Faith as Quest, not Bastion (part 3)

Posted 2 days ago | 0 comments | by Amy Moffitt| Link

An Interview with Brian McLaren
by Melvin Bray

This is the third of 4 posts that will contain the full text of Melvin’s interview with Brian. Check back soon to read the rest of the interview.

Melvin: There is a point in the book where you actually recommend that certain people put the book down for a while, if they are unprepared to deal with the psychic or relational dissonance that quest would undoubtedly cause. You have a remarkable ability for remembering and accommodating what it was like on the other side of quest. A mutual friend, author Will Samson (Enough: Contentment in an Age of Excess) recently suggested that this is because you are at heart an evangelist, but has evangelism not historically involved a crucial sense of urgency? Is there not a sense of urgency or imperative in the questions around which the book is organized? Is there some theological or other rationale for your less intense—if that’s the right phrase—approach to faith?

Brian: You’re right. There is a real sense of urgency. I was in Palestine recently. You can see there how Christian Zionism in the US, which is based on nearly everything I’m trying to counter in the book, could easily increase terrorism and help plunge the whole world into nuclear war – which could too easily dominate and take the lives of our own kids and grandkids. Its adherents don’t intend this, I hope! But they don’t seem to realize how easy it is for their Armageddon prophecies to become self-fulfilling. They don’t realize the unintended consequences when they focus on texts promising land to Israel without noticing all the other texts that demand ethical accountability for how Jewish people treat non-Jews. In so doing, their approach does to Palestinians what the colonists and cowboys did to Native Peoples, what Apartheid did to South Africans, what anti-Semitism did to the Jews in Europe throughout Christian history, what whites did to non-whites before Civil Rights – and sadly, since. Those are serious things, and I feel great urgency on behalf of the people who will suffer because of entrenchment in an old kind of Christianity.

Not only that, but many Western Christians, by failing to take the questions I’m writing about seriously, too often are unintentionally driving their kids and neighbors away from the faith. By doing so, their churches are shrinking and wrinkling, as I say in the book, and there’s real anxiety about the viability of many of our churches as a result. But even more, think about where their entrenchment leaves their kids and grandkids and alienated neighbors and friends. These people who feel squeezed out of the church are ones I feel especially called to help, and so I feel intense urgency about this.

But here’s the thing for people like me who feel so much urgency. If we go around grabbing people by the lapels and screaming, we’ll elicit reaction rather than reflection, and we’ll sabotage the very kind of rethinking we want to encourage. So we need to distill our urgency into gentleness and patience. That’s not easy!

On a more personal level, here I am, fifty-three years old, and I have spent part or most of every single day of my adult life – I don’t think this is an overstatement – grappling with what it means to be a faithful follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s an obsession of sorts. If it’s taken me decades to have the courage to break out of certain boxes and grapple with these questions and perhaps get a few small glimpses of insight, how can I be so uncharitable as to expect others to get on board right away? That’s why I spend the last couple chapters of the book urging people to be careful and patient and wise in the ways we try to stimulate rethinking and conversation in this quest.

Melvin: I imagine the following in the “Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?” chapter will be the cause of some consternation. “By coming out of the closet regarding their homosexuality, gay folks may help the rest of us come out of the closet regarding our sexuality…. As in so many areas, we must blaze a new trail into that terra nova beyond the binary and reactionary ideals of sexually repressive fundasexuality on the one hand, and sexually unrestrained hedonism, on the other.” When you came out on the sexuality question, you came ALL THE WAY OUT, didn’t you? Why put so much on the table (as if to say “this issue is way more complex than we want to make it”)? Yet after unpacking a boatload, you don’t actually answer the question of the chapter (at least not to the degree to which you respond to the other questions of the book). Do you at this point have any inkling of a way forward? If so, why not print it yet?

Brian: Well, I’m sorry you didn’t think that I answered the question, but I can see why you might see it that way. I ask, “How can we address divisive issues of sexuality without fighting and dividing,” and instead of offering a “how to” kind of answer – I do something more like that in response to the tenth question, actually – I tried to do two other things. First, I tried to show how the standard “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” approach isn’t as faithful as it sounds. I did a close reading of the second half of Acts 8 to show that there is another line of data in the Bible in conversation with the six Bible passages normally cited on homosexuality. In other words, to answer “How can we address sexuality without fighting and dividing,” my first answer is by getting beyond a proof-texting approach.

Second, I tried to show how even if one takes an absolute, irrevocable stand for or against homosexuality, one isn’t out of the woods, because we have a lot of other sexual issues confronting us. Either we’re going to grind ourselves into the dust with one sex-fight after the other – biting and devouring one another, as Paul said in Galatians – or we’re going to have to calm down and realize that we’ve got a major, complex, and ongoing challenge on our hands, a challenge that will require us to do a lot more than choose sides on issue after issue.

