For my whole Christian life, I've been bugged by the discrepancy between the wild, crazy, revolutionary, turn-your-world-upside-down words in the Bible, and the staid complacent traditionalism of so many of the Christians around me. Even well-meaning, sincerely nice Christians can seem much more interested in preserving their own way of looking at things than in seeing something new that God might be doing or leading us toward. For some it's that they've got such a comfortable prison cell, they don't really want the "truth that sets you free" that Jesus promised; a life of tolerable denials and cover-ups wins out. For others it is just a blind trust in stale ministry formulas, an adherence to dated terminology, or that insipid insistence that Christianity is 100% compatible with the Republican party (because God stands for oil, torture, war-mongering, xenophobia, and low taxes for the rich). The particular brand doesn't matter; the result is the same: trading the wildness of our faith for human comfort.
The worst of all to me is the complete myth that because we are "saved," Christians should be happy all the time (confusing Christianity with the "American dream," and bastardizing the whole "pursuit of happiness" idea anyway...). The shiny, happy Christian concept, for those who subscribe to it, inspires deep emotional dishonesty among Christians. Bad day? You must be sinning, because God would make you happy if you were with Him. Bah.
My point: When are we Christians going to stop trying to make our faith serve to justify our own opinions, biases, and comforts? Isn't it possible that, despite already being "saved," God might have something new to teach us, about our world or ourselves??? Is it possible that all this organization in our "organized religion" is actually hurting the cause, and that the problems and conflicts that "threaten" our churches left and right are actually God at work, trying to get our attention?
I think it is possible. I think God has a lot of cards up that big old sleeve of his.
My big problem is I let this get to me. I let the volume on my so-called Church go up (the knob is apparently broken), and the volume on My God slip down. I hear all the stuck thinking and the grappling over petty issues, and I start to wonder if I'm reading the same Bible as everyone else. If the God I believe in and love is the same one they claim. And I let myself forget who My God is: his Wildness, his Power, his Love So Deep and Visceral we can barely understand it. And His Grace. It is big enough to cover my frustration, and other people's errors too. For that's the story: we all make mistakes. And if we wanted to, we could come together and celebrate the simple clean fact that those mistakes do not define us anymore.
This morning I was thinking about my recurrent frustration with the Church (as it were), then I started reading The Message. I opened up randomly to Romans, and I stopped when I hit the end of Romans 9:
"How can we sum this up? All those people who didn't seem interested in what God was doing ['gentiles'/non-believers] actually embraced what God was doing when he straightened out their lives. And Israel [aka 'the established Church'], who seemed so interested in reading and talking about what God was doing missed it. How could they miss it? Because instead of trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what they themselves were doing. They were so absorbed in their 'God projects' that they didn't notice God right in front of them, like a huge rock in the middle of the road. And so they stumbled into him and went sprawling. Isaiah (again!) gives us the metaphor for pulling this together:
Careful! I've put a huge stone on the road to Mount Zion,
a stone you can't get around.
But the stone is me! If you're looking for me,
you'll find me on the way, not in the way."
(c) 2009, A.C.H. All rights reserved by the author. Quotation from The Message.
5.03.2009
3.03.2009
Down the rabbit hole…
The word “emergent” is on a lot of Christian lips and book covers these days (though notably not all). The first time I can remember hearing it was around 2000 in, contrary to the images the word conjures up to me now, a sermon in a very large mainstream Southern Baptist church in San Antonio, Texas (Yes, I said Southern Baptist). The preacher was George Harris, one-time president of the Southern Baptists of Texas, a great preacher of the Bible and a wise man who had in many ways transcended his denomination.
Since then, that word emergent, like a leaf caught on a river current, has carried me a bit farther downstream from the Southern Baptist organization, but as I think back over my journey and growth the past eight years, that specific detail is a reminder both humbling and hopeful. That day, Pastor Harris was talking about different models of the church, something like traditional, contemporary, and emergent. Of the three, the emergent church was adaptive; it reflected our increasingly pluralistic world; and most of all, he said it was the future of the church. Since then, I have met a very diverse selection of emergent-thinking Christians—the coffee house emergents, the punk rock emergents, the philosopher emergents, the liberal emergents—and the same basic description keeps coming back, especially the last part: it is the future of the church.
I am writing this today partly to settle an argument in my own head, and partly to give some shape to the term for acquaintances and friends of mine who are new to the concept. Since 2000, when I furiously wrote down notes from Pastor Harris’s lesson about the future of the church, I’ve heard the full spectrum about all things “emergent.” From emergent thinkers and practitioners who are grateful for the authentic space to worship God, to at least one preacher here in SA who thinks all things “emergent” and/or “postmodern” are nothing more than some kind of demonic worship of relativism which makes Jesus a mere Rorschach ink blot. I’ve also heard great questions—mostly about what Christian beliefs really are our core beliefs. As if we as a Christian collective are packing boxes and moving out of our parents’ house, and while we want to leave behind any waste, junk, weapons, or poisons, we also want to be sure that we seek out and preserve every scrap that is true and good and pleasing to God. For that reason, I love these questions—they may resist easy answers, but they are the heart and soul of this “emergent conversation.” (So, I’m told, is resisting easy answers.)
