Last week at the technology-and-teaching conference, I had the chance to meet and bore Ryan Bolger, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary. It was a treat to converse with him then, and an even greater treat to see him quoted in the LA Times (free registration required, sorry), in a story on the emerging-church movement.
The report gets at some of the defining issues (as best I read them — but I am not an expert on this), in a rough way. George Barna seems to have it wrong, though, when he says, “piecing together the different activities that are important to them in ways that fit their unique needs, as opposed to fitting into the schedules of religious institutions.” That sounds to me like an institutionalist thinker looking out at behavior that isn’t determined by institutions (without being anti-institutional, I think). So many church arguments have been pre-defined as involving "the institutional church," though, that the gravitational attraction of the familiar makes it hard to avoid that characterization of the emergent church. I take it, though, that emergent leaders want to get out from under the burden of reacting against "institutional" behavior as much as they want to escape the fetters of inherited (obsolescent) institutions.
If I’m right, then, it’s not a matter of the “cafeteria spirituality” that Barna describes, and more a matter of a genuine experiment in the nature of the church. An observer simply lumps Burke, McLaren, Cooper, Holsclaw, and their colleagues in with the “pick-and-choose” “needs-meeting” religious movements, misses a decisive part of what the emergents wants not to re-enact. The emergent leaders I’ve met want no part of a rope-’em-in-for-Jesus membership head count game; they’ve stopped cold, asked the basic question of why people who love God and want to follow Jesus should do it in bunches, and are trying to see what answers make sense on the ground.
I’m not a part of that endeavor, and I’m probably misconstruing it in various ways, but as far as I understand it, I respect the impulse and the ways it’s being played out around us. Institutional spokespeople (like me) should mostly just quiet down and let the Spirit speak, aye or nay, through the ministries of hard-working, committed leaders such as these.
Posted by AKMA at August 19, 2004 08:36 AM | TrackBackAkma, thanks for the encouraging words. People might describe you in many ways, but I would wager that 'boring' doesn't make the first 1000 descriptors!!
Yes, it is truly unfair to put these guys into the 'meeting needs' category, as they universally abhor the consumer/exchange emphasis of the seeker movement.
I have tracked the lives of about 100 leaders who have initiated new expressions of church in the UK and US, and there tends to be an 'aha' that causes them to hate everything they ever knew about church. They vent or react for a period, but when they stop reacting, they put the pieces together and construct expressions of faith that both remain rooted in their tradition and communicate clearly in the world in which they live.
What often results in these emerging churches is 'church as a way of life' rather than 'church as a meeting which meets at a particular place and time'. As Milbank has shown us, a 24-7 corporate spirituality has been elusive in the Western Church ever since the church accepted modernity's creation of the secular and its subsequent marginalization. I think the emerging church is making some inroads here -- they are not the first group nor the only group to do so, to be sure. But for middle-of-the-road evangelicals like me to move away from modern constructions of faith, we pietists who drank longest at the well of modernity, it is quite significant, I believe...
Posted by: Ryan Bolger at August 19, 2004 01:29 PM