Actually, there’s a third thing I tried to do in this chapter. I folded in another question I believe would make the top twenty if not the top ten: the question of anthropology. Issues of sexual identity pile a load of bricks on the straw-laden camel of our traditional view of the human being as a ghost in a machine. So I’m suggesting we can’t really resolve the sexuality issues until we reopen our understanding of the human being, who we are, what we’re about, what constitutes us. And our answer is going to have to go a lot deeper than the dualistic ghost/soul/spirit in machine/animal/body model that we inherited.


Melvin Bray is chief bbq taster on the Emergent Village green and the coordinating author of The Stories in Which We Find Ourselves: A Bible Story Project to write/collect re-tellings of the biblical narrative that resonate with emerging, missional and/or ‘post-ism’ sensibilities.

Faith as Quest, not Bastion (part 2)

Posted 3 days ago | 0 comments | by Amy Moffitt| Link

An Interview with Brian McLaren
by Melvin Bray

This is the second of 4 posts that will contain the full text of Melvin’s interview with Brian. Check back soon to read the rest of the interview.

Melvin: Speaking of the first two or three questions, you seem to have finally embraced as your own the evolutionary reading of Genesis espoused by your character Neil Oliver in The Story We Find Ourselves In. In the preface of the former book you seemed to hedge by characterizing the ideas of the book as one possible approach. What changed? What made this the time to hinge the credibility of the emergent quest on a scriptural reconciliation of creationism and evolution?

Brian: Although I do believe this book makes an important contribution, I hope the credibility of the emergent quest won’t hang on me alone, and certainly not on this single proposal! But I can see why you would point this out as being important, because the traditional reading of Genesis that I was taught as a child, and which is still faithfully followed by many good people of a conservative bent, requires us to see a world created in perfect stasis that has fallen into evolution and change. But that goes against everything we observe in real life. Whether we’re talking about astronomy, physics, geology, biology, paleontology, ecology, or anthropology, we don’t see stasis anywhere, now or in the past. What we see is a pattern of unfolding, expansion, growth, diversification, novelty.

I feel like James in Acts 15: it makes no sense to put a conceptual stumbling-block in the way of people who are seeking God, to say, “You can’t follow Jesus unless you subscribe to an outmoded way of looking at the cosmos.” To do so would be like requiring people to believe in an earth-centered universe or a flat earth simply because that’s how our ancestors understood things. Thank God, we are given not only permission but encouragement in the Scriptures to seek wisdom, and that includes wisdom about how the universe works. Evolution and emergence seem to be integral to God’s creative genius, and that fills me with a sense of wonder and worship.

It’s interesting you asked what changed, because a few friends have said that the tone or voice of this book seems different – maybe more confident, less tentative. Part of that, I suppose, is simply that I’m ten years older now than when I wrote my first book. And part of it is a gift from my critics during those ten years. When I wrote The Story We Find Ourselves In, I was proposing a number of important things, including a less literalistic way of reading Genesis. If that seems like I was hedging – well, for me, it was being appropriately tentative, in the proposal mode rather than the polemical mode. Then I waited and listened to see how people – including critics – would respond. If I’m wrong about something, I certainly don’t want to be the last to know, so I listen to serious critique of my work – by serious, I mean charitable as opposed to mean-spirited and intelligent as opposed to reactionary. The mix of critical and constructive responses served to increase rather than reduce my confidence.

At heart, what’s at issue is this: do we bring to the Bible the assumption that it describes a changeless, timeless system, more like the Platonic ideal, or do we bring to the Bible the assumption that it describes a story, a narrative. Most of us were given a pre-critical bias in the system direction, but now, whether it’s through the influence of postliberals like Hans Frei, or postconservative Baptists like Jim McClendon, or postmodern philosophers like Paul Ricouer, we’re seeing that the Bible works a lot better when read as a narrative rather than a system.

Melvin: You do a lot of teaching in the book about church history, geopolitics, philosophy, theology, anthropology. Is there a conscious reason you avoid explicitly acknowledging your use of literary analysis to arrive at many of your interpretations? I kept wondering if readers without your and my language arts background or interest would recognize why the interpretations you posit might be more credible than others. You seem to rely most heavily on your audience’s ability to follow your overall train of thought, rather than teaching what figures of speech, symbols, themes, allusions etc. are and how they function in any great piece of literature.

Brian: Well, perhaps my approach will turn out to be a mistake, but I generally try to understate the scholarly underpinnings for my work. You’ve heard the saying that some good ideas experience “death by a thousand qualifications,” and the same can be said for “death by a thousand footnotes.” My background, as you know, was literature, so I could talk about structuralism and post-structuralism, about phenomenology and logical positivism and the linguistic turn and language games, about reader-response theory and speech-act theory and the second naivete and aporias and so on, all of which I find fascinating. But I tried to let all that be like the submerged part of the iceberg, in hopes that the visible part would float for the average reader who doesn’t have time to do all the reading I’ve done before I write – just as I don’t have time to do all the reading the various specialists and scholars whom I respect have done before they write.


