A Node in the Web of the Emerging Church

Interview with Two Emerging/Baptist Guys

Posted Jan 21, 09:47 PM | 0 comments | by Editor | Link

David Fitch—author of The Great Giveaway, pastor at Life on the Vine in Chicago, and Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary—has posted an interesting interview with two “twenty-something emerging church type guys” from a local Baptist church (Matt and Jose).

Fitch writes, “They were leading a house group … and talking about church in ways that was all new to the rest of the more traditional Baptist church. Their words really illustrate the deep cultural shift taking place among the sons and daughters of evangelicals. ... Much of the content here may be old hat to many of us. Yet it continually shocks me how many churches are unaware of the depth of this shift taking place. In reading it again, I thought it illustrates beautifully the shift that is going on in the new generations of the West.”

Some quotes to ponder …

Matt: “The evangelical system says, ‘believe the right things, adhere to the correct intellectual things and you are going to be saved.’ And ‘saved’ to evangelicals is the idea that you are going to heaven later—then life becomes a kind of a waiting room. ... [Evangelicals] make an empty system where all you have to do is have a little bit of faith—whatever that means—and then you will be saved. And it’s just like becoming a mere shell of a Christian and totally miss the point.”

Jose: “When you get married, you don’t do it with just the first person you find. You have to get to know the other person—you have to experience who they are and ask questions, and then you make the commitment. I mean, we are supposed to be the church, the bride of Christ, and we expect nonbelievers to find Christ by answering a certain way to a bunch of dumb questions? Do we really expect them to make a commitment based on that? I mean, how stupid is that! Nobody does that in their right mind today.”

Matt: “Honest commitment is scary for many evangelicals today because it means that salvation is out of their hands. It is then up to God and the Spirit to work inside of the seeker. They maintain their techniques because they want to keep evangelism in their hands. They don’t have real faith that God is going to make Himself attractive to the seeker. They just have to give up trying to control everything and let God do His work.”

Matt: “We look at church history and think it’s beautiful, and modernity had its place, but it is over. And it’s not like postmodernism is better, but it is more relevant. It’s just growth. Is a two year old more important than a fifty year old or vice versa? And it’s not that emergents are rebelling against the modern church; it’s that we are asking questions because we have to.”

Read the whole thing, and please post your thoughts/reactions in the comments here! Thanks.

(HT: Ed Brenegar)

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