Project, a parachurch organization to serve as something like a church-within-a-church, displays the author’s own apparent realization of the distance between the idealized church he presupposes and the actual churches that exist.

A review of the full book is available online at www.modernreformation.org.

Dr. Michael S. Horton Westminster Seminary California Escondido, CA

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Emergent is a way of being? It’s a posture. It’s an attitude. What if it’s a conversation rather than an organization or a set of beliefs?” He referenced the writings of philosopher Michael Polanyi and said, “I think there is a kind of knowing that’s really a gut level knowing. I just know it. I just feel it. There are times when I just go, ‘man the Spirit of God is here,’ and I don’t know why.”

Someone in the back asked a practical question, “What would an Emergent community look like?”

One woman, Lacy, who attends Keel’s church, responded to this question while knitting something: “I used to go to Ecclesia church in Houston for a while, and my experience there was totally different and incomparable to my experience at Jacob’s Well. And having visited Solomon’s Porch once, again it’s incomparable.” She also suggested that though there are certain shared values among Emergent church congregations, the fleshing out of those values and rules of faith looks very different in Houston than it does in Kansas City or Minneapolis.

This led Keel to talk about his church. “I had to start Jacob’s Well because I couldn’t find a church where I could connect to God. I wasn’t trying to reach anybody, I was trying to find a place where I could actually have an experience of God and live my life in a way that I was actually being fed. And guess what? I found out that other people had the same problem.” He then spoke candidly about his

idea that evangelism was a myth, and that we’re not really called to go reach or target people. “I don’t believe in any of those things, because what it does is make the church about something. I believe that what we are called to do is have an experience of God, an experience of Christ that at a primary level shapes our identity as beloved.”

Someone in the group who was more familiar with Emergent spoke up and directed his comments to the people who may not have had their questions answered, “Some of you are asking a lot of the questions that I’ve asked in previous years.

And at first I thought ‘will I ever get a straight answer?’ But there is no straight answer.

Emergent is something you discover and you’ll know it when you discover it.” Keel paused and agreed saying, “It makes it a little more mystical than I would say it, but yeah.” When Lacy added, “This can’t be mastered,” Keel agreed again and said, “No it can’t. So any church that is being animated by God’s Spirit ought to be freakin’ messy.”

It was nearly midnight before the group finally disbanded. As I made my way back to my hotel room, I realized that the discussion had been very instructive. Not only did I get a better sense of what drew people to Emergent, but the conversation gave me some insight into the thinking process of those wishing to start an Emergent church. The issue is much deeper than hairstyle, as Keel indicated, or even wor-

Book Out of the Question, Into the Mystery

by Leonard Sweet Waterbrook Press, 2004 256 pages (paperback), $19.99 Leonard Sweet has a beef with modernistic western Christianity. Alerting us to the damage as he sees it, Sweet is instead calling us to embrace an alternative way of looking at faith and to accept an invitation to “get lost in the Godlife relationship.”

Sweet seeks to lead us “out of the question”: out of legalism, institutionalism, hyper-rationalism, orthodoxy apart from love, right beliefs apart from right relationships … all that bad fruit that

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no one wants to imbibe. Heading “into the mystery” means to embrace a whole relationship with God, a whole relationship with others, and a whole relationship with God’s creation and God’s story.

“It’s time to replant the Christian faith back into the ground from whence it first grew.” Sweet says that the original fertile ground of Christianity is a worldview where right relationships were held to be primary, as opposed to correct doctrine apart from love. “Western Christianity is largely belief based and church focused. It is concerned with landing on the right theology and doctrine and making sure everyone else toes the line….

We may be doctrinally correct but we have become spiritual cadavers” (6).

I’m sympathetic to Sweet’s concerns. I also truly want to welcome questioners and strugglers, be more honest about my own spiritual journey, and not “act like I’ve got the truth in a strangle

ship preferences. It also goes deeper than appreciating postmodernism. At its heart, the Emergent movement is about failure. Having hitched their wagons to modernism in so many ways, many evangelical churches have failed to provide a place of solace and transcendence in the midst of a dying culture. Now with the waves of postmodernism crashing upon our shores, the failure of churches still clinging to modernist assumptions are increasingly apparent, especially to the next generation. Having failed to define ourselves by Christ’s story, our churches look like entertainment centers, self-help seminars, political rallies, and Kiwanis clubs. Most of us do not really know the person in the pew sitting next to us, and we have failed to live noticeably different lives than those of our non-Christian neighbors.

The Emergent convention was not merely about diagnosing the ills of the contemporary church, it also pointed us to various treatments and therapies. This is where I fear the Emergent Church fails to give us much lasting benefit.

Labyrinths, yoga, and prayer sculpting (to give only a few examples) might make us feel better for the moment, but we need medicine of a stronger sort. Burning incense might help cover up the dank smell of a church facility, but it will not ultimately lead to reformation. Without question, recovering a lost sense of community is a grand idea, but if the community itself is not about some-

thing other than itself, it will not last. We need Christ: We need to be caught up in his story, rather than our own. We need to better understand his Word and his mission for the church, not our own Cain-like attempts at spirituality. While “re-thinking church” can sometimes be a step toward ecclesiastic renewal, it should never be forgotten that it has just as often been the root cause of schism and heresy. Truly authentic Christian faith and practice is not recovered by an examination of what other churches have done, whether ancient or modern. It can only be recovered if we once again focus our attention and submit to Scripture as our norm for faith and practice.

After returning from the convention to my home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I thought about many of the Christians who reside in my area.

Here community and spiritual discipline are among some of the top concerns, along with living lives of authenticity, and utter frugality. These Christians have always rejected the excesses of American consumerism and simpy live off the land God gave them. Though it’s not quite emergent, given the fact that this community emerged some five hundred years ago, it should also be mentioned that Amish men have really cool facial hair. ■

Shane Rosenthal is executive producer of the White Horse Inn.

Review hold” (to heed the warning of a philosophy professor I once had).

A more humble, more relational version of Christianity—who is going to argue? Yet Sweet oversteps in a few crucial areas and some of his basic ideas seem a bit over-reactive.

“Instead of talking about God or ‘thinking God’s thoughts after God,’ theologians ought to be participating in God’s life, experiencing God’s flow, living the mystery that is God” (196). Sweet, like other Emergent authors, is very emphatic about mystery and paradox. Yet he seems to applaud mystery to the point of forgetting how David leads us in meditation on God’s law, God’s statutes, precepts, and commands, and prays “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer” (Ps. 19). God is the awesome glorious one—and the one who has revealed himself. Yes there is mystery! But let’s not forget that this mystery, namely Christ, has been revealed to the world (Eph. 3:3)!

The answer to our sinful pride as Christians is not to embrace mystery to the point where we are abandoning the importance of doctrine. The solution is rather repentance and a deeper heeding of our Lord’s call to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).

This book could give Reformed Christians a window into how our concern for correct doctrine is perceived by some of our brothers and sisters as being prideful and elitist. Orthodoxy that is not really alive, life-giving, and yes, relational, is not real orthodoxy. Healthy doctrine ought to give more power for healthy relationships. Let’s pursue Christ together for both.