Melvin Bray is chief bbq taster on the Emergent Village green and the coordinating author of The Stories in Which We Find Ourselves: A Bible Story Project to write/collect re-tellings of the biblical narrative that resonate with emerging, missional and/or ‘post-ism’ sensibilities.

Faith as Quest, not Bastion

Posted 4 days ago | 0 comments | by Amy Moffitt| Link

An Interview with Brian McLaren
by Melvin Bray

This is the first of 4 posts that will contain the full text of Melvin’s interview with Brian. Check back soon to read the rest of the interview.

It would be disingenuous of me not to confess up front that my appreciation of Brian McLaren extends beyond his merits as an author to include his contributions of friendship as a conversation partner, a connector of fellow sojourners and a faithful dreamer. However, if one were to assume that friendship in any way inhibits me from critically engaging his newest book with the requisite skepticism paradigmatic upheavals deserve, one would be grossly mistaken. For me, and I imagine for many in the Emergent conversation, friendship is a full contact sport. I tend to delve deep fast with questions that can disquiet, disrupt and often unearth that which one might rather have kept hidden—questions that could be considered invasive. Still, Brian was gracious enough to talk to me.

Brian’s A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (HarperOne)—now in your local bookstore and online—proves to be an incisive and provocative contribution to the public conversation on the future of faith. Incisive in that it clearly discerns the scriptural fault lines and historical inconsistencies upon which modern Christian hegemony has been built. Provocative in that it posits fresh and forward-looking ways of being in the world that simultaneously deconstruct faithless assumptions of the past while making an ever more faithful connection to the best intuitions of the past. The book’s basic premise is that there are pressing questions about God, faith and life, that can no longer be ignored, to which Christianity as it has been commonly practiced throughout modernity offers insufficiently useful responses. Rather than intuitively hunker down in a defensive posture or go on the attack, as our dominant religious metaphors might incline us to do, McLaren proposes Christians reach for a new metaphor, that of quest. A quest is a search for something worth having, in this case a search for a faith increasingly more worthy of Jesus, our Lord.

Not everyone has had as affirmative an encountered with the book. Scot McKnight, a friend of both Brian and the Emergent conversation, has written what seems to be for the Christianity Today audience an ‘about time’ critique of “Brian’s new kind of Christianity.” With his review McKnight casts himself as the Puddleglum of an often Marshwigglesque Evangelicalism. For those who immediately understand that metaphor, they will know that it is not meant to disparage, for Puddleglum is one of the hero’s in the Narnia tale The Silver Chair, even as McKnight has been a cherished champion of the value of orthodoxy within Emergent Village. Nonetheless, McKnight’s essentially one note mantra does not seem to adequately apprehend the complexities and in some cases unprecedented challenges of the present. Don’t get me wrong: to dismiss McKnight’s warrants would, in my opinion, prove a grave misjudgment. However, if after all this time McKnight’s singular concern remains the lack of apparent orthodoxy in Brian’s proposals, I am forced to wonder aloud: Discretion may be the better part of valor, but who decreed that orthodoxy is the better part of faith?

This interview was conducted before McKnight’s review was published, but it does address some of the McKnight’s misgivings. I tried to pose questions that reflect my own ambivalence about faith as quest as well as questions that give voice to the deep reservations and doubts of my more fundamentalist friends and family who remain fully committed to faith as bastion. However, I must say that at the end of my questioning I find this quest of faith (humble confidence) toward a God whose hopes, dreams and desires are for the good of all creation far more compelling than what was my former belief (uncritical certitude) in the God of a triumphal few.

The first and last questions of this interview include content originally published at God’s Politics blog.

Melvin: Brian, it seems to me that the crux of the book is the “What is the Gospel?” chapter and that the most challenging declarations are made between pages 138 and 140. Was this true in the writing of the text? Of all the questions, what do you think makes the gospel question such a challenging conversation for so many to have? I know for myself, it’s the very conversation I’ve sought to avoid with anyone within the denominational tradition I call home who seems uncritically committed to doctrinal orthodoxy.

Brian: So much depends, of course, on what you and they mean by “doctrinal orthodoxy.” I am deeply committed to doctrinal orthodoxy, meaning I want to be faithful to the truth and to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even if that puts me at odds at certain points with what this or that group has determined as doctrinal orthodoxy. For example, my Calvinist friends who claim orthodoxy need to remember that to the Eastern Orthodox, Calvinists are heterodox from the get-go, because they’re not submitted to the patriarchs and bishops of the One True Church. And my many Wesleyan and Quaker and Anabaptist friends who consider themselves doctrinally orthodox are only questionably so from the perspective of some of my Calvinist friends. And my Dispensationalist friends often speak of “historic orthodoxy” without noticing the irony that before 1835, their approach to the faith had never even been dreamed of. The same could be said in slightly altered ways for Adventists and Pentecostals.

