Posted on 06/28/2006 6:23:32 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
ATLANTA (ABP)—Atlanta church planter Jake Myers used the images of beer, candles and theologian Soren Kierkegaard to describe the “emergent conversation” taking place within Christianity, which he said could be a good fit for members of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Myers, who leads an emergent community in the Little Five Points area of Atlanta, led a breakout session during the CBF general assembly. He also serves on staff at Wieuca Road Baptist Church in Atlanta as a church planter and mission leader.
The “emergent church” movement is a decade-old movement of Christians—both mainline and evangelical— exploring new expressions of Christianity within a context of postmodern thought and culture. Led by proponents like Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt, the emergent community interacts through blogs and websites like emergentvillage.com.
Myers suggested “generative friendship” as a two-word definition for the emergent movement—a place “where we can come together and talk about what it means to be Christ-followers in a postmodern, post-Holocaust, post-colonial, post-Christendom world.”
Myers used beer as a rubric for the conversational and inclusive aspects of the emergent-church movement, suggesting that beer is commonly shared by friends and accompanied by conversation. That conversation crosses theological and generational lines to support “the church in all its forms,” he said, from new monastic communities to house churches and from coffee shop groups to larger gatherings.
Ethics, social justice, and hospitality are central to the movement, he said. Among evangelicals, he said, the emergent movement has sparked a greater concern for justice issues, he said.
Candles “transform space” and “create a more somber, sacred environment,” Myers said, thus serving as an appropriate metaphor for a discussion of “how we connect with God in our postmodern world.”
Some emergent Christians have embraced ancient liturgical practices, he said, finding in them an openness to mystery not found in worship that is primarily rational.
Whatever the shape of it, liturgy needs to be organic, not imposed from outside but emerging from within the community of faith, Myers said.
The emergent conversation promotes a different model for doing church, Myers said. It is not an “attractional model” based on investing resources and doing marketing designed to attract as many people as possible, but a more incarnational or missional model that places more emphasis on being the church than on going to church.
Myers cited Danish existentialist Kierkegaard as a theologian who dealt with an apathetic, bourgeois church that didn’t really impact its culture but became assimilated to it. The emergent church, like Kierkegaard, calls on believers to follow Christ more than culture.
“The emergent conversation allows everyone to be a theologian,” Myers said, adding that “theology gets a lot of us into trouble” with critics.
Some emergent Christians are rethinking concepts like the penal substitution theory of atonement and challenging the idea that the primary reason for becoming a Christian is to avoid going to hell, he said.
Emergent Christians place a “huge emphasis on the kingdom of God,” Myers said, and on becoming “missional.” To be missional “is to be passionate on purpose,” he said, worrying less about whether people come to church and more about how “we participate in God’s mission in the world.”
Myers' audience included older Fellowship members wanting to learn about the emergent-church movement and younger Fellowship participants interested in ministering in such a setting.
Myers stopped short of identifying CBF with the emergent movement, but he said they have some similarities. Both think of themselves as renewal movements, he said. CBF describes itself as a “fellowship”; the emergent church describes itself as a “generative friendship.” Both CBF and the emergent movement were birthed through crisis. Both emphasize autonomy. And both have made theological education a big part of the conversation, he said.
Salvation, or a "missional generative friendship"? My, what a tough choice.
...“theology gets a lot of us into trouble” with critics. Some emergent Christians are rethinking concepts like the penal substitution theory of atonement...
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Here I am reading this, thinking okay its not bad to explore new ways to reach people and then this pops up. I want to see churches grow, become more vibrant and SCRIPTURE a greater part of everyone's life, but not at the expense of TRUTH!
If we want to change with the times we can become like the old "mainstream" churches.
Which IMO is why I am always suspicious of these types of groups. In seeking to distance themselves from established churches and discover "new truths", they always manage to embrace heresy. One has to wonder how closely they're listening to the "voice of truth", if they can get sidetracked by falsehood so easily.
No wonder he is so messed up - he really doesn't get why people become true Christians. The primary reason for becoming a Christian is to have Christ Jesus. When we come to the point where we understand what miserable creatures we are in His sight and that the only true peace and rest for our souls comes through Him, then we just simple desire the Almighty God, Jesus Christ. He is sufficient for all out needs.
Yes, He will deliver us from hell someday, and He will deliver us from the presence of sin, someday, but right now, He is able to deliver us from the power and darkness of sin in our every thought, deed and word. We hunger and thirst for His righteousness, not a get of hell free card. And He accomplished that by His substionaly sacrifice in order to atone for/cover our sins.
You're right, although one should make a distinction between discovering a "new" truth and merely recovering something that may have gotten lost. Sometimes we get into fads and have to look to historic Christianity to correct our misunderstanding.