Rev. Steve Huber Liberti Church (PCA) Philadelphia, PA

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FA I T H A L A C A RT E ? | The Emergent Church

Emergent Michael Horton: Hello and welcome to a special discussion on the Emergent Church movement. In this discussion, we’re not analyzing the movement and offering critique and solutions. We’re going to be discussing our own churches and some of the challenges that the Emergent folks have offered to us and maybe also some things that are already being done in some of our churches so that some of the issues that have been raised by the Emergent movement can be addressed here, especially by young pastors who are in that Emergent age group or emerging slowly beyond it, and who also minister to a lot of young people as well as older folks and younger children. We hope that this will be informative and useful for those people who are not only pastors and Sunday school teachers, but for people who go to church (who are) hopefully our audience. Todd Rodarmel is pastor of Mountain View Church in Mission Viejo, California, a church in the Evangelical Covenant denomination. Charlie Mallie is the pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Laguna Beach, California, which is in The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Michael Brown is the pastor of the Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California. It is a privilege to have you guys here today. First and foremost, tell us a little bit of the background of your church, its makeup, and your approach to ministry. Mike, we’ll start with you.

Michael Brown: My church is part of the Federated United Reformed Church in North America, which is predominantly of a Dutch (Reformed) flavor or a Dutch background, and grew out of the CRC, as you probably know.

However in this classis, and in Southern California in particular, there are a lot of new URC church plants that aren’t necessarily Dutch in flavor.

They’re very diverse. So that’s kind of our church.

It’s made up of people who are pretty new to the Reformed faith. Some have been brought out of

broad Evangelicalism; some have come out of broad Evangelicalism and moved into another Reformed denomination and just found their way here.

Horton: Such as yourself, you’re an example of this.

Brown: Such as myself. I guess I’ll leave my background unnamed, but I came from a Southern California broad evangelical movement. Very popular with young people, I suppose. Then I went into Reformed theology. But as far as my approach

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t Church to ministry, I suppose I would say that it’s very simple. It’s the means of grace. It’s Word and Sacrament. It’s the Lord’s Day, gathering together in a covenant renewal ceremony as we would understand it. Called out of the world to worship God, receive his gifts, and living that out through the week. Our piety really flows out of that. And our community flows out of that as well. As people who have been called out of the world and are on a pilgrimage from the time we’ve been redeemed until the time we go to the promised land. We belong to the age to come. And that’s really in a nutshell how I would approach ministry in that context.

Horton: Todd?

Todd Rodarmel: I’m definitely the least Reformed person here (chuckles). I came out of a large megachurch background, and I reacted to that and I entered into the emerging church. But I ended up at this church a couple of years ago after planting a church and then being a part of Westminster Seminary, and then coming to pastor this church that had just been going for about five years. It was part of the Evangelical Covenant church. It was a largely Orange County church,

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and the people in Orange County that go there are very genuine, honest people who don’t have a lot of background. Whether it’s Reformed or whatever, they’re not really sure what their background is. In fact, a lot of them came to Christ in this church.

And so, we don’t tend to use as much of the language of talking about some of those things, as much as having the teaching based in the Reformation and in good theology. But we’re trying to help people grow in their faith through some

Harley-Davidson motorcycle company. Can you tell us about that?

Charlie Mallie: St. Paul’s is a unique congregation. It is rather small for a congregation in southern Orange County, but being located in Laguna Beach, has had its share of challenges. Especially with regard to evangelizing in that community.

We worship with probably fewer than 100 people.

And the common thread that unites all of the members is a real need to hear Christ crucified for their sins and that the shed blood of the cross is bigger than whatever mess they’ve gotten themselves into that prior week. There seems to be a great need to hear that kind of a message in southern Orange County. And a lot of the people that come to visit us and end up staying come out of other churches where either that isn’t the predominant message being preached or because of how some bad theology affected their lives (we have several members who had a church fast, which, in one case, lasted thirty years). I would say we would try to stress God’s presence among his people through Word and sacrament with an emphasis on their individual forgiveness through those means. And that keeps them coming back.

Horton: I am sure you guys are definitely more familiar with the Emergent movement than I am. A lot of the people are expressing dissatisfaction with the church culture that they grew up in. First of all, what do you think they are reacting against? We’ll get to what solutions you think they’re proposing, but what do you think they’re reacting against— the young people you’re meeting who seem dissatisfied with their church background?

Mallie: (Chuckles.) I’m sure many of your listeners know a lot of the jokes about seminaries and as someone who has gone to a very conservative, traditional, four-year seminary with a one-year internship, I can attest that many of those jokes are true.

One of the things that I did to preserve my own sanity was go out and get a full-time job. So I put myself through seminary by working at a HarleyAnd the common thread that unites all the members is a real need to hear Christ Davidson dealership. They have a study program where crucified for their sins and that the shed blood of the cross is bigger than whatever you learn to be a Harley mechanic. You go out to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and they’ve gotten themselves into that prior week. take some tests. And yes, I do have a plaque and a diplosmaller discipleship groups. We use the Heidelberg ma from Harley-Davidson University, and their Catechism to train some of our people in leadership. mechanics program is called a Ph.D. We have done that not in a way that says, “Hey we want to be Reformed,” but in a way that says we Horton: You guys look like Emergent pastors. But want to look at the truth as has been passed on Charlie has tattoos. So, sorry, I think Charlie wins throughout history and perhaps from some broader this one. perspectives, but specifically from the Reformed Rodarmel: Well how many tattoos? I might have perspective as well. him beat actually. No, Charlie, you’ve definitely got me beat. I won’t mess with the bikers …

Horton: Charlie?

Horton: One thing you don’t know about Charlie but you will now is that he has a doctorate from the

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Brown: I think each one of us will probably have a wide variety of things to offer in terms of the different people we’ve met and the things that they’ve been reacting against. One of the things that I come across quite often, especially with people in my age group—you know the young to mid-thirties age group, is we’ve grown up in churches that were the baby boomer generation churches. I never attended a church with pews, vaulted ceilings, liturgy, Psalms, and hymns. Church as far back as I can remember was always done with a stage, lots of loud instruments, which were really loud, and you were always kind of watching something. And the emphasis was really on your individual piety and your own individual walk with the Lord. These are not all things that are necessarily bad in and of

themselves, but I think what happened over time is that people looked at this as something so individualistic and something so compartmentalized, that it naturally grew in to this megachurch, ecclesiastical Wal-Mart, situation that we have now.

Horton: Is the individualism why it’s called a “worship experience”?

Brown: It very well could be. Absolutely. But the people I am meeting are just fed up with that.

They’re tired of that. There is a longing for a sense of community. There is a longing for this sense of being connected to history. Not feeling as though the church just started in the late 1960s. And so, I guess I can identify with some of those concerns because I felt that way myself when I was growing up.

Rodarmel: I think that there is also a bit of a reaction against things being a bit too neatly packaged.

Whether it’s in three-point alliterated sermons, or whether it’s in the way things are presented and polished, I think that younger people have realized that life is messier than that. And their experience of everyday life is messier than that. And I think they want to be honest with that and have something that is honest and not feel like it’s coming across as something that is prepackaged and being sold to them.

Horton: “Authentic” is a word that keeps popping up in there.

Mallie: I’m glad you mentioned that. That was one of the points I wanted to stress. Authenticity seems to be a huge value for people in our congregation. I think that a lot of times people are reacting to what you see in a lot of American Evangelicalism with focus groups and identifying their target market demographic. And even some very popular books these days tend to deemphasize any sense of the transcendent or mystical experience of God and focus on the subjective, superficial, emotionality which doesn’t really get you anywhere except pointing you to your own sins. One of the things we were fortunate enough to do in our own congregation was take off on Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose, and being a historic congregation which has its roots in the Reformation, we celebrate the season of Lent.

And so we had forty days of purple where we actually had five wonderful weeks of preaching on the “Purpose-Driven Death,” which was a vehicle for talking about Christ’s sacrificial atonement for the forgiveness of sins for the whole world.

Horton: That is marvelous (chuckling).

Rodarmel: I think in some ways the Emergent movement is a response to this. It feels inauthentic.