You might be right that the fifth question is the crucial one, although I think the first two or three questions are probably the most radical, in that they open up space to ask the other seven or eight. I tell the story in the book of how shocked I was when an Evangelical theologian once proposed to me that most Evangelicals – including me – didn’t have “the foggiest notion” of what the gospel really was. So perhaps this question will seem like a shock to folks, but I can’t put into words how liberating it is to rediscover Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom of God, and to see that Paul and Jesus have the same gospel, not different ones.


Melvin Bray is chief bbq taster on the Emergent Village green and the coordinating author of The Stories in Which We Find Ourselves: A Bible Story Project to write/collect re-tellings of the biblical narrative that resonate with emerging, missional and/or ‘post-ism’ sensibilities.

Pushing the Boundaries Together

Posted 4 days ago | 4 comments | by Amy Moffitt| Link

by David Park and Dan Ra

Editor’s note: This article was originally attributed solely to David Park. It was actually a collaborative effort between David and Dan Ra. The article has been updated to reflect this.

David: The joke goes something like this: when a Japanese person goes to a new city, he looks to start a business; when a Chinese person first arrives in a new place, he looks to start a restaurant; but when a Korean comes to town, he’s going to start a church. As my Korean immigrant father is a recently retired pastor who planted or shepherded at least seven churches that I can count, I can attest to the above punchline—Koreans love church. And we’ve taken to church planting and the Christian industry by storm, a sort of ecclesiological Kim Yunah phenomenon for those of you who watched the Winter Olympics. We’re the darlings of global missiological and church talk: we plant big-ass churches and carve them out of the mountainsides; we send more missionaries than any other country; we boast some of the fastest growing and multiplying churches stateside as well, but if Dan Ra’s and my experiences are any indication, the gig is just about up. Korean Americans and their churches need to slow down and take a good look in the mirror because despite Soong Chan Rah’s claim that ethnic minorities are leading the next evangelicalism in the 21st century, the descent could be pretty steep.

Dan: In 2007, I found what was then called “the emergent conversation”, I was bright-eyed, curious, disillusioned and confused. Three years later, I find myself in “the emergent i-don’t-know-anymore” but nothing about me has changed. I am still filled with wonder and God and God’s kingdom are as beautiful as ever. However, the conversation has changed, and some would even say, died. And we’ve read commentaries from christian blogs such things as “emergent sold out because it’s not exclusive and cool anymore” or “emergent has become so diverse and varied it’s just changed.” Recently Emergent has made clear efforts to diversify its identity. With events like C21 and the recognition that the two-thirds world is now the “superpower” in global Christianity, things seemed hopeful.

But frankly, most of those voices come from our white friends. So what then say the asian american emergents among us? Even then there are scant and varying opinions. So you’ll have my perspective, and I’ll try to keep references to Soong-Chan Rah at a minimum.

While Asian American Christians are largely conservatively evangelical, the truth is, most of us lack self-awareness about our beliefs. Indeed most of us would find theological angst and exploration absurd and unnecessary. This is one of the toughest problems regarding the relationship (or lack of) between the Asian American church and emergent. Put simply, most Asian Americans, like most Americans if we were to be honest, don’t care about the unraveling of certain “major” theological notions. They won’t be engaging with the emergent church, at least for a while. This, admittedly so, is a glaring problem with the Asian American church: theological apathy.

That said, the emergent church will need to make greater and more intentional efforts to reach out to the Asian American church. Although I was pleased to see that all of C21’s speakers were women, I was disheartened to see only one was a minority. Unfortunately, widening the doors to new emergent gatherings won’t be good enough. What I’m asking is for the emergent church to take steps towards non-white communities and do two things: listen and see. As of right now, it appears to me that the emergent church acts as though western Christianity is still the ultimate beast, although knowing that Latin American, African, and Asian churches are creating great ripples. But even in America today, the rise in the minority population is greatly affecting the racial demographic of those that are practicing the Christian faith. If the emergent church had something to say about the confines and failings of modernism and individualism, will we have something to say about the changing face of American Christianity? Will we actively engage and invite racially alternative voices, even from the academic sphere? Will we step into Korean Presbyterian, Ethiopian Orthodox, Latin Pentecostal, and black American baptist churches and see how young, hyphenated American parishioners are experiencing the faith?

So what does this look like in practice? How can non-minority emergent christians break the separatist nature of ethnic minority christian communities in the U.S. and ask, “Hey, can we talk?” Because, at least in the Asian American church, the deconstructive and, in turn, redeeming spirit of the emergent conversation is desperately needed. Because we know how to plant churches, and we know how to get all the answers right, but we’ve forgotten how to ask questions. We are simply copying your means of empire, whether it be figure skating champs, automobiles or churches. And we may “do” church better for now, but that’s just postcolonial inertia. Emergent needs to engage ethnic churches because it is the next step to pushing the boundaries further together.