Overall, however, most of my Christian friends aren’t thinking about “emergent” versus “non-emergent,” not as such. They are instead occupied with living their lives as well as they can. And frankly, many of these people do not need a new aesthetic to come to God: they are already with God. They know how to deal with the sometimes difficult parameters of the established church because they’ve grown up with it. They know, implicitly where organized religion ends and God begins (very low to the ground indeed). The problem for the 21st century church, however, is that there are less and less people in the Christian “norm” and more and more people outside of it. The “givens” that once handed Jesus out like free candy to many of us when we were kids are simply dissolving out of mainstream Western culture (check out Barna’s book Revolution). Good or bad, it is just a fact. Others in society are like me—we once ate that free candy up, made the paper plate nativity scenes, and got dunked or sprinkled at a young age, yet we’ve awakened to realize the Christian “norm” doesn’t really include us after all. We think too much, we wonder too much, we like the wrong music, we vote for the wrong party, or we simply have problems despite the expectation that Christians aren’t supposed to have problems. Etc. Fill in your own reason here: _____________________________________. Of course other emergent thinkers are still pretty darn normal, yet they are drawn in because they want to see the doors thrown open, they want to reclaim Jesus for the broken and the imperfect and the unsavory and the unknown, and they are looking for a locksmith to help unstick their cathedral doors. That said, emergence is NOT a new recipe for evangelism. It is something much broader, all-encompassing, and perhaps even demanding (less of effort that of self).
Do our societal changes mean our whole religion is in danger of becoming a footnote? They don’t have to. Some look for a solution, a call to step up evangelism, simple and straightforward. Some of us, however want more than that. We see an opportunity to clean house, to purge the junk from the closets, to heal old wounds, to prune withered branches, to have gut-wrenchingly honest conversations with our atheist, deist, pantheist, agnostic, or otherwise diverse new neighbors. We want to do something. Meaningful. We are through with tokens, formulas, easy answers. We want to experience old truths. We want to rock the boat. We want to close our eyes and feel God pass before us. We want to let go.
Make no mistake, I don’t fault the establishment any more than I fault myself. I have “fallen short” too. But my gut is telling me there is no use in trying harder, unless I am also trying something new. And that new thing is here; look at the soil by your feet and you will see the tiny bud pushing its way into the light.
(c) 2009, A.C.H. All rights reserved by the author.
Since then, that word emergent, like a leaf caught on a river current, has carried me a bit farther downstream from the Southern Baptist organization, but as I think back over my journey and growth the past eight years, that specific detail is a reminder both humbling and hopeful. That day, Pastor Harris was talking about different models of the church, something like traditional, contemporary, and emergent. Of the three, the emergent church was adaptive; it reflected our increasingly pluralistic world; and most of all, he said it was the future of the church. Since then, I have met a very diverse selection of emergent-thinking Christians—the coffee house emergents, the punk rock emergents, the philosopher emergents, the liberal emergents—and the same basic description keeps coming back, especially the last part: it is the future of the church.
I am writing this today partly to settle an argument in my own head, and partly to give some shape to the term for acquaintances and friends of mine who are new to the concept. Since 2000, when I furiously wrote down notes from Pastor Harris’s lesson about the future of the church, I’ve heard the full spectrum about all things “emergent.” From emergent thinkers and practitioners who are grateful for the authentic space to worship God, to at least one preacher here in SA who thinks all things “emergent” and/or “postmodern” are nothing more than some kind of demonic worship of relativism which makes Jesus a mere Rorschach ink blot. I’ve also heard great questions—mostly about what Christian beliefs really are our core beliefs. As if we as a Christian collective are packing boxes and moving out of our parents’ house, and while we want to leave behind any waste, junk, weapons, or poisons, we also want to be sure that we seek out and preserve every scrap that is true and good and pleasing to God. For that reason, I love these questions—they may resist easy answers, but they are the heart and soul of this “emergent conversation.” (So, I’m told, is resisting easy answers.)
Overall, however, most of my Christian friends aren’t thinking about “emergent” versus “non-emergent,” not as such. They are instead occupied with living their lives as well as they can. And frankly, many of these people do not need a new aesthetic to come to God: they are already with God. They know how to deal with the sometimes difficult parameters of the established church because they’ve grown up with it. They know, implicitly where organized religion ends and God begins (very low to the ground indeed). The problem for the 21st century church, however, is that there are less and less people in the Christian “norm” and more and more people outside of it. The “givens” that once handed Jesus out like free candy to many of us when we were kids are simply dissolving out of mainstream Western culture (check out Barna’s book Revolution). Good or bad, it is just a fact. Others in society are like me—we once ate that free candy up, made the paper plate nativity scenes, and got dunked or sprinkled at a young age, yet we’ve awakened to realize the Christian “norm” doesn’t really include us after all. We think too much, we wonder too much, we like the wrong music, we vote for the wrong party, or we simply have problems despite the expectation that Christians aren’t supposed to have problems. Etc. Fill in your own reason here: _____________________________________. Of course other emergent thinkers are still pretty darn normal, yet they are drawn in because they want to see the doors thrown open, they want to reclaim Jesus for the broken and the imperfect and the unsavory and the unknown, and they are looking for a locksmith to help unstick their cathedral doors. That said, emergence is NOT a new recipe for evangelism. It is something much broader, all-encompassing, and perhaps even demanding (less of effort that of self).
Do our societal changes mean our whole religion is in danger of becoming a footnote? They don’t have to. Some look for a solution, a call to step up evangelism, simple and straightforward. Some of us, however want more than that. We see an opportunity to clean house, to purge the junk from the closets, to heal old wounds, to prune withered branches, to have gut-wrenchingly honest conversations with our atheist, deist, pantheist, agnostic, or otherwise diverse new neighbors. We want to do something. Meaningful. We are through with tokens, formulas, easy answers. We want to experience old truths. We want to rock the boat. We want to close our eyes and feel God pass before us. We want to let go.
Make no mistake, I don’t fault the establishment any more than I fault myself. I have “fallen short” too. But my gut is telling me there is no use in trying harder, unless I am also trying something new. And that new thing is here; look at the soil by your feet and you will see the tiny bud pushing its way into the light.
(c) 2009, A.C.H. All rights reserved by the author.
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