Horton: That’s an important point. This, then, seems to be what the Emergent folks are reacting against. This sort of prepackaged Christianity. Is there anything else that you can think of that is motivating this movement? They talk about the authoritarian, managerial model, CEO, top-down, where this one guy is in charge of a whole denomination.

Rodarmel: Or just the hierarchy of the church, where the people at the top of the church are right and they tell things to everyone else, and you have to get in line. Or where one guy speaks in front and tells it how it is. Or just the fact of saying, “We’re right.” The reality of a lot of the denominations we’ve been a part of, and the Reformed camp has been guilty of this as well, is that we’ve been very dogmatic at times. This is also being reacted against by the Emergent folks. We hear, “You guys are so sure that you’re right, but all you’ve been doing is dividing the church.” Even among Reformed folks or Reformation-minded folks or whatever that there may be some core agreement about some things, but there are also a lot of areas of disagreement. And I think there is this reaction to the dogmatism, that we’ve got to fight about everything that people just kind of want to say, “Let’s not fight about that, and let’s not be so sure of ourselves, and maybe be open to discussion more.”

And so I think that’s a part of the reaction.

Horton: That leads into what I wanted to ask next. It’s easy for us to say, “Okay here’s what they’re reacting against, the megachurch.” And we’ve been reacting against that for a long time.

I’m Reformed because I reacted against that. As those of us sitting around the table have said that is our background, too. But as you suggest, they’re also reacting against some other things that make us squirm, or at least make me squirm in my seat— the thinking that says, “We know it all, we have all the answers.” And I think I can safely say that in our own circles, you know with this treasure that has been handed down, also sometimes comes with a lot of cobwebs. And people thinking they know the faith they’re handing down when they don’t really know it. And in place of real conviction where they can explain it to a non-Christian, there is sheer force of power and will. Is that something that they’re reacting against?

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Mallie: We see that an awful lot in the Lutheran Church. In the Missouri Synod where a lot of pastors who have fought the fight for years and years degrade into a traditionalism. Rather than holding onto the tradition and being able to catechismally teach the whys and the wherefores. This is what we do, and this is why we do it. These are the passages on which these things are based. It sort of degrades over time into a traditionalism, where “this is what we do, because this is what we do. It’s all we’ve ever done and that’s why we do it.” And there is a huge reaction, at least from my age group, which is about mid-thirties, to answers given from that sort of authoritarian position that lack any sort of substance, let alone any degree of sympathy or empathy.

Brown: I think that in my tradition, or my branch of the Reformation world that I come from, we don’t see that so much. We maybe see some of that from the folks that grew up Reformed from infancy, but the vast majority of people, a reaction that I am hearing in particular with my age group, are people who say, “We appreciate this church because you confess certain things, but you prioritize those important things. You’re not bringing your agendas or your hobby horses.” It’s true that doctrine divides. It’s true when we take a stand, we are draw-

ing a line in the sand. But what is important to do, is to lay out what are those things that are nonnegotiable. And then make sure we are catechizing our young people and passing the baton on to the next generation so that things don’t get lost.

Horton: Let’s come to that point and work our way up through the age groups. Catechism or teaching the young the Christian faith. Here’s what I’ve seen, and you tell me if this is what you all see as well. I think in a lot of our circles, people who grow up, especially in ethnically Reformed circles, but not exclusively, there is this sort of herd mentality.

“This is what we do at this time in our life: This is profession of faith time or this is confirmation time.

This is what we do, we go through this hoop. This is our bar mitzvah. It’s what we do to make everyone happy.” Now that’s not the way I think it is for most, but it is certainly for many, I think, one of those rites of passage in the culture. It can also be that way even outside of ethnic Reformed and Presbyterian enclaves. But one thing I wonder is: Can we teach the catechism to kids, or the basic doctrines of the faith to kids, and teach biblical passages to kids so they can lock it in there? And then, when they get to a certain age, say teenagers, start teaching them to question it? That is what I don’t

Book R Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World

by Robert Webber Baker Book House, 1999 240 pages (paperback), $19.99

The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World

by Robert Webber Baker Book House, 2002 250 pages (paperback), $16.99 The postmodern shift taking place in today’s intellectual and spiritual world has presented evangelicals with a formidable chal-

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lenge. However we describe postmodernism’s characteristics, we must be honest in recognizing that something really is happening. The prevailing worldview of Western society is changing, and evangelicals face an inescapable imperative to think seriously about how the church should address this new worldview.

In 1999, Robert Webber published a book entitled Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World. Besides intending his book to be a sort of primer for postmodernists on the Christian faith, Webber also hopes to encourage evangelical thinkers to “carefully and cautiously seek to interface historic Christian truths into the dawning of a new era” (Faith, 14).

He calls on the church to reembrace what he calls the “classical Christian faith”—by which he means not Scripture, but the Christus Victor theology taught by the early church fathers.

see. I don’t see a culture of encouraging real questioning of the faith in the church to help them when they go off to college and start questioning it, and they don’t have a church around.

Mallie: Absolutely.

Horton: So what are we doing about it? Tell us stories about your own churches.

Brown: Something we’re trying to do is, to really implement the priority for the parents to catechize at home and to teach that it is really their responsibility to disciple their kids. Very often they’ll say, “Well, when are we going to get a discipleship group together? Who is going to disciple my boys?” Well, you’re responsible to disciple your boys. And ministers have historically done that. They’ve come alongside parents and equipped them. But it seems like there are certain stages with the children that we want to hit. The first stage is where they’re just bouncing back catechism questions and answers from memory. Where they might not be able to put two and two together at all. And they hit a new stage where they’re starting to think about those things. And by the time they’re about ready to make a profession of faith, it’s at that point where we

should be able to rigorously be able to bounce these things off them so that they’re challenged. And what I try to do is help parents to see that they need to be ready and equipped to present the faith to people. Maybe to people who don’t know the faith, or people who are going to ask them questions about their faith. They should be able to connect the dots without having to ask, “What does question 60 say again?” And that is one of these spiritual disciplines that people are looking for in our day and age because we never had it. Because we did have the herd mentality. And this is something that is not only biblical, but also historical as well.

Mallie: One of the things we do in our congregation is to have three years of catechesis from fourth grade to sixth grade. During the three years they learn the six chief parts of Luther’s catechism. They memorize that their first year, they get an explanation to that their second year, and in their third year, we take it apart both constructively and destructively.

Horton: In the curriculum, or is this something that you’re doing at St. Paul’s?

Mallie: It’s in the curriculum. Believe it or not, the six chief parts of the catechism only comprise twenty pages of the catechism. And I think the

Reviews Three years after Ancient-Future Faith, Webber published another book titled The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World. Here, he introduces us to “a new group of leaders who are shaping the future” of Evangelicalism.

If Ancient-Future Faith is Webber’s intellectual manifesto, The Younger Evangelicals is a practical directory of how these ideas are being applied in real churches.

I believe Webber has made some critical missteps in his books, but there is also much that I find quite exciting, ideas and concepts that seem to me to resonate with the Bible’s own model for church life. In fact, if Webber is right about what postmodernists value, then those churches that most faithfully conform to the biblical model will actually be the most attractive to a postmodern world.

Three major ideas, for example, show up in almost every chapter

of both Ancient-Future Faith and Younger Evangelicals—community, history, and narrative. The postmodern generation places great value on a living, breathing community of people who truly relate to one another, Webber argues (Younger, 118). The church, he says, should be “a revolutionary society of people … a new order, a new humanity which has the power to be an explosive force in society” (Faith, 81). Second, Webber calls the church to reestablish itself in Christian history, especially the “classical faith” of the early fathers.

