Tom Sine, The New Conspirators, Conversation I

In his first ‘conversation’ Sine describes the four streams (emerging, missional, mosaic and monastic) that he believes make up the ‘lively edge of what God is doing in our constantly changing society’. He cautions that these are loose definitions, that there is plenty of disagreement among leaders about the characteristics and boundaries of these movements, and that they are in any case for most part experimental and underfinanced - ‘so we need to cut them a little slack’.

Emerging stream

The emerging stream is traced back to the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s when a number of young leaders, variously defining themselves as post-evangelical or postmodern, ‘took initiative to begin the world over again’. The movement was marked by a desire to reflect on culture and faith, a preference for narrative rather than propositional forms of theology, a distrust of the ‘old certainties’ of modernity, a sense of mystery and wonder in worship, a recovery of ancient symbols and practices, and a search for ‘the sacred in the profane’. It has not seen the sort of numerical growth that the house church movement enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s, but the extent of its influence is immediately apparent at events like Spring Harvest and Greenbelt. Since then the emerging movement has spread to New Zealand, Australia and the US. A number of innovative North American church plants are listed, but there has also been a growing interest among young leaders from mainline denominations.

Sine clearly has trouble extracting a coherent understanding  of the emerging church from the spectrum of definitions that are out there. He offers, however, a list of leading characteristics, including the preference fofr ‘gospel as story’, emphasis on the arts, experiential worship, a call to a ‘more authentic, embodied, whole-life faith’, a community orientation to mission, and so on. No one quite knows where the movement is going. The book An Emergent Manifesto of Hope has some thoughtful essays. D.A. Carson has reservations about the writings of Brian McLaren, but if the critics would get to know emerging leaders personally, they would find that many of them ‘actually take Scripture more seriously than some of their detractors in their call for “ortho-praxy” - not only intellectual assent to faith, but a more authentic living out of a biblical faith in believers’ entire lives’.

Missional stream

‘Whereas the emerging church movement was birthed by practioners reinventing the church for a postmodern context, the missional church movement was birthed out of the academy.’ The missional stream has its origins in the work of Lesslie Newbigin, but it is The Gospel and Our Culture Network and the book Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, edited by Darrell Guder and Lois Barrett, that effectively initiated this shift of focus among primarily  traditional churches in the US away from internal programmes towards mission. The movement has strong support in US seminaries and has done better at addressing the relevant theological questions than the emerging stream; but interestingly Sine finds the ‘missional’ character more consistently evidenced in emerging churches than in ‘many of the churches that identify with the missional label’.

Mosaic stream

The mosaic stream is defined by diversity: Hip Hop churches at one end of the scale, large multicultural city churches at the other. ‘God is indeed raising up new conspirators who are determined to create churches that look like God’s multicultural kingdom.’ These churches are characterized, on the one hand, by the ‘rich gifts of different cultures’, and on the other, by a determination to acknowledge a history of prejudice and redress injustices.

Monastic stream

This final stream of renewal differs from the other three in that it has no interest in church planting, tends to be represented by an older demographic, and it raises more questions about what it means to ‘be disciples of Jesus, be the church and do the mission of the church’. There are middle class monastics who are drawn principally to the spiritual practices of the movement. And there are groups ‘who view following Christ as living in community, working and living incarnationally with the poor and taking time for serious spiritual practices’. A more recent expression of the monastic stream is the ‘new monastic movement’, which began in Raleigh Durham in 2005. Sine quotes Jason Byasee’s description of the new monastics as ‘living in the corners of the American empire… a harbinger of a new and radically different form of Christian practice’.

This simple summary of the four streams into which Sine’s new conspirators are divided omits the material that makes the analysis lively and interesting - the conspirators themselves, many of whom Sine appears to know personally, and the various conspiratorial things that they have been doing. The conversation reads a little bit like a quick spin around the Google Earth of post-evangelical radicalism, with brief descriptions of salient names and organizations popping up and quickly vanishing. 

The analysis seems fair, though clearly the boundaries between the four categories are permeable. It’s important to recognize that the label ‘emerging church’ as it is currently employed does not do justice to the full breadth of the ‘lively edge’ of renewal. But I wonder, then, what we should call the ‘conspiracy’ as a whole, the four streams combined. I still like to think of these various developments as the more explicit signs of a church that is broadly and slowly emerging from the Christendom paradigm.

