A Node in the Web of the Emerging Church

A Movement of People

Posted Aug 16, 01:11 PM | 0 comments | by Editor | Link

A People Movement

By Jonathan Brink:

If Jesus stood in front of you and said, “Come follow me,” would you follow? Would you drop everything in the very face of God and become a fisher of men? I’d like to believe I would. These three words have become, for me, a clarion call for what it means to be a Jesus follower. They suggest action, participation, and movement. Something is happening, and I want to be part of it.

I like the idea of being part of something restorative. I want to be part of a movement that reflects the very face of God. I want to be part of something that people walk away from and say, “God was present here.” We see the change that is emerging and know it is good. This is what attracted me to the emerging church conversation. It is asking the question, “How do we find the soul of what God is already doing yesterday and today?”

But historically movements can quickly divide. Not everyone wanted to follow Jesus, or Gandhi, or MLK, even though in hindsight we could see it was good. Not every movement was about positive restoration (see Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro), even though it looked like that in the beginning. For every positive movement, there is an equally negative one to put everything into question.

The tension this creates is substantial. What if we get it wrong? What if we lead people down what we think is the path towards positive change only to discover that we made significant errors in judgment? What of those who have followed us? Important questions to consider and wrestle with. Finding the true soul of a movement is an important task.

And then I read something that for me brought so much clarity to this question. Jenell Paris wrote in a recent blog post the following quote:

“In movements, ideology quickly becomes more important than individuals.”

And in an instant something became very clear to me. It helped me to understand why I am participating in this movement called the emerging church. From my perspective, the emerging church is the first church movement in my lifetime, or recent past, that is not simply about ideology but about people. It’s about restoring the heart of what it means to follow Jesus. It’s about restoring relationship, humanity, and dignity.

Yes, we have to deal with ideology. But central to the emerging movement is the willingness to be in conversation with those who disagree, to engage a dialog that could easily leave both parties running for the exits, but instead challenges both parties to discover the dignity of each participant, which is the very thing most positive movements are fighting for in the first place.

Because what good is a movement of people whose ideology eventually leaves everyone crushed in its wake? What good is it to win an ideological war when no one is left to enjoy its fruits? The very essence of a good ideology is one that leads its people to restoration, to love.

When I look at the words of Jesus, I see a movement of people. And the ideology, the core essence of what that movement believes, must not just be pondered but practiced. Do we really, really love our neighbor as ourselves? When it matters most, in the heat of debate and conversation, will we choose to love first? Will we reveal to those we are in conversation with that they too are just as valuable as we are? And most importantly will we, when called upon, lay down our lives for the other instead of taking one?

When we do that, when we lay down our lives for others, we are a movement whose very ideology is about people. And that’s a movement I want to be a part of.

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