Of course, when people start inventing things that were never believed, never practiced, and never even dreamed of (hello gay "marriage"), that's when heresy rears its ugly head. I find it impossible to believe that Christ would abandon his Church to the extent that it would get such things TOTALLY wrong for centuries and centuries only to revivify it by some genius liberal "scholar".
I have seen this Emergent Church happening within my own church as the worship leader loves Brian Mclaren and the Emeregent movemant. It is frightening!
To those who are Evangelical Christians(not Catholic) you should be concerned about this movemant. Do some research on the internet about it and you will find some disturbing issues.
If you notice your own church starting to light candles everywhere, have a room designed for prayer with pictures to enhance your visual sense, reading the Apostle's Creed and making it your churches statement of faith when it never was before, start being accepting of other worship fellowships, not looking to the Bible as much anymore or theology anymore, but rather your own mind. This is a very new agy movemant and I want nothing to do with it. Be on your gaurd!
It could indeed be a bad thing *if* these things were introduced under pretext of the New Age: i.e. "here, take these candles and this Christological heresy with it." Is that what is going here, though? It's not clear to me from the story, and perhaps you or someone else has a better understanding of the people behind the movement. Incidental things like candles, icons are/have been a part of Christianity since the beginning though; so I'm hoping that they are being introduced to these churches in that context, and not as a vehicle for heterodoxy.
http://www.understandthetimes.org/eca.shtml
Read through these 2 things. They are just a small sample of many more things I have read. My church hasn't gone that far out and called themself an emergent church, but they are getting close everyday.
The way I see it is the Emergent church wants to go back before the reformation happend, or basically say the reformation is over and now we are all one together, Catholics, and Christians. I am not a Catholic and I know many here are so I'm not trying to offend them or their beliefs. Anyhow, the reformation took place for a good reason and we can't just say it is over and accept all roads to heaven is acceptable.
I believe in justification alone and that is the key reason the Reformation happend. I'm not a real scholarly person but what I'm seeing is that the Emergent movemant is accepting of others ways to get to Heaven.
Anyhow, there is a lot of other reasons I have issues with the Emergent CHurch, but it would take all day to type them out, lol! Do some research on your own. I'm stay far away from this movemant. It is just another seeker friendly church and takes away from the truth and tries to spice it up. We don't need spice, we just need the truth.
I'll check out that link, thanks!
"I find it impossible to believe that Christ would abandon his Church to the extent that it would get such things TOTALLY wrong for centuries and centuries only to revivify it by some genius liberal "scholar"."
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JESUS never abandoned his CHURCH. It's the large institutions that have corrupted the truth to their benefit that abandoned JESUS.
BTW, The CHURCH is all those sealed by the HOLY SPIRIT, not some bricks and mortars.
And that's precisely the sense in which I am using it. What I'm saying is, it strikes me as impossible that all Christians--from the time of the Apostles to the present day--got it wrong on a question such as gay marriage. Sure there are bodies who may spin off into heresy here and there, but to say that *all of Christianity* just missed the boat on "gay rights", and forward-thinking Christians have to correct it today, that I cannot accept.
Christ would indeed have abandoned his Church if that happened. And as for the large institutions, don't be more down on them than you need to be. There are plenty of nutty Christians and heretics in small groups or even as single individuals who get seduced by demonic error.
I would, however, like to say a point or two about the concept of the Emerging Church in general.
I can certainly see why--in view of the classical Protestant opinion about icons--the use of holy icons would cause alarm within Evangelical circles. But other things like candles, which have no great theological impact either way, are throwing me for a loop. Candles would have been in every church before the advent of the electric light. And I do not know of a single Scriptural prohibition against using them. I think the objection to things like candles (and the sign of the cross while we are at it) is not so much because there's a theological basis for them but because they look...well...just too Roman. But that's not a good reason; anymore than it would be a good reason for us not to study Scripture because it is too "Protestant". So I am happy to see that some denominations are rethinking some of these prohibitions for which there is no theological justification.
And liturgy also. There have, since Luther and Calvin and Henry VIII themselves, always been liturgical churches within classical Protestantism (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican especially). And there have also been very aliturgical ones (Quakerism). It would seem to this outsider anyway that whether a congregation decides to have a set liturgical form should be no skin off anyone's nose.
As a final point, I'd just like to point out that, from everything I know of evangelical Christianity, the *essential* aspect to being a Christian is accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Once you do that, you are saved, and what goes in the denomination does not affect that.
Given that belief, I find it a little strange why some would be so strenuously objecting to "saved" Christians adopting practices like icons, candles, and liturgy. You can argue, "it's heresy!" Well, if it is, then it is heresy that is (ostensibly) not affecting the eternal destiny of the folks that are practicing it. If a person accepts Jesus as Lord and Savior, and then lights candles, prays in front of icons, etc....do they suddenly become unsaved? Was their salvation phony to being with?
I really fail to see why we should be critical of such practices. And I'm not even speaking as a Catholic here. If I were Anglican or Lutheran I'd say the same thing.
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