Transmission

So John MacArthur, a radio evangelist, recently released a fundraising letter/diatribe against the Emerging Church. Among other things he claims that the Emerging Church is a “threat” and that “the danger is real.” Dan Kimball, a pastor who identifies as emerging, wrote a lengthy refutation to this. Go read it at The Ooze.

The thing is, I actually find MacArthur’s portrait of the EC to be much more compelling than Kimball’s, which seems to be indistinguishable from traditional church (rigid authority structures, 45 minute sermons, modernist doctrinal statements, etc). If presented with a choice between the two, I’d take MacArthur’s Emerging Church any day.

Take this one juicy bit:

“The result is a movement that thrives on disorganization, lends itself to mysticism, distrusts authority and dislikes preaching, feeds intellectual pride and recognizes few (if any) doctrinal or moral boundaries. You can see why the movement is so appealing to college-age people young people - it is fleshly rebellion dressed in ecclesiastical robes.”

Yup, this pretty much describes me to a T, minus the bit about the ecclesiastical robes - I can’t say I’m interested in dressing my fleshly rebellion in anything other than what they’re already wearing. I like it so much that I kind of want to paste it in the “about us” page…

Yes, we thrive on disorganization. We have abandoned rigid, top-down authority models in favor of a lateral authority model. Emergence is a term borrowed from Self-Organizing Systems Theory. I recommend everyone go read The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

Yes, we lend ourselves to mysticism. Mysticism has been in the Christian Tradition for a very, very long time, and anyone who contests this should go reread Augustine, Anselm, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Keating, and Richard Foster. It is precisely the lack of mystery which makes traditional church unappealing to so many postmodern people.

Yes, we distrust authority and dislike preaching. When our culture is telling us what we need to value (wealth, power, status), advertising campaigns telling us what we need to buy (iPods, cars, soda), and our government is telling us who we need to bomb (usually people whose per capita GDP is less than a tenth of ours), do we really want our churches to be training us to be passive towards authority? Churches ought to be training us to be active thinkers, to critically engage each other, and to read our Bibles for ourselves.

Yes, we feed intellectual pride and recognize few moral and doctrinal boundaries. Well, sort of. We love it when people begin thinking for themselves and value intellectual diversity. We distrust systems of moral and doctrinal boundaries precisely in the way that the New Testament distrusts religious legalism. We rely on grace while we try to follow Christ: feeding the poor, caring for the meek, and welcoming the marginalized into our homes.

We are a fleshly rebellion. We affirm our bodies as good creations (good enough for Jesus, at any rate). We acknowledge that a Christian can be spiritual AND earthly in the same way that God can be immanent AND transcendant, Jesus can be incarnate AND redemptive, and communion can be body AND bread. We recognize that drawing closer to God does not entail a denial of the body. Dancing, yoga, exercise, and sexuality can be profoundly prayerful.

There was recently quite an active discussion around one of our early posts about what it means to be emergent, and I agree with our Lurker that the term is becoming less and less useful as it gets tossed around more and more. I think we’re going to need a new word to describe those of us on the radical fringe of Christianity.

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