open source theology

The Future of the People of God conference was promoted as a conversation between Tom Wright and the ‘emerging church’. It was clear enough who Tom Wright was, with his silver episcopal cross swinging around his neck. But the identity of his interlocutor - this amorphous phenomenon which has been labelled ‘emerging church’ - was not so obvious, which made it, in some respects, a rather difficult and puzzling conversation.

Different people at the conference were clearly ‘emerging’ from different things, and something needs to be done to understand much better where we are coming from, how these journeys interrelate, and where they might be leading us. Whether or not we are entering a post-denominational world, the question of how we express unity in diversity is as pressing as it ever was. Emerging church ought to have the resources to address the challenge more effectively than the ‘modern’ church has done, but the need to secure our own position rather than serve others may yet defeat our best intentions.

All I want to do here is give an indication of the different captivities that we are emerging from and suggest that we should plan on spending a long time on the journey together and not worry too much yet about what the promised land might look like when we get there.

So what is emerging church?

It is church as it emerges from modernism, and this inevitably means that we are on a journey through postmodern territory. But it does not mean that the emerging church wishes simply to be postmodern. We are at different points along that journey, but many have spent long enough in this exhilarating but waterless landscape to know that the people of God cannot settle and build here. We have to keep moving, even if we’re not sure where we’re going.

It is church as it emerges from the evangelical-charismatic consensus that has (perhaps necessarily) sustained the church in the West over the last 50 years. Many, of course, feel that they are not so much emerging as barely escaping with their lives, with the chariots and horsemen of Egypt hot on their heels. Others are cautiously venturing through the gaps that have opened up in the rusting border fence that has confined them for so long. Some are coming empty-handed and desperate. Others are bringing much of their past with them, loaded on to handcarts, and it remains to be seen how much will survive the journey.

It is church as it emerges from social and cultural isolation. It is church struggling to shake off a deeply depressing sense that it has become irrelevant, indefensible, spiritually bankrupt, that with the demise of Christendom it is rapidly shrinking to the claustrophobic dimensions of a sect.

It is church as it emerges from a place that is felt to be too narrow and restrictive to do more than lipservice to the goodness and exuberance of a creator God. It is church that has come to believe that it can no longer maintain an attitude of theological and moral disdain towards the world. It is church that has grown tired of wandering in and out of meetings and wants to learn again how to suffer and rejoice in the midst of things.

It is church wanting to hear the story again, as though for the first time - church sensing that, for all the books and bible studies and sermons, it still hasn’t quite heard the authentic voice of its Lord, still hasn’t quite got the point. That’s why Tom Wright - although he would be horrified by the implicit analogy with Moses - has the power to draw such a disparate and cantakerous group together and make them feel that they’re not just wandering aimlessly across the desert.

So we come back to the question of unity. My recommendation would be that as we travel together we spend much more time relearning and retelling the story of the mighty saving works of God than planning how we will organize - or disorganize - our corporate lives in the promised land.

But having mentioned ‘corporate lives’ - I think that the body metaphor writ large across the whole emerging church, rather than the individual community, and perhaps across the whole church, has something to teach us. God has given gifts to the church so that we might serve one another. Surely we must assume that the diversity we have is the diversity that God has given us. There must be some discernment, some judgment of what is good and what is not, but it is by virtue of our differences not our similarities that we are a body. We do not abandon our particular theological, ecclesiological, spiritual distinctives, but we learn to serve and bless one another from those positions. Isn’t that how we subvert the principalities and powers that always threaten to divide?

I thank God that Tom Wright, an Anglican bishop deeply committed to his own history and heritage, had the grace both to serve and to learn from the emerging church.