I have reservations about his emphasis on the fathers, which I will address shortly, but all in all, the emphasis on church history must be a good thing. Third, Webber observes that narrative is a powerful medium of communication in the postmodern world. The case for Christianity, he says, will be most compellingly made by telling the story of the Bible in all its richness and life (Younger, 84), so Christian worship services should be the place where “the story of the work of Christ is proclaimed and enacted” (Faith, 105). For any Christian familiar with the grand, breathtaking vistas of the Bible’s [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 4 ]

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catechism goes for 197 pages. We have section two which is composed of Christian questions with their answers. And you wouldn’t believe the honesty and relevance of those questions in today’s culture. The catechism walks the kids through their question to their answer from the Scriptures. Now to that we supplement some “on-the-fly” or “onthe-street” evangelism and actually a little bit of training in apologetics, especially in a community like Laguna Beach. There is a converted Buddhist in our congregation who walked away from Buddhism after thirty-five years. I mean I can’t tell you the impact something like that has on kids where they see the relevance of people who have actually worshipped idols coming to the Lord’s table. There’s a great connection to what they’re reading in their catechism, it doesn’t just remain this academic discipline, it’s like math for them.

They need to memorize their multiplication tables before they get a job at Taco Bell, so they can actually make change.

Horton: And disciple people. We have all these discipleship programs today, but a disciple was a student of a rabbi, who walked around and listened to everything the rabbi said and jotted it down, or at least they didn’t have to jot down, they could remember things in those days. And that was catechism. That was catechesis. That is what being a disciple is. Not following the eighteen steps to whatever. Do you think Emergent folks today will look at something like that and say, “Now that is authentic. That is not a prepackaged, eight-steps to this or that in an attempt to make Christianity relevant”?

storyline, this is surely an insight to be eagerly embraced! If ever there has been a compelling, life-altering story to be told, it is the Bible’s, and Christians should rejoice at the opportunity postmodernism presents to share that story with an unbelieving world.

Having said that, however, I believe Webber has made some significant errors in articulating his vision of evangelical Christianity.

For example, he embraces the postmodern agenda of rejecting propositional truth, a position that makes no sense with an evangelical gospel. In fact, Webber himself writes, “The framework of the message is that God created the world; that the world fell away from God in the disobedience of the first Adam; that God rescued the world through Jesus Christ …” (Faith, 46). One wonders how he can write such a sentence while denying the importance of propositional truth. Of course, the gospel is more than propositions,

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Brown: I think so. I think that they might be thrown off a little bit by the dogmatic claims of the gospel that something like the Heidelberg Catechism makes. But I do think that for one, they would be drawn to the fact that this is something that we didn’t invent, and it isn’t the new fad, the new Prayer of Jabez, or Forty Days of Purpose. Rather this is something we recovered from the past, which, during the Reformation, they had recovered from the early church fathers. And so catechesis is something that would be very attractive to many of those people.

Rodarmel: There’s certainly an appreciation for things old rather than things that are just novel or new. Like you were saying the Gothic Gregorian chants. Anything that’s old seems to have more substance from somewhere. People are looking for that. We’ve found that as we’ve introduced some of the catechisms for parents to use in the home for training with their own children. And people have responded to it just because of its simplicity. I remember when we first brought the Heidelberg Catechism to a leadership meeting at our church and people started reading through it; people started crying. They were saying, “Oh my gosh, this is so great, where did you find this stuff?” I said, well it has been around for a long time. They thought it was the coolest new thing they had found, because they just haven’t seen those things.

Mallie: We often have very young people who are mystified by this book that is not the Bible. It’s called a hymnal. It has something in it called a liturgy. And to the left and right of the margins are

but it cannot be proclaimed without propositions.

Webber’s emphasis on the church fathers is excessive. If the goal is to return to the “classical Christian faith,” why stop with the church fathers? Why not return to the source of it all, the Bible? After all, for all the good and useful things the fathers taught, they also made some egregious errors. The Christus Victor motif, for example, is simply not sufficient. Certainly the Bible affirms Christ’s victory over sin and death, but he won that victory by dying as a substitutionary sacrifice for his people. Though that truth lies at the very heart of the gospel, it is one Webber seems hesitant to embrace. Substitutionary, sacrificial atonement is almost entirely neglected in his books, and where it is mentioned, it is only to lament the “modern” tendency toward a “cross-centered evangelism” (Faith, 144).

these things called the Scripture references. And they tend to be mystified by them. We have hymns in our hymnal written by Athanasius. I mean, you want to talk about a connection to the past.

lem because I don’t think everyone is asking that question. I think it’s the attention span issue. I mean my attention span isn’t that long. And I don’t think a lot of people’s attention spans are that long.

Horton: Who wasn’t a Northern European.

Horton: We’re used to channel-surfing.

Rodarmel: I heard he wasn’t a Lutheran either (laughter).

Rodarmel: Yes, I can change the channel or flip to the next song on my iPod or whatever. And I don’t think there’s the attention to that kind of detail. It’s kind of like, “Hey, this is a great resource, I think this is nice,” and I don’t think we often ask those questions.

Mallie: Well he is; they’re all Lutheran in heaven (laughter). One point that you brought up: the Emergent movement has discovered something I think that the prior generation has forgotten.

There needs to be a connection between doctrine and practice. And so often the way in which something is presented conveys a part of the meaning. It would be sort of inappropriate to convey the glories of the resurrection of that Sunday after Good Friday with sort of a commercial jingle. I think there is something missing there. And I think that the Emergent movement does well to say, “Yes, something is missing there, and we need to go search.”

Horton: Is the problem there, though, that a lot of times the answer is, “We just want to go back to the mystical, mysterious, and transcendent and the old“? And not say that, “Well, the problem was that doctrine and practice weren’t linked.” So if we’re going to do this practice, let’s ask where it comes from doctrinally. Is this consistent with the teaching of Scripture? Is that where it gets a little fuzzy?

Rodarmel: I think that’s where you have a prob-

Horton: A big issue is transcendence. We’ve touched on it tangentially, but it’s at the heart of one of the characteristics of the Emergent Church movement. They’re looking for transcendence.

Something that isn’t just like every other day and every other place. They want to meet with God. One thing I come across in their literature again and again is, “We have a passion to meet with God.” And they don’t think they got that in churches growing up very often. How do you think our worship is failing or fulfilling that concern to actually meet with God? Specifically in terms of our own particular churches.

Brown: I think that something we try to do is have Sunday school or catechisis on what worship is.

The whole worship service we have at Christ URC really flows around a dialog between God and us.

So God gets the first and final word. There’s a call to worship, and we respond with an invocation.

Finally, Webber believes the Bible itself needs to be decentralized. He writes: “I sometimes say to my students, ‘You would think the Bible became incarnate, was crucified, and rose again for our salvation’” (Faith, 189). He doesn’t mean to demean the Bible by saying that, he adds, but only to put it in its “proper place.” He dismisses the doctrine of inerrancy, for it makes the Bible “purely objective” and allows no room for a “subjective side” (Younger, 98).

Moreover, he argues that Scripture is only one part of the authoritative tradition handed down to us from the apostles. The Bible is authoritative, he argues, but so are the rule of faith, the ecumenical creeds, and even to some degree the primitive Christian hymns, doxologies, and benedictions (Faith, 181). Scripture’s testimony, however, is that it alone is the inspired Word of God, and to relegate it to being merely one authoritative tradition among many is much too great a surrender to the postmodern worldview.

There are certainly some exciting trends identified in Webber’s books. In some ways, postmodern culture even seems to be moving in a direction that is more in line with biblical truth. So far as it is, Christians ought to welcome the shift. But there are also aspects of postmodernism that should not be embraced, but rather resisted—the rejection of propositional truth, the denial of Scripture’s inerrancy, and the decentralizing of the Bible. At the end of the day, Christians ought to build their churches and live their lives according to the Bible’s instruction—being glad when postmodern culture resonates with them, but faithful to the Bible anyway when it does not.

