2017 Emergent Church AMA
Intro:
Welcome to the 2017 emergent church AMA. The panelists today are u/Raziid, u/robingallup, and u/mintandgrey.
What is the emergent church?
Brian McLaren, author and “grandfather” of the emergent church, has said that defining the term “emergent” is like nailing jello to the wall because emergent people so heavily focus on praxis and experience rather than on doctrinal boundaries. This leaves us with a potentially broad classification.
According to our loudest critics, we're relativism-spouting, revisionist heretics, busily watering down the Gospel to make it megachurch-palatable. But in reality, most of us aren't quite that bad.
"emergent” is intended to communicate the idea that the Christian church is entering a post-denominational mode, marked by a distrust of institutions and the urging of Protesting Christianity to become less hierarchical and more communal. The emergent church does not refer to a new denomination, but rather exists as the outermost ring of the tree of Christianity, embracing and identifying with what has come before it, as McLaren puts it.
How is the “emergent church” different from the “big E” Emergent church?
Emergent Church with a capital E refers to the Emergent Village. The Emergent Village began as an organization of people disillusioned by 21st century church practices trying to corporately re-imagine church. Think of the Emergent Village as an attempt at creating a tangible network of emergent churches.
Is the emergent church a Denomination?
Most of us consider it more of an ecumenical movement happening within the context of many existing denominations, rather than a unique denomination in its own right. Churches belonging to any denomination might identify with or adopt emergent practices. For example, there are communities that identify as “Anglo-emergent” or “presby-emergent”.
Denominations exist inside a boundary of shared theological or doctrinal beliefs, whereas, the emergent church movement is formed around the belief that ecumenical practice and experience informs doctrine.
This isn't to say that doctrine and theology are not important to emergent Christians or that people who are emergent do not know what they believe. Rather, it means that one's personal, doctrinal beliefs are not generally used as an exclusionary criteria to determine whether another potential participant is eligible and/or welcome to become part of a particular emergent church or community.
Is this different from the emerging church?
The emerging church refers to the umbrella of churches that are participating in the emergence from the existing church, while the emergent church is the larger manifestation of the specific practices that re-evaluate the role of experience and doctrine in church.
Some communities or leaders who were early-adopters of the term "emergent" have since abandoned it, so as to avoid an implied affiliation with any other specific emergent church or community. These communities may still embody the same values or principles commonly associated with the emerging Church movement, but have chosen to distance themselves from what they perceive as the Emerging "brand” or associating with the Emergent Village.
What does the emergent church believe?
The answer to this is as diverse as the people themselves who identify as emergent. As stated above, doctrinal boundaries are not what the emergent church uses to define itself.
That does not mean that there are no boundaries, however. As a whole, we center our beliefs around the life and teachings of Jesus Christ as interpreted through the Bible. This results in a variety of beliefs, generally differing on the individual level rather than the community level.
Perhaps an easier question to answer might be, "What does the Emerging Church value?"
Below is a cross matrix from Tim Conder that compares the values of the emergent church to that of the existing church. Note that this comparison is not a interdenominational comparison, but rather a comparison within denominations:
| Value | Existing/Modern | Emergent/Postmodern |
|---|---|---|
| Ethics | personal/absolute | corporate/contextual |
| Epistemology | abstract/absolute/transcendent | experiential/perceptual/local |
| Theology | systematic/propositional | narrative/missional |
| Gospel | eternal salvation | present reign of God in this world |
| Mission | defined by personal, spiritual needs | defined by God's redemptive agenda |
| Biblical Interpretation | propositional/dependent on theological systems | contextual/narrative |
| Leadership | positional/hierarchical | relational/egalitarian |
| Spiritual Formation | linear/cognitive/personal | nonlinear/holistic/communal |
| Basis of Community Formation | boundaries formed by doctrine/confession | boundaries shaped by ethical and missional commitments |
Some of these terms might be unhelpful for the average reader, so below are some examples. Feel free to ask about any of these as well.
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Basis of Community formation: Intellectual assent to doctrine, tradition, institutions, etc. forms the basis of many Christian communities and denominations. The emergent church defines its communities by a shared mission (work, goals, impact) and ethics (acceptable behaviour, values). Some emergent communities may avoid having doctrinal statements, or lists of official beliefs. This means we include people with varied lifestyles, backgrounds, sexual orientations, or beliefs that may be contrary to our own.
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Gospel: The assurance of being allowed into heaven after death is what the gospel is to many existing Christian communities and denominations. Emergent communities place an emphasis on the idea of God's kingdom being a present, accessible reality for everyone, and talk a lot about what it looks like for "thy kingdom come" and for God's will to be done "on earth as it is in heaven." The gospel is God’s kingdom being among us rather than about escaping to God’s kingdom sometime in the future.
