Is "Missional" the New "Emergent"?
As mentioned last week, the “What Is Missional?” SyncrhoBlog is going on today with 50 bloggers participating in answering that question. Perhaps a good place to start would be with Alan Hirsch who addresses Emergent Village specifically in his post “Missional the New Emergent? Not On My Shift!!”
Hirsch writes, “In my opinion what is expressed through Emergent, the Alt-Worship movement, and what has been called Post-Evangelicalism, is not by-and-large a missionary movement, but is rather what I would call a renewal movement. That is, as far as I can discern, its primary concerns lie largely in interpreting theology and worship for the post-modern situation. Therefore, for many who can no longer hold to modernist understandings of the faith, it is a deadly serious search for a ‘place to stand and believe’ or else abandon the faith altogether. But at best the emerging church movement is about contextualizing theology and spirituality for a particular cultural context at the dawn of the 21st Century. At worst, it is simply a reaction against both Evangelicalism and a Western church captive to a distinctly modernist cultural understanding of itself. And let it be said that I believe that many of its concerns ought to be heeded, although I do believe it sometimes overreaches itself and discards many hard-won, and profoundly significant, theological insights passed on to us in the historical, orthodox, understanding of faith. As for me, I am happy to call the so-called ‘emergents’ friends and fellow travelers, I personally do not feel the need to question the inherited theological tradition as many of its adherents do.
“All this to say that I do not believe for a moment that ‘missional is the new emergent’! Emerging forms of the church must always be subservient to the missional purposes of the church. We can use the term, as I do in my writings, the ‘Emerging Missional Church’, but the emphasis should always fall on the term ‘missional’. Actual mission must precede any new cultural understandings that the church might develop of itself. The Emerging Church has a certain validity as a renewal movement, but renewal movements come and go, the Missio Dei however, is something that must have abiding implications for the Church’s theology, lest we lose the irreplaceable redemptive core inherent in the Christian view of the world. My advice to ‘emergents’ is therefore, don’t emerge before you have a mission.”
Read the whole thing and visit other “What Is Missional?” synchrobloggers
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I hope Hirsch realizes however that without the theological renewal of the emerging church there is every chance in the world that the church will end up serving the wrong “mission”. Already I’ve seen the term “missional” get co-opted by traditional evangelicalism to mean simply more of the same old mission of rescuing people out of the world so they can go to heaven when they die.
Bottom line, an emerging theology of the kingdom as a present reality and missional praxis have to go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other.