Greg Gilbert Student The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Louisville, KY

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Then God greets us and we sing to him in response.

And then God speaks to us in law, and we confess our sins to him. And then God speaks to us in the gospel and the declaration of pardon, and then there’s this constant dialog until we have the preaching of the Word and the Lord’s Supper. And I think that when people start to catch that, they see something that they’ve never had. In any kind of broad evangelical church they had more of the 30/30/15 liturgy, where it’s 15 minutes of prayer and

present. He is the one serving you; he is the meal.

Brown: Calvinists believe that too, Charlie (laughter).

Mallie: For Lutherans, that is the center of our piety.

You don’t get closer to God this side of heaven than when you take him into your mouth for your forgiveness. That is one aspect of our service for people. If they haven’t had that experience of being in the presence of the divine, they can get that at any The Emergent movement has discovered something I think that the prior Lutheran service. And any pastor who is worth his salt is generation has forgotten. There needs to be a connection between doctrine doing that very well underscoring what Christ told his and practice. own disciples. “He who hears you, hears me.” And the emphasis of what Christ is announcements, 30 minutes of music to get you hot doing in a church is that it is Christ who baptizes, and sweaty, and then finally 30 minutes of a talk. Christ who feeds, and Christ who forgives.

Then off you go to get coffee at the church café.

Horton: You know what this all brings up is the Horton: No wonder the sermon was seen as sort crisis of mediation. A crisis of God’s presence being mediated to his people through the means of grace. of intellectual, when, in fact, it was just dry.

And it seems to me that one of the places where the Mallie: We use a similar kind of liturgy, but it is worship wars has completely gone in circles is over much looser. And less formal and traditional. But the whole issue of worship as something that we do we actually print in our bulletin who the person for God exclusively. For instance, you often hear leading is and what his part is, and then what the both representatives of the megachurch and critics people’s part is. It lists the people’s part and what of the megachurch say, “Worship is not about what they’re supposed to do during that part. It lists we get out of it, but we give to it; therefore, it has when you’re to listen or respond or pray. It helps to be participatory, it has to be this, it has to be walk them through understanding more than pre- that, it is all directed from us to God.” And what I senting an order of what’s going to happen next. don’t see changing with the Emergent stuff that I’ve It’s something that they’re participating in. This is seen is that there is still this emphasis on us coming and bringing our art, our icons, our incense, our a meeting or Covenant renewal. journaling, alongside the Word and sacrament.

Horton: A vertical conversation.

Isn’t this part of the point? One of the reasons why we do limit worship to the means of grace, to that Mallie: Yes. Both ways. I think this emphasis for which God has commanded, is precisely because a desire to meet with God is one of the great this business is not about our bringing, as Cain did, strengths of Lutheranism. Our whole theology of whatever he wanted from the field. This is about worship is what we call a divine service. We actu- the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the ally very rarely use the term “worship”. One of the world. This is about God coming to us and not huge emphases of Christianity is God’s descent to about us bringing Christmas to God. earth in the flesh of Christ. And so our whole theology of worship follows that motif. Again of God Brown: I would totally agree with everything descending to be present amongst his people Charlie said about the worship service. That is prethrough Word and sacrament. Again for the sole cisely right. We look forward to the Lord’s Day purpose of listening to their confessions, concerns, because something actually happens there. It’s not prayers, forgiving them their sins. And a Lutheran just us bringing our own little trifolds or whatever theology of a divine service culminating in a Lord’s we want or our own little expressions of how much Supper. Where Christ himself bids you to come, we love God. We are there to receive from him take, eat, take, drink, and Lutherans hold what is who descends to us. Who does forgive us. Who called the Real Presence. That Christ is actually does speak law and gospel to us. Who does feed us

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with his table and his Word. We look forward to that and so we long for that all weeklong. I really believe that is the transcendent experience so many believers are longing for. And we just don’t have it in Southern California.

Mallie: It’s the one thing that most churches in Southern California lack, and it’s the only job that church is called to do. A dispensary of forgiveness.

And if Christians understood that, they would find these theologically sound citadels around the world, and they’d be beating down the doors like heroin addicts at a methadone clinic.

Brown: Absolutely right. I find this all the time. In the declaration of pardon and the absolution.

People say, “We were first a little shaken up when you raised your hand and said, “I declare to you in the name of Christ and by the authority of his Word that your sins are forgiven and you are not under the condemnation of God.’” People love that.

Horton: They are petrified the first few times when they come out of churches where that isn’t practiced. Then they say, “If you ever don’t do that, I’ll notice.”

Brown: Exactly. It adds to such a part of our experience.

Horton: Can we also say as a warning that if we look for transcendence, that we might find the devil? Because the devil is transcendent, too. He transcends the terra firma. We struggle with powers and principalities in heavenly places. And not all that is transcendent is good. Nahab and Abihu wanted to bring their gifts to the altar and that didn’t turn out so well. Don’t we have to come to God through his means, through which he has come to us? Otherwise we meet not God at all, but our own worship experience which is dangerous.

Mallie: I think we do, and this is one of those areas where there seems to be a bit of confusion out there in the culture. Everybody understands that “God is everywhere.” And while it is true that God is everywhere, he is not everywhere to save. And he is present to save only where he has revealed himself to be present to save. And at least scripturally, those places are very narrow. In his Word, in the waters of baptism, and in the Supper. I think when we go on a journey we are seeking God, we might want to realize that perhaps he saved us a lot of the work.

And he’s given us a road map to say, “Here I am.”

Brown: And we want to make clear that we’re not

into transcendence for the sake of transcendence.

We’re not trying to do transcendence as the next gimmick.

Horton: If you look at Romans 10, Paul says you don’t have to go up to bring him down. That the search for transcendence ends at the Incarnation.

God has come down, and that ends the search.

Mallie: That’s right.

Horton: There is a lot of talk in the Emergent movement about recovering spiritual disciplines.

When we in the Reformed tradition hear talk about spiritual disciplines we squirm in our seats. Todd, you’re in the Evangelical Covenant Church. Spirit disciplines are probably part and parcel of the Evangelical Covenant tradition, so that probably is not as stark. First, what do you think they are reacting against? And what do you think they are trying to put in its place?

Rodarmel: I think they’re reacting against just knowing stuff in your head when it does not make a difference in your life. And I think people want, and this is a big part of the Emergent thing, to say, “We want to become like Jesus. We believe that he saved us from our sins, but we also want to be his followers and learn to live like him. To obey.” The last part of the great commission says, “Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

So we want to get about obeying it and get better at that. I think there is a desire to do any practice that helps us to learn to be like Jesus or more like Jesus. And so spiritual disciplines have the place of helping us learn how to do that.

Horton: Following, not just learning.

Rodarmel: Following, not just learning for more knowledge. But practicing.

Brown: When we talk about spiritual disciplines it might be helpful to identify a few. I know in the Reformed tradition I’m thinking of attending the means of grace for individual and family catechesis.

Other things as well, such as vocation, we would see as a spiritual discipline. Putting in a good day’s work is a good work. It is a spiritual work toward God. Horton: And serving our neighbor.

Brown: And serving our neighbor. These kinds of things. And also within the context of ministry. A pastor going and visiting people in the congregation and their knowing that they are under the

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authority of the office bearers and in covenant with the local congregation really plays into their spiritual disciplines as well.