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Epistemology: The Emerging Church is generally asking "what does this mean to us, right now, right where we are?" We often eschew holding onto traditions or belief systems (in the abstract) just because someone at some point thought it was nailed down for all time (absolute and transcendent). We see a constantly changing, postmodern world in need of a constantly responding, postmodern (local) church. This does not mean shrugging off traditions in order to become more attractive, but rather speaking to the experiences, perceptions, and language of the time. We might want to know how an idea has been understood in the past, and examine why it was understood that way, but we will still want to examine what is the best way for it to be understood right now. Truth does not change, but everything else does. And those constantly changing variables and landscapes impact how we perceive the truth, and what applying the truth means for each of us. It's sort of a "becoming all things to all people" mentality, if you will. This yields diverse results, and so church environments can vary greatly.
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Mission: Traditional Christian missions are focused on the individual spiritual and material needs. This often involves some sort of aid sometimes paired with proselytization. The emergent church is more interested in God’s redemptive agenda; that is, resistance to oppression, care for the poor, restorative justice, and holistic peace among all. We care, a LOT, about issues like global hunger, sex trafficking, homelessness, slavery, and oppression. Where other denominations might have a much stronger presence in terms of equipping, sending, and supporting "missionaries" in the traditional sense, emergent Christians tend to seek out what it looks like for each of us to be living missionally. It usually looks less like knocking on doors to share the Gospel, or leaving Bible tracts for the waitress, or going to Africa to convert people to Christianity. It usually looks more like opening our home to an unmarried, young, pregnant woman whose family recently disowned her, or inviting the persecuted Muslim family on our block for a weekend barbecue, or advocating for the economic empowerment of people so that they no longer rely on aid. This does not mean we don’t like to tell people about Jesus, we just don’t believe that proselytizing is part of redemption because, as stated above, the gospel is about the kingdom here and now, not about your afterlife insurance policy.
What’s the deal with Rob Bell?
Most people should probably put Rob Bell in the same category as prominent speakers and authors of other denominational persuasions, such as Pat Robertson, Beth Moore, Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, or Joyce Meyer. Even if you believe a lot of the same things as any of them, you don't automatically view them as an ideal mouthpiece to represent your particular flavor of Christianity.
If you have specific theological questions or want to know our opinion on specific doctrine, feel free to ask, but know that our answers will only be partially representative of any emergent population.
At this point we will stop abstracting the emergent church, which is very non-emergenty, and introduce you to our local, contextual narratives:
u/Raziid :
I'm Josh. I grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical megachurch. I learned from my parents to be involved in church at an early age. I started playing guitar for youth group when I was 12 and became a worship leader when I was 16. Music ministry has been a significant part of my church involvement. When I was 25, my brother left his faith and that began an intellectual journey for me that led me to Rob Bell and on to many other Emergent authors. For the past few years, I've been leading Bible studies, reading and writing theological works, and trying to co-exist with other Christians. I have always had an interest in the intellectual side of Christianity, but it wasn't until all the answers I had been given growing up started falling apart that I was free to actually pursue Christianity in a self-critical, intellectual way. My focus is primarily on theology and church history, feel free to ask me for book recommendations. I do not attend a church at the moment. I brought my gf, u/MintandGrey along as she is an academic expert on the subject. She made her account just for this.
Hi, I'm Rob. I grew up in a conservative, evangelical environment as the son of a pastor dad and a Christian schoolteacher mom. As an adult, I worked in several churches as a pastor and music minister over a fifteen-year stretch. These days, I refer to myself as "ex-pastor," meaning simply that I'm retired (by choice) from vocational ministry and have no plans to return. I spend my days raising my four kids, ages 8-15, and doing a variety of freelance work. My first introduction to emergent theology came from reading Erwin McManus's "An Unstoppable Force" around 2004. I'm also a fan of Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, Donald Miller, and Peter Rollins as authors and explorers of emergent church culture. I currently attend and volunteer at Flatirons Community Church in Lafayette, Colorado, which, though not necessarily identifying as an "emergent" church, does a great job of providing a safe-to-explore, "come and see" environment, as well as a non-isolationist, missional focus, which a semi-jaded emergent like me finds refreshing.
I'm Hannah! I grew up in a liberal, non-religious home. From a young age, I was asking questions about meaning, truth and the divine. I wanted to go church and begged my parents to take me. I attended church on my own, trying to understand where a liberal young woman fit into an unfamiliar evangelical subculture. I was always drawn to narrative and story when talking about what it meant to be Christian, rather than being defined by a particular doctrine. Like many of us, I got pushback from my closest friends, youth leaders and mentors. This incredibly isolating experience led me to readings of the emergent church at 16, finding comfort in the works of Bell, McLaren and Rollins. I eventually wrote my honor's thesis on the role that experience and doctrine play in emergent christian communities. I just started attending a small Presbyterian (PCUSA) church with evening contemporary services. It's a good balance of liturgy, contemporary music and an intellectual approach to the Bible. I also volunteer with the undergraduate United Methodist College ministry hoping to mentor other young students struggling with their faith and practice.
Posted Jun 30, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC