Some Thoughts on Emergent and The Church

May 22, 2005

There were a lot of conversations taking place at the Emergent
Convention this year and most of them are new to me, but it seems like
the underlying issue is how are we going to be church in our time and
place?

We can talk about emerging theology, youth ministry,
leadership, worship, et cetera, but the issue has to be how we are
going to be church. I come from an institutional church, a mainline
Protestant denomination, and I see our churches struggling with numbers
and mission and vision. Who are we? What are we about? I wonder if we
even ask those questions any more. It is so much easier to ask the
questions of numbers and theology and polity - who can be in and who
must stay out; what type of worship will reach what generation of
people. Practical questions - institutional questions. Important
questions, but not the essential question.

There are things I
dislike about the Emergent Convention, and I’m not sure this is the
conversation forum for me, but I appreciate that under all the issues
there is a group of people gathering to look critically at tradition
and the ways things have always been done in the Church. I appreciate
this group of people who are looking at the world around us and their
theology and wondering where they intersect and how to help people meet
God in this world we find ourselves in. A group of people asking what
it means to be Church.

I have found this conversation in this
place to be geared more towards those coming from a different
perspective and set of assumptions than I - toward people for whom
women in ministry is a real question, and whether or not we can
re-interpret the Bible or theology is a troublesome issue. I have found
the conclusions of the leaders in most of the seminars to be my
starting assumptions. But, the conversation that is happening here
needs to happen in the mainline, liberal denominations as well and I’m
not sure it is.

There needs to be a conversation that begins
with these conclusions as the starting assumptions that asks the same
question of a different group of people: what does it mean to be church
and how are you going to effectively model that vision in this time and
place?

It’s not about contemporary or traditional worship;
it’s not about liberal versus conservative theology; it’s not even
about who gets to do ministry; it’s about church - what do we mean when
we say we are the Church and how are we going to live that out?

I’m
not sure how I feel about Emergent as a phenomenon, but I think the
underlying issues they are tackling are going to be the foundational
and pivotal issues for our generation.

Posted in uncategorized by Sarah