Horton: Do you think, too, that one of the reason maybe we squirm is that it’s certainly true, at least of me, that I don’t pray enough, I don’t read my Bible enough? And the private disciplines of an individual Christian are important. But when I hear those obligations, I am reminded again of how far I fall short. But also, perhaps one reason why we squirm is because we do put so much emphasis, as Lutherans do as well, on the corporate means of grace and what is done in the home and then what is done for the neighbor. There is this long polemic since the Reformation against the monks. Where Luther and Calvin and everyone else say that “You guys don’t care one bit about your neighbor who is hurting or needs your help or needs a meal or needs a job. All you’re doing every day is focusing on yourself and your own salvation. And Calvin, to Cardinal Sadileto, says, “It’s so liberating when you know you’re already saved. And now you can actually help your neighbor without doing it because of what it might do for you.” I imagine a lot of Christians think, “Well, if I help my neighbor, then he might become a Christian,” or “If I help, my neighbor might become holier. I might fulfill my spiritual discipline.” Instead of deciding to help my neighbor because my neighbor needs help.

Rodarmel: I think that’s a lot of the same thing that the Emergent people are saying. “Why can’t we help our neighbor without trying to convert them?” or arm wrestle them into the church or trick them into thinking that Christians are nice or whatever. And that’s a good criticism. But it’s a criticism that the Reformed and Lutheran have shared for a long time. Typically, when people are thinking of spiritual disciplines, they’re thinking about silence, solitude, prayer, and fasting. Things like that. Those can become, like you’re saying, self-focused things. And there is a danger in them, that the Reformation quite reacted to, and that is a legitimate danger.

Horton: Getting our eyes off of ourselves and focusing them on Christ, and then sending us out into the world to be bearers of not only Good News, but as good friends and neighbors to nonChristians. Let’s end with this. One criticism that I hear the Emergent folks mentioning that I have a lot of time for is that a lot of the preaching they’re reacting against contains these timeless propositions of either eternal doctrinal truths or eternal moral truths. They miss the story. And they’re say-

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ing, “Tell me a story.” I’ve heard eighteen stories this week about how reality is. I’ve seen four movies and I have listened to eight thousand songs. All of them tell me a different story about how everything ends up. Tell me the one story that might actually grab my heart. How do we respond to that?

Brown: Well, we would just take them to the unfolding drama of Scripture and redemptive history. That it’s really only about one thing. God redeeming a people for himself for the Lord Jesus Christ and all of it fits in that way. And that’s another thing that I guess my brothers would concur with. Seeing people come to our church, they’re so appreciative of that redemptive historical emphasis, whereas before, it was really just a handbook full of propositions or moral stuff or tips for living.

Horton: Believe this or do that.

Rodarmel: You put the story in its context from Genesis to Revelation and help people see that and how Christ forms the center of it. People love that.

And they do want to hear that story, and they need to hear that story again and again. About how Christ has forgiven their sin and every week when they come to church they need to hear that. And so I think that’s the part where the Reformed and Lutheran and Reformation-minded churches can focus on, and not go to preaching their systematic theology through whatever passage they’re at. But preach it in the context of the story. I think people will resonate with that.

Mallie: Preach the Word. And this is where the pastor really has to spend his time preparing his sermon. As we began a part of our conversation with there’s so much stuff that’s canned in the world. I’ve certainly seen it come across my desk with sermon helps and canned sermons and three points to save you fifteen minutes so you can go play golf or something.

Horton: And it all sounds the same.

Mallie: It is all the same. It’s garbage. I think that pastors need to start their week by praying and translating the Scriptures from the original languages and trying to, as I had a wonderful professor who once said, “Think yourself empty and read yourself full.” I know none of us can really do that—start with a blank slate. But the point is to let the Scriptures come to you in such a way where the power of God’s Word is speaking and not being forced through some mold and some dogmatic understanding.

Horton: One of our Reformed confessions says that the preached Word is the Word of God and that it is made effectual by anything in the minister himself. In fact it says that though he be an infidel or immoral, it makes no difference in the effect of the Word. That the Word is that objective. Can’t that really heal a lot of people who have grown up in cultish personality churches? Where really it’s the charisma of the preacher or the force of his preaching or the style of his preaching, rather than being overwhelmed by the fact that Jesus Christ just showed up in front of you and clothed you with him. That he just did this to you while you were sitting there.

Mallie: If we could just get people into a place where they could hear the Word of God rightly preached. And law and gospel. And get them to think, what if this were true? I mean wouldn’t that change everything? And to be able to help them get past the aesthetics. Or the music or the organist who misplayed a couple of notes, or Grandma and Grandpa Schmidt who have been there for fifty years with their arms folded, or the guy who is looking at his watch as you’ve gone over the magic hour, or anything like that. But get them to a place where they’re actually, and maybe for some of them for the first time in their lives, confronted with the raw Word of God being preached to them. I think both of our traditions think that God is living and active in the preached Word. Not just historical redemptive but a creative redemptive Word of God that goes through the ear and down into the heart. One of the things I try to emphasize is that the organ of faith is the ear, not the eye.

Horton: Where does true faith come from? The Heidelberg Catechism says, “The Holy Spirit creates it in our hearts by the preaching of the Holy Gospel and confirms it by the Holy Sacraments.” That’s where true faith comes from. And people are looking for true faith. That’s exactly the answer to the question people are looking for.

Brown: Something along those lines that just came to mind is that I’ve had so many people come back and say that this is something that’s been very helpful to them, that they haven’t ever had before.

Not to overemphasize “eye-gate” over “ear-gate,” but on our Wednesday-night Bible studies, we use a big dry erase board, and probably not a Wednesday goes by when I don’t draw a timeline on the board and show from creation to consummation in Christ, Covenants, things that have happened, Israel, and garden. Just as it comes out in the teaching, they’re able to find where they fit

into this story. And that they are a part of a people who are traveling toward a goal. I’m not interested in being a pilgrim just for the sake of being a pilgrim. You know I want to go somewhere.

Otherwise it’s just like going to Egypt.

Take me back to England, take me back to Egypt, I want a telos, but I think that’s been something that through the timeline, as it’s flushed out in the preaching and teaching of the Word, they’re able to see that the Bible fits together.

Horton: Instead of how do I make this Bible story relevant to my life, it’s how does my life fit into this story?

Brown: I remember a young person once making a profession of faith at another church, who said, “Well, I read my Bible. I really like the New Testament. The Old Testament, it’s okay—other than the Ten Commandments there’s nothing that really applies to me. “And this was a young man who had grown up in a Reformed Church who had not heard the redemptive history unfold.

Mallie: Is he not a child of Abraham?

Horton: So the law is what was familiar. We don’t need to go to have that be familiar to us. The gospel, the gospel, the gospel. A lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about here as a way of summarizing has been a challenge not only to megachurch folks and Emergent church folks, but this is a conversation where we all and our churches have to take their place as well. We have to realize that everything we’re saying here is not happening, even in our churches oftentimes. We have to constantly be reforming according to the Word of God. And not standing over at this place where we’re Reformed and looking at everyone else who isn’t.

Rodarmel: I think that’s the problem with the name “Reformed.” It sounds like you’re finished (laughs).

Mallie: Maybe Lutheranism should dump the word “Luther” in this day and age and go back to what Luther had wanted to call us: “followers of the way of St. Paul.” Maybe that’s something that the Emergent movement would pick up on and say, “Oh, okay, that’s pretty postmodern.”

Horton: Thanks a lot for being with us.

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Speaking of...

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hey claim to be rejecting the last thirty years of evangelicalism, and they're repeating the last thirty years of evangelicalism.

— Robert Webber, his response to the 2004 Nashville Emergent conference, from Christianity Today (October 22, 2004)

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xploring new styles and theologies of worship is one of the characteristics of the Emerging Church.

