• Home
• Events
  • Google Calendar
  • Subscribe
• Cohorts
  • Find a Cohort
  • Contact Cohort Support
  • Cohort Blogs
• Groups
• About
  • FAQs
  • Values and Practices
  • Support
  • Leadership
  • Emergent Worldwide
  • Publishing Partners
• • weblog
  • podcast
  • press kit
  • donate
  • Feeds (RSS)

The Emerging Church and Where I Stand

Posted Apr 10, 10:33 AM | 9 comments | by Editor | Link

By Thomas Turner, re-posted from Everyday Liturgy:

One of the most perplexingly frustrating details about myself is that I am emergent. I am not just emergent, I am the cohort leader of the Northern New Jersey Emergent Village cohort.

Some friends and acquaintances may have picked up on the certain ways I say things or the language I use and had an inkling that I am in the broad stroke of “emergent”. Others may have no idea. I never wanted the label “emergent” to keep people away from friendship or theological conversation.

I have talked to a few friends about how to basically state
that I am emergent and not cower saying, “please don’t hate me!” After several conversations I think the best way to explain where I stand on emergent/emerging is to tell my story. After watching the latest video on defining the emergent church from the Christian Books Expo I wanted to be able to tell my story because what Scot McKnight says finally gave me the courage to say I am part of something that is broad and diverse while at the same time vigorously defending it.

I first became involved with the emergent church by reading James K.A. Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism and John Franke and Stanley Granz’s works. I came in through the back door, so to speak, wanting to engage in theological and philosophical discussion. I became the emergent cohort leader of Northern New Jersey because I wanted to have theological discussion with people that lived around me after moving to the area and not being able to find the type of academic conversations I had grown accustomed to while at college.

When people hear that I am part of the emergent church I get weird looks. They think I hate doctrine, I am a reclusive mystic, or that I am part of a secret conspiracy to destroy the church. I assure you that is the least of my aspirations. I want to be
in conversation.

I joined Emergent Village because they are the only people talking while the rest of the Christian world seems to be shouting or vexed. I joined Emergent Village because I wanted to be part of a group of people who did not all look like me, talk like me, and believe the exact same doctrine, theology, or philosophy
as I do. I wanted to be part of the larger whole of Christianity as it exists in such a diverse group as the emergent church.

I do not need the label emergent. It is not a label I would have a problem losing. I would have a problem losing the label missional, orthodox, or Christian. But emergent isn’t essential.

What is essential is knowing that my brothers and sisters in the emergent church all love Jesus and the good news he brings. The most used criticism of the emergent church is that it doesn’t know what it believes, and while there is no official doctrinal statement of the emergent church Emergent Village’s “Values and Practices” comes very close, and for those skeptical of the emergent church it should change your mind on many of the blatant lies that spread about the movement.

Recently Mark Sayers wrote about the mini-movements of the emergent church, a similar concept to Scot McKnight’s Christianity Today article “Five Streams of the Emerging Church.” I identify readily with parts of all five of McKnight’s streams, and some of the mini-movements Sayers identifies (particularly the Neo-Anabaptists and Neo-Missionologists). But what is the best part of the emergent church, and why I will continue to be a part of it, is that I can be with such a diverse group of people and still find myself in different streams or mini-movements that are not much talked about.

I identify mostly with a mini-movement Sayers does not touch on but McKnight does which is the Ancient-Future movement (McKnight calls it Praxis-oriented). I also would identify with being what Rod Dreher calls “Crunch Conservatives,” people who are socially very conservative but hold to a cultural mandate to support the local community in a way that is both Christian and agrarian. I, as is Rod Dreher and many others, am deeply indebted to the works of Wendell Berry in outlining what it means to be a counter-cultural Christian and to undo the separation of the physical and the spiritual that has taken over the vast swath of Western Christianity.

I am not being individualistic in claiming my own stream or mini-movement, for there are both many who agree with me and many who agree in part. But the best part of being involved in the emergent church is that I can still love and serve with those who do not agree with my agrarian, ancient-future way of doing things because we hold to one common faith.

This is why Scot McKnight is so right to stress the creeds. The creeds are what hold us together. The creeds are what make the emerging church not a “diversity” but a “university,” a place of unity amongst diversity.

I am involved in the emerging church and have never read a Tony Jones book. I have never read a Doug Pagitt book. I have read James K. A. Smith, Stanley Grenz, Scot McKnight, John Franke, and others who don’t come up as the “major players” in the emerging church, but that doesn’t mean I am not emergent or that those authors aren’t, as McKnight argues. I am emergent because I am in conversation with those who might disagree with me, and I am okay with that and they are okay with that—and in the end that is what is so scary about the emerging church for so many people.

It is a conversation where the buck never stops. There is no gavel that pounds the table and says, “done!” Some people want that and desire it because they want there system where all the holes are plugged and everything makes sense—a static Christianity. And most people believe that Christianity has always been static.

Let us not delude ourselves. Christianity has always been, and will continue to be, an ever evolving conversation about what it means to follow Christ. That is why new books are always being published, sermons being preached, conferences being attended. These are all good things, and should continue. They are all part of the conversation since Peter stood up on the day of Pentecost and got the ball rolling.

I want to be part of a dynamic Christianity. I want to be part of the whole body of Christ, not just one little facet. I want to be part of a conversation about Christianity that stretches across geography and time. That is why I am part of the emerging church, for better or worse.

---

Thomas Turner is the cohort leader of EmergentNJ. He is also on the ministry team at The Plant, a community cultivating love, truth, and compassion in Allendale, New Jersey.

Bookmark this article using Remarkable!