I’ve just discovered your site through reading, by accident, about the author Brian McLaren from Cedar Creek CC and the Emergent movement in the US. I have been encouraged to read that there is an honest to God attempt to re-evaluate the current state of the church in the light of the post-modern world outside. Well done!
To tell you a little of my experiences with this problem, I took my degree in Biblical Studies at Sheffield University in the early 1990’s and suffered a horrendous depressive episode toward the end of the course as a result of the abusive attitude, both to myself personally and within lectures, of several of the staff. Such men represented within the academic community in the UK the post-modern tradition at its worst within the educational establishment. Their teaching and attitude literally depressed me physically and spiritually.
That was all a decade ago and I still feel the effects of their abuse. So now, I wonder, what the church has to say about this post-modern blight and how are today’s christians to respond and survive these attacks on our faith. And then I saw your website!
It’s really encouraging to see that this current state of affairs is of great concern to christians across the globe and that you are honestly seeking to find the right path to go down.
All that said, I have a few questions of my own that I would like to share with you. It is very clear that you are all in the early stages of this new movement and I’m curious as to how you will answer these very real concerns.
So here goes:
1) Do you see this movement altering or reshaping the current structure of the worldwide church? Do you intend to bring Protestants, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and so on together and how will you do this without causing more splits? Do you intend to change the church from the inside or form a new alliance?
The last thing, I feel, christianity needs is yet another ‘denomination’ of ‘non-denominational’ churches to spring up and cause yet more splits in the church, so….
2) How will you reconcile the many hot potatoes between current evangelical, bible-believing christians and the more liberal, post-modern christian sections of the church? Issues such as homosexuality, women in leadership, worship styles, abortion, relationship between church and state, doctrinal differences and so on.
It’s a tough cookie and I wish you all the very best in dealing with these very difficult problems.
3) How are you going to safeguard this new movement from descending into just a new ‘fad’ or extreme ‘christian cult’ enjoyed by only a few and confusing the world yet further as to what the church has to say? You’ll have your critics and many will fear change. How will you combine the real need to adapt to the challenges of today’s society and make christianity relevant without alienating traditional christians and those accustomed to older styles of worship and ‘way’s of doing things’?
Personally, I think that we can learn a lot from the mistakes made by recent charismatic movement churches by not making the post-modern relevance the only thing that is important. It seems to me that recent charismatic churches have concentrated only on making the gifts of the Spirit the only important issue of the day and creating a more lively form of worship that only the young and energetic like on a regular basis. Yes, it’s good to be excited about God and express your joy with dancing and clapping and so on. But it’s not the whole christian life….What of suffering, loneliness, depression, despair, pain and confusion? All of these issues need to be addressed without alienating one part of christianity in favour of another.
I think it is important for the real issues not to be clouded by certain people’s preferences.
Finally, I have a request. It seems to me that writers such as Brian McLaren, as I mentioned previously, are very tuned in intellectually to the problems of post-modernity and its catastrophic effects upon contemporary biblical studies in our Universities and Colleges (or as you say, Seminaries). Please, please, please could those of you, like Brian, turn your attentions to the great problems of the current educational system as well as finding an alternative for the ‘educational model’ for current spiritual formation.
While you are considering a better way, there are many young, eager, energetic christians out there who are being spiritually crippled at the outset of their adult lives by the current biblical teachings. Worse still, many are teaching what they have learned in University to the average unsuspecting pew filler. The poison is being spread and fed across our churches.
Please consider using your intellectual talents to combat this problem and free up the next generation of our leaders to serve God without the great burden of intellectual and spiritual confusion that abounds.
God Bless you all in your endeavours to do God’s will and bring the light of Christ to this very dark generation.
It’ll be very interesting to see what you come up with.
Best Wishes
Mr T J Shaw B.A.(Hons)
The emerging church denomination
I think avoiding the creation of another denomination will be the easiest part of the job. The emerging church is really a just phenomenon that has been labelled recently, although I suspect it has always existed. It is the collective term for Christians who are refusing to have other people’s meta-narratives imposed upon them and who are seeking out their own self constructed faith. I suspect that the emerging church has always existed and will always exist; it’s just that the increasingly culturally irrelevant nature of today’s established churches is facilitating a much larger emerging church than usual.
What, I think, we must be wary of is creating denominations in the wake of the emerging church. While none of use can guarantee that such a thing would not happen, it is comforting to note that it is not particularly post-modern to want to create a denomination. It’s unlikely that people who are reacting to the meta-narrative imposed on them by modernist established churches would want to create their own meta-narrative to impose on others, but you never know.
Ultimately, I suspect the emerging church will encourage all existing denominations to decentralise and allow more personal interpretation among it’s membership. Although different denominations will do this to differing extents at different paces we can be sure that the current cultural shifts will not allow the church to remain as it is.
I think the hot potatoes you mention are probably still just as potato like in the emerging church, although perhaps not quite so hot. What I mean is that nobody is claiming that we should all agree on this stuff anymore. This follows from my previous point; having deconstructed the meta-narrative that had to be accepted or rejected in totality, we’re re-analysing everything, only we’re all doing it as individuals. Nobody is claiming to have all the answers, and even if they did, we’d probably all ignore them and figure it out for ourselves anyway.