David Park and Dan Ra write with other Asian American bloggers at Next Gener.Asian Church. David is finishing up a degree at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA and likes the fact that he has no idea as to what comes next. When Dan Ra isn’t writing for Next Gener.Asian Church, he is dabbling with computers, singing for communities, and dreaming of possibilities for Asian American Christians in our post-everything world.

A Place to Belong. A Place to Become.

Posted 18 days ago | 2 comments | by Amy Moffitt| Link

by Ken Howard
St. Nicholas’ Episcopal Church
Darnestown, MD

It is difficult to capture the essence of the St. Nicholas faith community in a few words or even a few pictures, because what makes St. Nick’s a unique Christian community is more about what lies at the heart of our community than what lies at the surface.

But when we do try to capture that essence in a few words, these are the words we use: “A Place to Belong. A Place to Become.” These two phrases represent what we understand to be our two core callings at St. Nick’s.

“A place to belong” represents our core understanding that as a community we are called to love unconditionally. We believe that the only sufficient basis for Christian community is Christ’s love for us. If God sends you to us, you are part of our community. Because Christ first offered us the grace of unconditional love and acceptance, we are called to accept and love without condition anyone God sends to us. Because God has adopted us into his family without condition, we are called to welcome you into our family without condition.

“A place to become” represents our core understanding that we are called as a community to speak truth unconditionally. Because part of the grace that God offers us the truth about ourselves – to see ourselves as God sees us, both as we are and what God knows we are meant to be – we are called to offer that same grace to all that God sends to us. Knowing that as imperfect creatures we only see imperfectly and in part, we say what we with humility and ask only the same in return. Diversity of opinion – even theological opinion – is not threatening to us. Rather, we welcome it, understanding the diversity held together in unity is evidence of the Holy Spirit working among us to make us a more complete body.

Perhaps I can illustrate the impact of these two complementary understandings with a few brief stories:

• A former CIA officer, self-described as “to the right of Genghis Khan, politically” and a openly gay man, retired on disability, who learned first to accept, then respect, then to love each other in Christ.

• A husband and wife, she self-described as a “near fundamentalist” and he, jokingly, as “sort of U.C.C. (Unitarian Considering Christ),” who for the first time in their lives have found a church in which they can co-exist openly.

• A young Buddhist who came to our church for almost 3 years, proudly proclaiming himself St. Nick’s “resident heathen,” before he went and “ruined” his nickname by asking to be baptized.

• In the run-up to the Iraq war, when many were avoiding the topic for fear of division among our members, we held a series of discussions in which, after talking through how to speak our truth in love, people on both sides of the issue shared their thoughts and feelings about the impending invasion. There was disagreement and strong emotions were expressed, but we were able to agree on several things: (1) war is always an evil, never a good and (2) we need to pray for all involved in the conflict: our leaders and theirs, our soldiers and theirs, our civilians and theirs.

• Some of the most liberal and most conservative members of our leadership came together to petition the U.S. government for the release of five Muslim Uyghurs who had been found to be non-combatants but were still being held at Guantanamo, and when that was denied, worked with a local Muslim congregation to hold a fundraising dinner to obtain their release from the Albanian refugee camp where they had been abandoned. As one of our conservative leaders said, “This is not politics. This is about justice.”

These and other examples have strengthened our conviction that, by following in the example of God’s grace in both unconditionally accepting one another and speaking the truth to one another, walls of human division can be broken down and God’s Kingdom built up.

Read more about St. Nicholas’ Episcopal Church at their website. In addition, you can read an article by Ken published in the Anglican Theological Review describing the theological approach of St. Nick’s. In September 2010, Paraclete Press will be publishing a book by Ken called Practicing Paradoxy: Creating Christian Community Beyond US and Them. Look for it!

Theology Beyond Google

Posted 18 days ago | 7 comments | by Amy Moffitt| Link

by Chad Holtz

This article is excerpted from two posts at Chad’s blog. You can read the full posts here and here.

This article is an attempt to address and respond to Philip Clayton’s article, Theology after Google. I recommend you read the article first. It’s a great article that has some convicting and challenging words for all of us in the church (pastor and lay alike). While I can agree with much of the sentiment found in the article, I disagree with some of the ways Philip (along with other leaders within the Emerging Church) articulates that sentiment.

Sentences in quotation marks are from Theology after Google:

“The church members like the old hymns and liturgies; they don’t like tattoos, rock music, or electronics.”

My gut reaction here is: What is wrong with the old hymns and liturgies? I have a tattoo, love rock music, and love electronics and yet I LOVE the old hymns and the liturgies! Why? I suppose because no one told me it was wrong to, for starters, and also because people I encountered along my journey taught me to appreciate the deep treasure trove of theology that is found in our old hymns as well as appreciate the communal spirit and bond that arises from a congregation reciting liturgies together – the individual being swept up in the faith of the many. I derive great pleasure in teaching my rural church why we do the things we do and watching their eyes being opened up for the first time as they recognize the significance of a song they have sung for decades or a creed they have recited from childhood.