Where once altars and hymn books were used, one is now as likely to find a community worshipping utilizing contemporary cultural icons—moving images, ambient music and a ‘chill-out’ environment. We invite you to use this space on the website as a place of prayer. Clicking on one of the lava lamp 'blobs' will open a dialogue box in which you can type a prayer, then watch it float and become one with the other prayers in this lamp. Why a lava lamp? For centuries, light has been a Christian symbol of hope and the presence of God. For many years a 1970's kitsch icon, the lava lamp is now recognized as a design classic—a revolutionary take on the purpose of a lamp. Here is a lamp that not only lights the way, but is fluid—constantly changing and evolving.

— Lava Lamp online prayer application at emergingchurch.info

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t was "alt.worship" night at Bluer on a recent Saturday, and as a crowd of about 50 people, mostly in their 20's and 30's, milled around an open loft space filled with couches and candles. John Musick, the pastor, sat behind a drum set, accompanied by three other members of the musical "ministry team." Light fixtures dangled from exposed pipes; slides and videos of old stone crosses or statues flashed on two screens. Mr. Musick, 37, wore a faded T-shirt and blue jeans and had mussed hair and a soul patch beneath his lower lip. Instead of his weekly sermon, he directed the congregants to make their way among three makeshift altars, each with a stack of cards carrying a prayer and a list of topics to think about. "You're going to be put in a position where you have to think about your relationship with God," Mr. Musick said.

— John Leland, "Hip New Churches Pray to a Different Drummer," New York Times (February 18, 2004)

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An Interview with Brian McLaren

Conversation Partners

BRIAN MCLAREN Senior Minister Cedar Ridge Community Church Spencerville, Maryland

Editor’s Note: Brian McLaren, senior pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church near Baltimore, Maryland, is a leading voice of the Emergent movement. He was recently featured in TIME magazine, was a guest on Larry King Live, and is a frequent contributor to evangelical publications. Our conversation with McLaren occurred this past February when he was in San Diego, California, for an Emergent conference.

We want to thank McLaren for spending a few moments with us and charitably entering into conversation about his own theology, the Emergent movement, and the future of Evangelicalism.

MR: What is orthodoxy and who gets to define it?

BM: That’s a great question. One of the great insights of postmodern philosophy is to pay attention to the power relationships that are involved in all discourse. If we say, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” there’s a power dimension to that. Because if you’re a Native American, you’d say in 1492 the invasion and genocide of lands and people began. So there are power dimensions to everything we say. And this is the great challenge: to follow a master who demonstrated power by washing the feet of his disciples, and demonstrated a conquering power by being crucified by the most powerful force in the world, politically speaking. So we follow a path that has this paradoxical relationship to power. And unfortunately the word “orthodoxy” has so often been related to who has the power to tell other people what to do. Now, there’s no easy solution to that.

Actually, there is a solution. It’s virtue, and it’s Christ-likeness. One of the things I try to suggest in my book, A Generous Orthodoxy, is that orthodoxy itself is a practice. I got this idea from Jim McClendon in his three-volume systematic theology. Volume one in that set is about ethics, because he’s saying, before we can even do theology we have to be a community,

and before we can be a community we need virtue, because it takes virtue to forgive and accept and to deal with power, and so forth. So ethics comes first, then doctrine comes second, and witness flows out of that. And he goes on to describe doctrine as a practice of the church seeking truth.

MR: But if orthodoxy gets defined as Christ-likeness, does the word “heresy” have any meaning or validity anymore?

BM: Well, first of all, because I’m narrative in my approach I believe we look at the history of the Christian church and we see two things. First, that there is a Christian tradition, and second, that it’s a living tradition. And that’s why I’m not in a hurry to have all these problems solved. I think the tradition shifts. You know, how many years did we spend grappling with the issue of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ? You could probably say it was a three-hundred-year discussion. And so, I think the Eastern Orthodox have a great sense of patience in this, because these things take time.

I definitely do believe in heresy, but I also think that heresy is not just having bad ideas; it is seeking to divide the church with bad ideas. And divisiveness is a really horrible thing. And so this is where the generosity and the orthodoxy aren’t two separate things you’re trying to put together.

You need both of them: enough generosity to keep room for the tradition to stay living, and enough orthodoxy to keep the tradition from losing its identity and its way.

MR: How generous is your orthodoxy? For example, are you willing to allow in Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or someone with a legalistic theology close to that of the Judaizers of Paul’s day?

BM: That’s a great question. This is why I think there are legitimate spheres of authority. So the J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 9

leaders of a local church have to decide who they’re going to let in and for what purposes. So at our church, we let anybody in our doors unless they’re going to disrupt or harm the community, but we don’t let just anybody into membership.

We let people into membership who are in sync with our vision, mission, and values as well as our understanding of the gospel. And we have a good bit of latitude in that, but a Mormon won’t want to be part of our church as a member. But that’s where I just think for this to all work we have to respect that different communities have standards.

And though they have different standards, that might be good. I sometimes think that God’s sovereignty leads people to have different sets of strengths. And this is where the infatuation with what’s relevant and successful now I think can be harmful, because there may be denominations right now that are not very effective, but they’re preserving something that three hundred years from now we’re all going to desperately need.

And that’s one of the reasons I hope we can be generous and respectful of one another. We might have different jobs to do, but as Paul said “I shouldn’t judge the servant of another.”

MR: Part of the movement’s energy and vibrancy seems to come from reading more widely within and beyond the Christian tradition for resources. But is there a danger here of skimming various traditions as tourists without really knowing any of them well?

BM: You’re absolutely right, that’s a great danger.

It’s one of the reasons why a lot of people are antidenominational. I actually hope all our denominations survive and thrive, because, to preserve an Anabaptist value of peace, it takes a lifetime of being raised in a certain kind of community. To retain and preserve a Reformed understanding of all that is captured in the word “sovereignty,” you can’t just get that in a five minute perusal of a book. That’s something that goes so deep in a person’s roots from being in a tradition.

When Lutherans use the phrase, “the Word of God,” they mean more by that phrase than anybody that I’m ever around. And this is one of the values of communities, but when a Lutheran who has that so deep in him, he can convey it to me when we sit down together, and I can then benefit by it, and this is the way I hope we move ahead. It’s not just taking all our traditions and throwing them in a blender. No, we should keep the distinctiveness but share our treasures with each other.

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attempting to translate the faith into the language of the postmodern age. William Willimon has written that perhaps we shouldn’t attempt to squeeze the gospel and translate it into the vernacular of the current generation but that we should think of it as a foreign language others need to learn. What are your thoughts on this?

BM: That’s a really healthy dynamic tension.

Here’s what I would say has happened to me.

Because I’m an evangelical (at least I think I am … maybe some other people don’t), I want to help people find Christ, and to do that I started in that mode of wanting to translate so they can understand. Well, once I got into conversation with a lot of postmodern people, I started understanding their questions. When I understood their questions, I realized that some of them were not about the content of the gospel but were about the methodology of modernity, and they were turned off by this methodology. So I have become increasingly interested not in the question how do we translate the gospel into postmodern culture, but how have we already syncretized and domesticated the gospel in modern culture? Now, to take a domesticated gospel and just domesticate it under another rubric I don’t think is a step forward, and this is the dynamic tension that I think we always live with. The gospel must engage with culture. If you’re going to use language, language exists as a part of culture. Leslie Newbigin said there’s no such thing as a pure gospel, if by that you mean a gospel that’s not expressed in terms of a culture.

But if it becomes domesticated by any culture, then we are just parrots. And of course this is part of our crisis right now. I think the religious right in America ends up domesticating the gospel into a Republican agenda, and vice versa.

