Post-post.

hi people. i see this post has been read by a few but not commented upon. i admit that i was being a bit tongue in cheek and it was also written in a state of high angst after some disturbing news footage. hopefully my central point is not occluded by this, namely: assuming the emergent conversation has in it’s sights a more relevant and authentic expression of faith - in relation to post-modern society and ourselves within it - surely a profound rediscovery of the radically compassionate and servant heart-in-practise needs to be a part of this. i’m preaching to myself here when i say that we are maybe too much of the world and not enough in it and that this needs to be reversed somehow. ie - yes, lets be more relevant and take on board the ramifications of being in a post-modern world, but not forget the simple message of Christ, which in todays consumerist society is a call to a radical lifestyle and way of being. mutant/physician, heal thyself!

Hello Mutant, Phil and Paula   Thanks for opening up this topic and sharing your response to these kinds of issues. I believe you’ve touched on something highly important and the relative silence mutant observes can even be an indication of that. All forms of religiosity struggle to come to terms with the simple call to serve the poorest, because it cuts to the core of the justice of God and exposes religiosity for what it is. And we all sense it… if we dare.   The problems come when we try to take the next step. Religiosity so easily claws its way back into our thinking as we find ways of justifying reasons for NOT getting out of our comfort zones and being radical in responding to the conviction that has gripped our hearts. The quite understandable inner contradictions which Paula and her husband experienced faced with the reality of their missionary income being threatened if the boat is rocked, provides a clear, but far from untypical, example of this.   Personally, I cannot emphasise enough how important I believe it is to truly engage with the issues raised by considering the poor and God’s attitude towards them. I touched on this a little in my post "What hope for the future?" when I wrote

"…from within the West, a truly Messianic people are genuinely needed; a people who have been up close and personal with all that modernism and capitalism and materialism have to offer and said, "Yes" - to its best; "No" - to its worst and "There is more than this" to Secularism’s claim of universality and its dogmatic denial of mystery and Divinity"

and

"A Christian faith and community that can engage with an unfamiliar world and a world larger than it’s own hitherto horizons. One that can learn, learn and learn again, in order to discover, uncover and reveal a kind of heavenly success that blends sacrifice and faith, poverty and prosperity, weakness and strength, truth and experience, Scripture and community, humility and confidence."

I mean by this to add strength to Mutants suggestion that the real "emergence" from stagnant Christianity which is required is one that goes beyond passive theological debate and angst about relevance, and which instead measures it’s allegiance to "truth" by the fruit of active love; love not merely of the "one another" of our church communities alone, but of "the least of these." Since we now live in a world in which we increasingly sense that "our neighbour" can as easily be an African orphan, as the people on our street, this challenge takes on very different dimensions than those we are previously likely to have ever considered.

In practice, such a radical realignment of priorities is likely to be highly disorientating, but my suspicion is that in such a "dying," the way to life will be found. I have long believed that the "revival" that so many long for is inexorably linked to "mission." This seems to be something in principle that "emergent" groups are comfortable with. However, it seems to me that this is not infrequently because they have redefined "mission" in their own image.

In such an emergent worldview, mission no longer refers to the defiant insistence that the lost, the last and the least - in a global sense - should not be overlooked by the Gospel - to do so being in effect a denial of our faith in it’s vitality - instead "mission" is simply a new buzzword for everything from "doing the will of God" to evangelism to new forms of emergent church.

Ok, in the broadest sense, any involvement in the Missio Dei can be labelled "mission," but if so then we need to redefine and re-"brand" what the pioneers of the world Christian mission movement (including the Celtic Christians, for whom a good many of the emergent communities of UK / US can probably trace their ultimate gospel roots) meant when they spoke about mission: the reaching of unreached people groups in such a way that an indegenous reproducing Christian community exists within that group (though I concede their description would have used quite different language) — "Frontier Mission" perhaps. Why should these groups be considered a priority? Because they have zero opportunity, zero "chance" to hear the Good News unless someone, at some point in history crosses the cultural frontier and incarnates the message of God’s love to them. That’s not an issue of dogma, it’s a simple issue of justice.

Alonside this we need to "remember the poor" - by which I refer NOT to those who are simply less wealthy or even less advantaged in comparison to ourselves, which is simply patronising but in terms of - by humbly drawing alongside communities of people who are so disempowered by their poverty that they also have zero opportunity to properly hear and respond to the Good News, except that someone, at some point in history, lays down their own wealth in order to authentically engage with them, to level their playing field in such manner that the formerly disenfranchised may truly begin to live out the dignity of human existence hithertoo denied them, including the opportunity to discover the reality of Jesus Christ and his wilingness to be amongst them, even while they remain in their abjectness and poverty.

Unless emergent communities find ways of incorporating such a radical commitment to communities of the global lost, last and least, alongside - note: not instead of, alongside - the more convenient, "culturally relevant" outreaches that are more normally in vogue amongst them, I strongly suspect the seeds of their own impotence and demise will be sown from the very beginning; in x years time, it will become obvious that while the theological morass may have been stirred up, it’s capacity to uphold radical, Christian community has not increased.

Why? Because God’s commitment to the poor is so significant that to circumvent it is borderline denial of the Good News. If we truly want to understand why the Christian Community has lost the respect of the culture and society around it within the consumerist, materialist west, we might look closely at our attitudes to the global poor, in particular the unreached peoples, who expose our insipid allegiance to the message we say we believe in. In the results of such an investigation, I suspect we may well discover a greater "relevancy," - that is a struggle, an engagement, more recognisable to the society we are so keen to salt - than we might ever have expected…

Shalom!John, eternalpurpose.org.uk