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August 15, 2006
Dichotomy and the 'Emerging' Church
Topics: EmergentA recent Christian News article describes the "emerging" church movement, concentrating on the primary motivation as the desire for relevance in a godless society.
"... the way we've been doing it (church) is working for less and less people," Bob Hyatt, pastor of Evergreen Community in Portland said, noting that traditional approaches to church and evangelism were becoming less effective.
"We need to explore doing something differently so that we can have a Christianity that makes sense when we go to these people, when we love them and when spiritual conversations happen" he said.
The solution to irrelevance, however, is not adaptation to the godless culture but rather identification of the reasons for irrelevance. Nowhere in the article was there concern for pleasing God, righteousness and transforming the church on the basis of Biblical principles. The means of grace and spiritual disciplines have been trumped by church formats that more closely match the expectations of society
Robert Blackman, youth director at First Presbyterian Church in Corvallis, explained, "The name [emergent] gets at the process of spiritual change marked by trying to translate church and the gospel into today's emerging postmodern culture."
The translation is unfortunate. Biblical Theology and doctrine are viewed as rational, logical, traditional and, yet, irrelevant. Meaning and relevance appear to be found through experiences and relationships that do not provide a rational foundation for truth. This Hegelian dichotomy is not at all new and forms the basis for the post-modern understanding of knowledge. In the end, adherents will be led to despair because the knowledge and experience of the Gospel are pitted one against the other.
Posted by calvin at August 15, 2006 02:21 PM
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"Nowhere in the article was there concern for pleasing God, righteousness and transforming the church on the basis of Biblical principles. The means of grace and spiritual disciplines have been trumped by church formats that more closely match the expectations of society"
But to assume, therefore, that we have no passions for those things would be erroneous. Please don't take a two-hour conversation about church that gets edited down into two or three lines by an author with a word-count limit as being all inclusive our our thoughts, feelings and convictions on matters...
My first and foremost desire in life and pastoring is to please God, to glorify Him and to point people to Jesus. Like any good missiologist, I choose my methodology carefully, based on what's biblically allowable and what's culturally relevant.
Contextualizing the Gospel is both biblical and necessary. My comments were merely meant to convey that I think many churches that support missionaries who study, employ and depend on contextualization of the Gospel have forgotten that it might actually be needed here in post-Christian America as well.
Posted by: Bob Hyatt at August 15, 2006 03:47 PM
Thanks for the comment, and in particular, "My comments were merely meant to convey that I think many churches that support missionaries who study, employ and depend on contextualization of the Gospel have forgotten that it might actually be needed here in post-Christian America as well." I suspect the author of the article did you a significant disservice by suggesting your answer to the irrelevance of the church is a “contemporary church with non-religious approach” that uses a “dialog format” in “a cozy living room atmosphere”.
Posted by: calvin at August 15, 2006 06:30 PM