To be assigned to a church that “loves the old hymns and liturgies” and is comprised mostly of members over 60 can be a great blessing to both pastor and parish if entered into with the right spirit – which above all means recognizing this is Christ’s Church, not mine or theirs, and God loves 60 year olds who sing Blessed Be The Tie That Binds every Sunday as much as God loves punk rockers. A pastor who drops a drum set in the older, rural church on his or her first Sunday has not only dishonored the story that this church has lived into long before the pastor arrived but has also destroyed any chance he or she may have had to lead them into a new story in the years ahead.

“Theology is not something you consume, but something you produce.”

Actually, I think it is fair to say that theology is both what we consume and produce as well as how we define ourselves. Theology gives us our identity.

We should be careful with our history so we don’t set up false dichotomies. It is not as if every Christian before the Google-Age were passive leaches merely consuming what was fed them from a book or pulpit. Just a cursory glance at the history of the Church from Acts forward reveals a lot of production by lay and clergy alike. In fact, speaking from my own Methodist history, most of the “doing” of God’s work was lay driven. They were not content to just sit in pews and be told what to believe but were pushing through the frontier eager to bring healing and hope to the suffering.

We also shouldn’t short-change “consumption” of theology– it’s vital. As St. Paul said, “how will they know if they do not hear?” We have the best story in the world to share but it is not learned through osmosis. We shouldn’t apologize for stating the huge need to educate our churches because switching stories (read: conversion) requires one to learn a new language and a new way of being in the world. We need trusted guides to help us see and these guides need to know the landscape, which includes our past, our present reality and the hope to which we are moving.

“Theology after Google is not centralized and localized. Likewise, the church cannot be localized in a single building. We find church wherever we find Jesus-followers that we link up with who are doing cool things. This point is huge. Denominational officials and many pastors have not even begun to conceive and wrestle with what it means to work for a church without a clear geographical location.”

I don’t think we can survive long with the world as our parish without some localized place where we can feel connected – grounded. One of our primal needs, as Genesis well reflects, is a need for land – a place to call “home.” This is not a bad thing, although like anything, home can become an idol. I can’t name a single pastor I know who thinks “church” is restricted to their geographical location or building or denomination. Certainly it is the case that many Christians in churches across America have gotten very cozy in their “home.” But this can be as true of the 12 folks meeting in a house church as it can be for a denomination. Rather than hope for the death of denominations we should be praying for revival.

“The new Christian leader is a host, not an authority who dispenses true teaching, wise words, and the sole path to salvation.”

I love the language of “host” and think it should be something we add to our vocabulary as church leaders. But if our model of leadership in the best of times models Jesus it seems odd to me that we would pit “host” against one who dispenses true teaching, wise words or the path to salvation. Jesus did all three and calls us to do the same. We are, after all, “ambassadors” of Christ (2 Cor. 5:20) and we have been given a mandate to go into the world and make disciples. I believe the Holy Spirit is raising up pastors and teachers and leaders today just as the Spirit was in the 1st century and before. While these roles within Christ’s body, the Church, do not make anyone greater than another (and to even think this way of oneself is to forget that the Lord we proclaim is the same one who washed the feet of his disciples) they are gifts from a God who brings order out of chaos.

The Christian leader is certainly a host but also a guide and his or her authority is not and should not be simply tied to their title or degree but to the extent that he or she is living out the story proclaimed.

“But what exactly do I believe? What must I say, and what should I not say (and do)? This quest is more open-ended. It’s filled with uncertainties and indecisions, and it’s constantly evolving. That quest just is theology. It’s everything I think about and do. It’s reading the New York Times headlines online each morning when I awake. It’s the philosophy text that I teach in a classroom or the intriguing idea about christology that I talk about with friends over a beer. It’s our attempts to be involved in authentic forms of ministry and Christian community, and the questions we ask about whether those attempts are really faithful and how to make them better. It’s that recurring question, “What should I do with my life?”

One thing missing here is Scripture. The work of doing theology certainly includes the profound to the mundane of life but it most certainly cannot exist apart from its root. As Christians we confess a belief in revealed religion. We are not simply spouting off novel “ideas” about Christology but offering informed, prayerful, Spirit-led reflections on what it means to be addressed by this God and how to best live out that address. The New York Times does not tell me how to think about God. However, Scripture gives me a lens through which I can read the Times, thus adding flavor to a meal already given us by our Host.

Chad Holtz is a disciple of Jesus, a husband, a daddy of 4 (soon to be 5!), a pastor, a student of all and a friend to many. He is working on his MDiv at Duke Divinity School and blogs at chadholtz.net.

