c. 2005 Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly
(UNDATED) In a dark sanctuary filled with votive candles, fast-paced images flash across video screens. Participants file forward to write their names on a wooden cross on the floor, while at the altar, a DJ with a computer mixes new age music to set the mood.
Welcome to worship for the coming generation.
More and more Christians say the usual ways of “doing church” no longer resonate in a contemporary, post-modern culture. Seeking to fill the gap, a growing movement called “the Emerging Church” is developing new forms of worship and theological questioning for a new cultural context.
“What I think many of us are concerned about is how can we go back and get reconnected to Jesus, with all of his radical, profound, far-reaching message of the kingdom of God,” Brian McLaren said on the PBS television program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.”
McLaren, a former college English professor with no formal theological training, is an intellectual leader of the Emerging Church movement, which began about a decade ago as a conversation among Gen-X evangelicals alarmed at the drop-out rate among young people in their 20s and 30s.
They formed a loose network called “Emergent” to discuss their mission in the post-modern world. Discussion exploded over the internet, especially through several lengthy and ongoing blogs.
The movement _ McLaren still prefers to call it a “conversation” _ flourishes predominantly among young evangelicals and is making inroads among mainline Protestants. There are no hard numbers for it, and Emergent leaders resist attempts to institutionalize.
But their ideas are taking shape in diverse congregations across the country.
“Christianity is just simply not a stagnant belief,” said Doug Pagitt, pastor of Solomon’s Porch, an emerging church in Minneapolis.
“I know that comes as a very hard concept for some people to put their minds around, or for people to accept, but Christianity has never been stagnant and has never been about uniformity,” he said.
At Solomon’s Porch, the congregation meets in the round and has couches and recliners instead of pews. Pagitt doesn’t preach sermons, but leads discussions, inviting feedback from those in attendance.
“When you sit on a couch as opposed to a bench or a pew or something else, you just have a sense that you’re supposed to talk to that person (next to you). Because who do you sit on a couch with other than a friend? And so it implies a relationship.”
Pagitt said the Emerging Church movement is “rethinking Christianity” in an attempt to reach out to those who feel alienated from current expressions of the faith.
But the movement has generated controversy among those who fear such “rethinking” could lead to an abandonment of the faith altogether.
Professor Don Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill., said he is troubled by the unwillingness of many in the movement to commit to truth.
“You keep moving farther out and farther out and farther out and farther out until the whole cultural shift that is sometimes characterized by the label `post-modern’ begins to domesticate what the Bible is actually about,” Carson said.
“At that point, it becomes more than troubling. It becomes really a threat to historic Christianity,” he added.
According to Carson, some in the movement are “so influenced by post-modern sensibilities (they) find any mention of truth, objective truth, angular or offensive. It might sound intolerant.”
Emergent leaders say that because the spectrum of beliefs is so great, it’s impossible to make sweeping judgments.
“Is it more sloppy than what a systematic theology professor does, sitting in his tenured chair typing up a book on the doctrine of the atonement?” asked Tony Jones, the recently appointed national coordinator of the Emergent network. “Yeah, it’s messier than that. But that’s what I think theology (is) as it works itself out in the lives of human beings who are kind of scratching and clawing their way to try to follow Jesus on a daily basis. It’s a messy endeavor, and I embrace that messiness.”
McLaren has become a lightning rod for much of the controversy.
He is founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Burtonsville, Md., and earlier this year, Time magazine labeled him one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.
His 2004 book, “A Generous Orthodoxy,” has become a manifesto of sorts for many in the Emerging Church movement. In the book, he urges Christians to move beyond status-quo categories and divisions.
“I fear that what happens in our polarization is we stop saying, `Am I becoming a person who’s more Christ-like? Am I becoming a person who’s more a part of God’s mission?’ And we think, `Am I becoming a good conservative, or am I being a good liberal, or am I being a good Protestant or a good Catholic?’ And you know, that can end up really being a colossal adventure in missing the point.”
Many emerging churches have adopted McLaren’s approach, weaving together elements from different religious traditions, especially Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Some are discovering medieval mystical practices such as walking the labyrinth. It’s a pick-your-own-mix approach that also stresses community and social justice.
“The Church has been preoccupied with the question, `What happens to your soul after you die?’ And that has resulted in, in all too often, an abandonment of the ethics of the kingdom of God, the ethics of Jesus for this life and our history here and now,” McLaren said.
McLaren is raising provocative questions. For example, in his latest book, “The Last Word and the Word After That,” he urges reassessment of the traditional view of hell, which he says unintentionally “makes God look like a torturer.”
“My purpose is to get conversation going about the old view, and problems with it so that then we can, together, move forward in reconsidering,” he said. “Maybe there is a better understanding of what Jesus meant and what the Scriptures mean when they’ve talked about issues like judgment, justice, hell.”
The Bible is not a “look-it-up encyclopedia of moral truths,” McLaren said, arguing that he is being faithful to Jesus by pressing new questions.
“Now, that doesn’t mean that we just throw out the Bible,” he added. “But we’ve got to learn ways to engage with the wisdom in the Bible that helps us be more ethical and more humane and not less,” he said.
For conservative evangelicals such as Carson, such views can be dangerous.
“Do I think he’s saying some dangerous things _ dangerous in the sense that he’s diverting people from things that are central to the Gospel, that are non-negotiable as part of the Gospel, that he’s diverting people away from those things? Yes, in that sense I think he’s dangerous.”
McLaren is careful to stress that he doesn’t speak for all in the Emerging Church movement, but he has clearly struck a nerve.
“Many of these Emergent voices are less certain of their theological ideas, and this appeals to a generation that is given to dialogue and to discussion and to conversation, and not making firm judgments about people,” said professor Scot McKnight of North Park University in Chicago.
McKnight describes himself as a “sympathetic observer” of the movement. But he said this theological openness poses big challenges for those in the Emergent conversation.
“I understand that many of them want to ask good questions, but for things to be Christian … means that there are answers and there are limits to what those answers can be,” he said.
Emergent leaders say they are still developing their ideas.
“We’re figuring this out together,” said Jones, of the Emergent network. “We don’t have an agenda of what it looks like at the end of the road. We just want to gather up people who are on this road, who want to go together on it.”
KRE/RB END LAWTON
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A version of this story first appeared in a special two-part series broadcast on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.” This article may be reprinted by RNS clients. Scot in 34th graf is CQ.