MR: There is a lot of talk in Emergent circles about “my experience of God,” “my testimony,” “my practice of the faith,” “where am I in this text?”, and so on. Could this perhaps be criticized for being too “me-centered,” especially when compared with Paul’s goal to know nothing but Christ and him crucified?

BM: First of all, the danger of me-ism is so great, and I think that’s a serious problem in this Emergent conversation, but I think this is a serious problem across Evangelicalism. In fact, one of the most controversial things in my most recent book is that I’m raising the question whether the salvation of individual souls to go to heaven after they die is the point of the gospel. And I think just about all evangelicals of every stripe are working under that assumption. When that is the ultimate question, I think there is always a gravity toward individualism,

and I don’t think the Bible thinks that way. I think the biblical mindset is more on creation and the people of God as a community. And that actually is a very strong value in secular postmodern philosophy, as found in the writings of Alistair McIntyre, Michael Polanyi, and others.

So that danger of me-ism is really there. But I don’t think the solution is just to say I’ll know nothing but Christ and him crucified because, though it’s a quote from the Apostle Paul and legitimate, I also think of Ephesians 3, that we will know the love of God with all the saints. So it’s not just individual, it’s communal. Something, I think, bad happens when we say it’s all about me and God. We miss the community and we miss the world, and I don’t think we can have an authentic Christian faith that’s about me and Jesus.

MR: Is there a hint of Marxist categories in your continual emphasis on community and concern about power structures?

BM: You know Leslie Newbigin considered Marxism a Christian heresy, because the Christianity of mid-nineteenth-century England that Marx was exposed to was focused on me and Jesus. It was the era of the Victorian parlor hymn and it was the era of a very personalized and pious faith that didn’t seem to care that little boys were being dropped down chimneys to get black lung, and that workers were coming out of the mines incredibly abused. It’s not so much that it’s Marxist, but a lot of people are paying attention to the gospel of the Kingdom of God. And when you pay attention to the Kingdom of God, you see that it’s closely related with justice and also with community, because “Kingdom” is a communal word. And all the talk about candles and musical styles I just think is a huge distraction. To me the real question is what do we make of the gospel of the Kingdom?

MR: In Emergent circles, there seems to be a big emphasis on “right now,” this present moment. Does this attitude reflect a distinctively modern preoccupation over immediate relevance?

BM: If that’s your impression, or what you’re hearing, I certainly wouldn’t argue against that.

The interesting thing to me is that I hear in this setting a lot more of the discussion of the term Robert Webber and Leonard Sweet use: ancientfuture. An interest in where we’re going in the future, but a greater degree of looking for resources in the past. It’s instinctive for me to bring up a prayer from Origen or Thomas à Kempis, in order to be more enriched and rooted in tradition. In some circles I hear an awful lot of that, you know,

where everything is what’s the latest hot new trick.

But I actually hear that less around here than I do in a lot of other evangelical circles.

MR: According to the latest research, most teens growing up, even in conservative Christian circles, know very little about the content and teaching of the Bible, and their values and practices don’t really differ from their non-Christian counterparts. How is Emergent going to address this phenomenon?

BM: Oh this is a huge problem, and the complexities of this are so great. The best research I’m aware of now is telling us what we probably should have known intuitively, and that is for children to end up with a coherent faith as adults, while they are children they need to be exposed to adults who have a vibrant, vital faith and talk about it. It goes back to Deuteronomy 6, teaching our children, training them while we’re walking down the way, and so on. So I think this is going to call for a radical rethinking of what we have called Christian education, which itself is a modern model. It’s put people in modern industrial-style classrooms, and through modern age-graded curricula, and all the rest. Not to say there’s no value in all of that but when we segregate children and only keep them by themselves, we then make it impossible for them to be around adults who could become those kinds of older mentors and guides and examples.

MR: Is it also a loss of parents passing on the faith to the next generation?

BM: I think parents might pass on their beliefs, but I think the power is in passing on their stories.

Obviously their beliefs need to be passed on, too, but the stories embody their beliefs. In some ways it’s the old evangelical word “testimony,” but it’s not just the testimony of how I was saved at one point thirty years ago. It’s how God was real in the crisis I had at work last week, how God helped us in our family argument the other day, and for people to talk about a living relationship with a living God. MR: Which in your opinion is worse, liberalism or fundamentalism?

BM: Well, whoever has the most power and weapons is the most dangerous. And right now, the liberals have an awful lot of power in Hollywood, and the conservatives have an awful lot of power in Washington. So, that to me is like choosing between lung cancer and leukemia.

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MR: You mentioned in one of your talks that you thought fundamentalist Christians were more dangerous than fundamentalist Muslims. Could you unpack that?

BM: Well it’s not because I think they’re more wrong, but that they have more power. And so when you have a lot of power, you can do more damage. So as an example, if a person thinks there is some level of validity to the whole issue of global warming, as I do, and if Christians in the United States don’t get the government to care about global warming, then the entire effort of the rest of the world would be reduced by thirty percent (because we produce about thirty percent of the greenhouse gases in the world). And conservative Christians who right now have the ear of the administration in a sense are the ones who you have to hold accountable for that. And if conservative Christians become very pro-war and are willing to legitimize an imperial stance . . . you know Muslims can do some damage with terrorism if they have biological and chemical weapons, it can be terrible damage. But first of all, we have the most biological and chemical weapons and we have the most nuclear weapons. So if we aren’t really in sync with the Spirit on these things, we can do a lot of harm.

MR: What would you like to see as the fruit of your labors ten years down the road?

BM: Oh, I’m embarrassed to answer that because it will sound so grandiose, but here’s the way I would say it. The Christian religion is the biggest religion in the world. And if Christians have a healthy view of God, a healthy view of the gospel, a healthy view of their neighbor, a healthy view of God’s purposes for this world, then the world will be a way better place. But if they don’t, if they only see the gospel as another personal enhancement, if they only see the gospel as some way to gain power over other people, the world is going to be in deep trouble, especially in our encounter with Islam. And so, what I hope I can be some very tiny part of is helping Christians become more in sync with Jesus so that our role in the world will be more redemptive.

Letters [ C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 3 ]

destroy European identity. One of the strengths of your magazine is its constant refusal to let truth be high-jacked for base human gains, but for once, I believe you let your guard down here. This article is neither an informative journalistic presentation, nor a serious theological discussion, but unfortunately a compendium of clichés from a very narrow and politically homogeneous group of pundits from Europe and the U.S. Darla Rudy-Gervais Paris, France

Editor’s Response The editors are happy to acknowledge errors in fact. We are grateful to Mr. Leighton for correcting our spelling. We also appreciate Ms. Rudy-Gervais calling our attention to the fact that the Madrid bombings mentioned in the Between the Times news summary did actually occur on March 11, not in November as the author indicated. We do not, however, find it necessary to apologize for the author’s perspective on the “Islamization” of Europe and disagree with Ms. Rudy-Gervais’s characterization of the article as a “misrepresentation” of “Islam and Islamic attitudes in Europe.” The article did not claim that “all” Muslims are “aggressively invading Europe,” but rather, that millions of Muslims are emigrating to Europe, and that this is causing a serious conflict over values, etc. Clearly, not all Muslims are terrorists, but one can hardly deny that the world’s most significant terrorist threat continues to come from the Muslim world. This realization should not preclude a fervent evangelistic engagement with these new immigrants.

Join the Conversation!

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1725 Bear Valley Parkway

MR: What’s the subject of your most recent book?

BM: My latest book, The Last Word, and the Word After That, struggles with the issues of judgment and justice and how they work out in this life and beyond.

Escondido CA 92027 760.480.0252 fax Letters@modernreformation.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters. Letters may be edited for content and length.

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