Breaking Bread Together

Posted 32 days ago | 6 comments | by Amy Moffitt| Link

Dinner Church at St. Lydia’s
by Emily MD Scott
St. Lydia’s, New York, NY

Times of departure from tradition are often marked by a return to tradition; this has been the case for what some have termed “The Emergent Church,” a movement pointing the way forward for the Church. St. Lydia’s, a new church that meets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is following this pattern. Our worship is modeled after the Eucharist of the Early Church when Christians would gather for worship that took place around a full meal, with its liturgical roots in the Sabbath Super and Seder Meal.

Every Sunday night, Lydians (as we have come to refer to ourselves) gather at Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran parish near Tompkins Square Park. Each week a different congregant acts as the “lead cook.” As congregants arrive, they are put to work in the kitchen cutting vegetables, or in the sanctuary setting the tables or arranging flowers and putting out candles. We’ve found that welcoming regulars and newcomers alike by asking them to pitch in helps them own the worship experience, and draws us together as a community. When all is ready, we gather in the entryway, sing a lamp lighting hymn and process into the sanctuary, light the candles, and sit down to bless our meal. A celebrant leads us in the chanting of the Didache Prayer: the earliest known Eucharistic Prayer, dating to the second or third century. After sharing the loaf of bread, we dig into our sacred meal, catching up with one another over nourishing food.

As the meal winds down the bibles come out and we read and interpret scripture together. Last Easter I told our congregants that we gather each week to hear a story: a story about how Love is stronger than death. Each week we rehearse this story, hear fragments of the story and tell our own stories, tuning our hearts to pick up on God’s movement in our lives. Then we join hands to pray. Worship closes with the blessing of the cup (just as Jesus blessed the cup after dinner, so do we) and clean up, followed by announcements, an offering, and a final hymn in the entryway.

Why make church this way? Why gather around the table to sing and pray?

Because when we invite people to the table to share in the meal, we want that invitation to ring true in the most immediate way possible. We want the distance between our symbols and their meaning to be as small as possible. We want the connections between our table and all tables to be palpable. We want the foretaste of the feast to come to be felt with all the senses.

Because we want our worship to be inculturated. New York is a city filled with young, ambitious people who often feel isolated from one another. They live long subway rides from their friends and sometimes have trouble meeting folks outside of the workplace. It’s difficult to host in their small apartments, difficult to make home cooked-food in their kitchens. St. Lydia’s seeks to feed the hunger that exists in this city: a hunger for connection that goes deeper than the surface level, for exploration of scripture that is complex and nuanced, for food that is cooked with love and care and a table that is large enough to seat us all.

Find out more about St. Lydia’s at their website.

Read more of Emily’s writing at her
blog.

Is the emerging church dying or maturing?

Posted 32 days ago | 36 comments | by Amy Moffitt| Link

Is the emerging church dying or maturing?
by Jonathan Brink

At the end of 2008, I wrote a year end summary called The State of Emergence. In many ways it was an attempt to create some meaningful understanding of this thing we participate in called Emergence, which is manifested in the idea of an “emerging church.” Something is happening within our conversations that is disrupting all of our preconceived notions about the Kingdom of God. As much as we want the conversation to be over, the reality is we’re still exploring exactly what is happening. It continues to unfold.

But over the last year, and much like the year before, we encountered significant voices who were walking away from the conversation. The underlying question seems to be, “Has the conversation truly died?” As much as some want to say, “yes”, I would suggest that the answer is a resounding, “no”.

Before we rush into the evidence of maturity, it is important to reflect on why some think the conversation is dying. We cannot ignore the well documented history of the U.S. version of the emerging church. What started out as a Leadership Network’s idea to reach the Gen X audience, morphed into a conversation that attempted to address the post-modern shift in culture. Those original gatherings provided the initial sense of movement. That sense of thrill was documented in Danielle Shroyer’s recent post, “What do you do when a revolution isn’t sexy anymore?” Danielle said:

“I stumbled into this conversation as an eighteen year old college freshman in Waco, Texas. A few short years later, I felt as if I’d accidentally been placed among a fabulous group of people who happened to be sitting on top of a revolutionary volcano. It was thrilling, and sexy, and I quite literally believed that we were going to change the world. I can recall that feeling like it was yesterday.”

But like any movement, things changed.

“The truth is, everybody loves the beginning of a revolution. (Well, at least those of us who enjoy playing the part of the revolutionaries!) You have the distinct honor of experiencing and witnessing a slew of firsts- and sometimes being one, too. You get the thrill of telling people ideas they haven’t heard before and watching their expressions as little fireworks go off in their heads (for better and for worse). But no revolution stays in its honeymoon period forever. At some point, you have to come home and start the hard work of actually making a life together,”

The shift into different territory arguably began when Mark Driscoll distanced himself from and even became a vocal critic of the original conversation. It continued when Dan Kimball made it clear he was interested in evangelism and helped start a different conversation. The criticism of the movement was palpable. But this year the Tall Skinny Kiwi, Andrew Jones, wondered out loud if 2009 was the end of the movement. The post stirred up a firestorm of comments and responses. Tony Jones immediately shot back. C Michael Patton had already suggested it was true. Drew couldn’t believe it was true. Emerging Mummy was just tired of the talk. Rick even wrote a satirical obituary on it.