Tom Sine, The New Conspirators, Conversation II

The second conversation - ‘Taking the Culture Seriously’ - falls into two parts, which got me a little confused. Sine looks, first, at the state of the world post-9/11. The threat of Islamic terrorism and conflicts in the Middle East demand that the Abrahamic faiths ‘find ways to work together to build bridges of understanding and reconciliation’. Sine backs calls for the creation of a Palestinian state and repentance on the part of the Christian West for the crusades and continuing insensitivity towards Muslim culture and faith.

By contrasting his experiences at a Christian Arab Media conference in Lebanon in 2001 with current realities Sine highlights a number of aspects of the current turbulence we are experiencing: the West is increasingly confronted with a new ‘majority world’; we face extreme economic volatility; globalization is widening the gap between the rich and the poor; and the global economy has developed a religious or imperial function, defining ultimate reality for people: ‘At the core of the modern worldview underlying globalization is the assertion that the ultimate in human experience is defined primarily in economic terms.’

Secondly, Sine asks ‘to what extent we unwittingly allow the aspirations and values of modern culture and the global mall instead of the images of an ancient/future hope to define our sense of what we are on the planet for’.

His argument is that our narrow and over-spiritualized eschatology has failed to shape our understanding of what constitutes ‘the good life and better future in the here and now’ and that the resulting ideological vacuum has been filled by the ‘storytellers of the global mall’. So how are the four streams responding to this challenge? The emerging stream is too uncritical of culture; the missional stream has developed an intellectual critique but not the practical resources for resistance; but the mosaic and monastic streams are doing rather better.

The problem is again that we have a false future hope based on the Greek idea that a spiritual ‘coming home’ consists of an escape from material existence and has nothing useful to say about everyday life. Sine then pursues an increasingly familiar critique of the Enlightenment dream of progress that has generated the ‘empire of global consumerism’ in which we all - moderns and postmoderns alike - now live. He also discusses The Devil Wears Prada, ‘The Merchants of Cool’, a documentary that reveals how ‘corporations have mounted an unprecedented campaign "to colonize”" the imagination of the largest teen generation in American history’, and several other examples of how not just American youth but all generations are subjected to extreme marketing pressures.

In light of this, Sine argue, the task before us is to take back our imaginations from the marketers and merchants of cool. First, we need to decode the messages that come to us from the global mall (a couple of resources are mentioned: within the monastic stream Geez Magazine, and within the emerging stream Alternatives for Simple Living). Secondly, we need to challenge the imperial claim to define reality: ‘To counter the imperial colonization of our imaginations, we need poets, prophets and artists to help us create subversive imagery that challenges the reigning reality.’

Well, the pace hasn’t slackened. This is a fast-moving, sometimes rather jumpy book, but the analysis is well grounded both in research and personal observation. A bit more depth to the assessment of how well the different streams are responding to the challenge of economic globalization would have been welcome as this synoptic perspective of the current renewal movement is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Perhaps we’ll get more later. I’m relieved to see that Sine is not attempting to change the world in the way that McLaren does in Everything Must Change, and I like the emphasis on finding ‘our way home by reentering our ancient story and rediscovering a new vision of our future hope’. I’ll be interested to see how that thought gets developed.

Tom Sine, The New Conspirators, Conversation III

It is a sign of how voguish eschatology has become that the third ‘conversation’ in Tom Sine’s The New Conspirators is entitled ‘Taking the Future of God Seriously’.

He wants to suggest that ‘the Bible’s imagery of coming home to the kingdom of God is not simply a theology we salute on Sunday but a new reason to get out of bed on Monday — a new “cultural” vision of the good life and better future that reflects God’s loving purposes for a people and a world’.

That pretty much encapsulates his argument. Christians should find their ultimate ‘home’ not in heaven – he quotes N.T. Wright’s provocative ‘Heaven is not our home!’ – but in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is God’s future ‘restored creation’ breaking into the world, which must have ‘implications for spiritual, social, economic and political transformation of our world today’. The immediate challenge for Christians, then, is to re-imagine what this means in a way that directly connects with human experience, to give fresh expression to the ancient images. To this end Sine offers his own slightly mawkish but still powerful reworking of Isaiah’s vision of the mountain on which God will ‘prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples’ and will ‘swallow up death forever’ (Is. 25:6-9). ‘Clearly God intends to bring us safely home as a great resurrected, multicultural community to a restored creation.’

I think Sine gets the tension about right between this vision of an ultimate future and the calling of the followers of Jesus to live that renewed life in the present:

When we join this movement, we are not building God’s new order on earth through our own efforts. Through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, God is actively at work in our world today, using our ordinary lives in ways we have never imagined to give expression to God’s new order, in anticipation of that great homecoming day when all things will be made new.