It’s easy to see why we’re interested in being “post-emerging.” Emergence suggests transformation but it also reveals that we’re not finished. In other words, it reveals the very thing we are attempting to grow out of. Transformation takes time and if we’re honest we’d just rather be done. We live in broken systems that we know don’t resonate like they used to, yet we continue to participate in because they are all we have. Emergence then just doesn’t come fast enough. Phyllis Tickle suggests that these shifts take hundreds of years to work themselves out. But we’re the “insta” generation. Ideas are “so yesterday” before the ink has dried on the blog post. We think we can condense everything into instantaneous moments of glory. Yet the reality is that God is not instant. God is more like a Gardener, patiently willing to let the seed struggle through the soil in order to reveal its full bloom.

So the question on the table is still, “Is the emerging church dying or maturing?” I would suggest that it not dying but undergoing a deepening of what it means to emerge. There is considerable evidence to suggest the conversation is not dying. If anything it is maturity and even expanding. For those who were at Richard Rohr’s Emerging church conference last year, you know what I’m talking about. Suddenly the conversation was not just a small group of evangelical or mainline white guys, but a large group of Catholics too. The stereotype had been broken. The world was waking up to what it means to emerge. The conference was so popular Richard is doing it again this year.

Columbia Theological Seminary recently hosted a conference on the emerging church called Emergence Now. Tony And Doug recently hosted an all female speaker conference called Christianity 21. Christianity 21 was from recounts an epic game changer. It not only gave rise to the feminine voice in our midst, but it shattered any remaining notion that women should simply sit on the sidelines and watch. It was a brilliant display of the God image represented in our midst. Peter Rollins is even hosting the “I Believe In The Insurrection” tour.

But the conversation doesn’t end there. Even within the deeply traditional evangelical walls of Wheaton College, they are still talking about it. Dan Kimball recently shared his thoughts on their recent conference on the emerging church.

“I really didn’t think too many people would even come out for it because it feels like the “emerging church”* discussion with that term is more one of the past (*I do believe the church will always be “emerging” until Jesus comes – and as I say often, the mission of the emerging church still continues even though terminology may change). So I was surprised to see the place so crowded to where they ran out of seats the first day and people had to sit on the floor.”

As much as we want to believe its dying, we can’t ignore that people are still asking and wondering what this thing is all about. But emergence is not just about conversation. It’s about transformation. Much of the shift in emergence appears to be towards “missional”. The Origins network began with this vision.

Our Vision: This network is a community of followers of Jesus who are passionate about seeing people know God and experience life as He intended. As we are guided by the Scriptures we will inspire one another to embrace innovation and creativity as a means to fulfill this mission.

In November Steve Knight and some friends launched the Transform Network. Transform was started “to bring together men and women who are on the verge of starting new communities (i.e., community catalysts) or are already cultivating new communities and to give them the encouragement and resources they need to get started and be sustainable.” The network now has over 650 members and have an incredible lineup of speakers at their first gathering in May.

Many have criticized the publishing element of emergence but it is a clear means of communicating ideas. Spencer Burke launched Ooze.tv, which quickly became a hub for some amazing conversation. Brian McLaren is launching his next book, A New Kind Of Christianity, Ten Questions That Are Transforming The Faith. Julie Clawson released Everyday Justice. Peter Rollins release The Orthodox Heretic. Cynthia LaGrou is producing Taking Flight. Philip Clayton and Tripp Fuller launched Transforming Theology, and are hosting Theology After Google. The Baptimergents are even releasing a collection of stories called, “Baptimergent: Baptist Stories From The Emergent Frontier,” Danielle Shroyer released The Boundary Breaking God. John Franke release Manifold Witness, the Plurality of Truth. Dwight Friesen released Thy Kingdom Connected. We need these books because they help us process ideas that help us make sense of emergence.

If anything the evidence suggests Emergence and even the emerging church is alive and well. She’s just maturing. If anything died, it was the expectation that emergence would be everything we demanded it would be, rescuing us from having to confront our own dissonance. Like Danielle suggested in her post, we’re now working out what it means to do the hard work of making life together. And isn’t that why the conversation started, because our structures, models, and habits weren’t producing life? It’s not sexy. It’s not even fun sometimes. But it is worth it. It is worth exploring the Kingdom of God in our midst. It’s always emerging and transforming us, even when we’re unaware of it.

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Jonathan Brink is Managing Director of Thrive Ministries, a missional discipleship agency. He lives in California with his wife and three kids.