But it is a serious business. We cannot avoid confronting the powers of darkness in both their personal and their systemic forms; the realization of God’s new order in the present must entail a judgment on injustice; and we must take the political and social activism of God in the world seriously. And on a lighter note, we must take the ‘good life of God’ seriously.

This has probably been the best conversation so far. Sine has more or less achieved what he set out to do – a re-imagining of the concrete social and political existence of the church in the light of a biblical eschatology of new creation. My only real problem with his approach – and with a lot of current emerging theology – is that it collapses into one what I think are in fact two distinct eschatological narratives in the New Testament. The first narrative has to do with the process by which Israel moves from judgment to vindication in the ancient world; the second has to do with an ultimate renewal of creation that is anticipated in the existence of the people of God.

Traditionally theology has given priority to the first narrative but has universalized it, finalized it, and assimilated the new creation theme into it. So being with God in heaven has become an ultimate destiny for Christians rather than a consequence of the vindication of the faithful suffering community.

Sine rightly objects to the traditional approach on the grounds that it provides a too restrictive vision and motivation for mission. But he has still not understood the force of the narrative structure, and has in effect simply reversed the error, subsuming Israel’s immediate eschatological narrative into the larger but more remote narrative about the renewal of creation.

One particular consequence of this conflation, I think, is a misuse of the ‘kingdom of God’ motif. Sine makes the same point that Brian McLaren does in The Secret Message of Jesus that kingdom language ‘doesn’t connect well to life in the twenty-first century’. But ‘kingdom of God’ was never meant to capture the hope of social transformation that both Sine and McLaren, in their different ways, aim at. It refers to the foreseen event of God acting to liberate his people from oppression and become king over his people in place of various corrupt rulers, including satan. There is a transformation of Israel that goes along with that, but it is a transformation entirely centred around the renewal of worship and obedience to YHWH. That event and transformation then makes it possible through the power of the Spirit for the people to be an effective sign of new creation.

Tom Sine, The New Conspirators, Conversation IV

Sine’s fourth conversation is substantial. He starts with a question: ‘How might it change our lives, congregations and communities if we both anticipated and creatively responded to even a few of the coming challenges?’ His basic premise is that most churches and Christian organizations, including those in the emerging, missional, mosaic and monastic streams, lack foresight; that they have not woken up to the ‘coming waves of change that will impact our lives and the lives of our poorest neighbors’; and that if they are to be missionally effective in the coming years, they must come to grips with the far-reaching changes that are taking place.

The driving force for change is ‘economic globalization’. Sine considers, first, the environmental impact of runaway economic growth and argues that as followers of Christ ‘we need to live our lives and influence policies that reflect our unqualified commitment to creation care’. But the chapter mostly focuses on the challenges faced by the three levels of society: the global rich, the vulnerable middle, and the imperiled poor. In each case he attempts to re-imagine how these different groups might respond to these challenges. The super-rich can become super-philanthropists. Middle class Christians should ‘reexamine our love affair with our individualistic lifestyles and explore community and cooperative based models’. And the church must do something to empower communities trapped in poverty:

The only way that poverty will become history is for those of us whom God has entrusted with God’s generous resources to critically evaluate our own lives and priorities. It is estimated that today over 200 million Christians live in dire poverty. Isn’t there something terribly wrong, in the international body of Christ, when some of us live palatially and other Christians can’t keep their kids fed? Isn’t it past time to recognize that we live in an interconnected, interdependent global village in which there is no longer any such thing as a "private" lifestyle choice?

This is very good stuff. I was left wondering at times what is going to make the Christian response to the evils of economic globalization distinctive. Is this simply a matter of us throwing in our limited economic and political weight behind the governments, NGOs, and philanthropists who might really make a difference to the world? There is more to be done here in exploring the theological framework of this sort of activism. But Sine squarely faces the challenges to the church’s fund-base as the baby-boomer generation heads for retirement, its numbers as the under 40s find themselves increasingly disenchanted with the modern institutional church, and its missional vision that are looming on the horizon.

Given the trends we have discussed regarding the future of the poor, the middle class and the church, it is time to recognize that a "business as usual" faith will not serve. It is critical that we seek to raise the bar in all our churches on the meaning of discipleship, church and mission. We will all need to more authentically reflect God’s new order in which we make our lives and resources more available to the growth of God’s quiet conspiracy of compassion in a world of mounting need.