Democratic and Dialogical

Last updated on: May 3, 2005 at 5:12 am By Scot McKnight

No, this is not about American politics: the Emergent movement, in many of its local shapes and variations, often (though not uniform) will have a sense that the Church is a body and that it only functions best when it is thoroughly democratic, and that term means “governed by the people.” In more theological terms, the movement tends to be congregational and it is low church.

This is emphatic at Solomon’s Porch and it won’t surprise to learn that it embodies this in the “architecture” where it gathers: there is no stage; the meeting is in the round; there are no clear designations between the “pastor” and the “laity.” And the latter terms would not be entirely appropriate. They want to see one another’s faces instead of the backs of people’s heads, so they create a room in the round. Instead of using a “concert/theater” theme for the physics of their gathering with its stadium seating or pews, they choose couches. What Solomon’s Porch wants is for “church” gatherings to be “normal.” Dress, seating, everything is to evoke the way we really are.

Here’s the point of it all: “it’s important that the roles people play not be confused with power” (52) — even if I might wink at Doug Pagitt for resorting here to a “theater” metaphor in speaking of “roles.” Power can be connected to public voice, especially when that voice is magnified. (I recall a friend who was aghast at Willow Creek when he saw the figure of the speaker blown into mega-size by the concert screens, and he found it nearly impossible to see it as idolatrous. Having become used to such a use of media, I found myself temporarily stunned by his being stunned.) Power is an issue in the Emergent movement, and it is against it.

I can’t confirm or reject his observation that by making the gathering place “normal,” there is established an easier connection between talking about the kingdom of God and living in our world. “Instead of having a special place, unlike any other, where we try to make the things of God seem normal, we have tried to create a normal place that gives us permission to discuss the unique things of God” (53). This is (almost) Chestertonian in rhetoric and (even more closely) Anabaptist in theology.

In true postmodernist spirit, Doug Pagitt’s comments are set within the journal of a “Dustin,” who on these pages says this: “Church without Doug is a lot like when Valerie left on that old sitcom “Valerie’s Family”…. Doug is our Valerie. Each week he is gone brings us one step closer to syndication” (53). Try as hard as one’s might enables, and you will always end up with those who are gifted being needed by those who need the exercise of those gifts. This doesn’t necessarily make for hierarchicalism, but it does establish a biblical sense of the Church: where leaders lead. The dangers of hierarchicalism are ever present, and only constant vigilance, such as one finds at Solomon’s Porch and in many other Emergent churches, can prevent leaders from taking over the whole show. I’m Anabaptist, and so I think the effort must be made. I see Solomon’s Porch as one more attempt by Christians to do what they can to avoid the hierarchy the Reformation so worried itself over.

Because there is an anti-hierarchy strain to the Emergent movement, and “strain” might seem to some to be too gentle a term, there is correlative: democratic church structures encourage, even if they struggle to achieve, genuine dialogue between all participants. Clearly, Solomon’s Porch achieves more dialogue than most. The single-most observable feature of dialogue for Solomon’s Porch is that Doug Pagitt meets with a group Bible study on one night in the week and sees that as the center of his sermon study time. I’ve been trained, yea I’ve trained others, in the opposite tradition: namely, with pastors tucked away in some study for prayer and Bible study and thoughtful reflection as the center of sermon preparation time. So, when I read this, I have to take a step back. My initial response was “not surprising” and “consistent with a pure low church ecclesiology,” but the third thought came after these two and chased them down with this: “but, Doug, what about giftedness?”

But, because I am committed to a low church and democratic and congregational and Spirit-led sense of ecclesiology, I must confess there is something to what Solomon’s Porch is doing. It would be good for all preachers, I say to myself, to listen to how his or her congregation “hears” Scripture and to listen when such persons are reading the Bible and discussing its implications for daily living. And to do so without saying a word so as not to interrupt the flow. I’m wondering if others have tried this and if it genuinely is of value to the “preacher.”

All of this about democracy and dialogue to say this: deep in the heart of Solomon’s Porch is a belief that the Church is the Body of Christ, that 1 Corinthians 11–14 is the heart of how the church works, and that is time to remind ourselves, once again, that “lay” people are gifted and when that giftedness is thoroughly implemented, the wall between “pastor” and “laity” is thinner than thin. And when this happens in tune with the Spirit of God, the Church is the best witness God has left on earth to his transforming grace.

Particular and Local

Last updated on: May 2, 2005 at 7:35 am By Scot McKnight

One of the most important elements of the Emergent movement, an element that DA Carson unfortunately didn’t address, is that many of these folks think the gospel has to be worked out at a local level and in a particular place. DA Carson’s book focuses on the epistemology of Brian McLaren but, in so doing, misses what I think is foundational (dare I use that word in another sense?) to the entire movement: its ecclesiology. These last few blogs have focused on ecclesiology, and I am looking at it through the lens of Doug Pagitt’s book, Reimagining Spiritual Formation, and therefore the life of Solomon’s Porch.

Here’s the issue as I see it: the gospel will come into a physical/spiritual expression in different ways in different places because the gospel cannot be equated with those expressions. I can’t emphasize the importance of this point: the gospel and the manifestations of the gospel are not one and the same. What will appear in one place (say a strong emphasis on artistic expression) may not appear at all in another place (where there may be more emphasis on social justice or on teaching or on any number of things).

The gospel is the same, and I’m not sure this is the place even to try to define the gospel, but the manifestation must be particular and local. For Solomon’s Porch the gospel is pretty close to participating in the story of God, as made known in Scripture and the world.

Within this conviction is another: transportable church models are potentially dangerous. If one believes in a seeker-model, one might be tempted to import Willow Creek type things to a community that neither has Willow Creek’s particular giftedness nor will the local community need such a ministry. In other words, copy cat ministry is Verboten among the Emergent folks.

Take Tony Jones or Andrew Jones or Doug Pagitt or Brian McLaren — take them and look at their communities and you will not see the same thing. Why? because they each are trying to let the gospel bloom in their local gardens.

Pagitt, for instance, has led Solomon’s Porch — and “led” is not as democratic a word as I need — into a very artsy expression; they compose their own songs; they “do” their own sermon-making; they reach into the missional needs of their own community; and we could go on and on.

Let us not forget this: what is particular and local involves the particular and local leaders who are in turn shaped by that particular and local. Community is not amorphous: it has particular shapings from its leaders.

But, there is something unusual about this Emergent sense of the particular: it is not about “preaching the gospel” in a local place and then seeing what happens and then calling that the “particular.” This implies that one already knows what the “gospel” is; the Emergent folk tend to be more radical than this, and they want to say that the “gospel” itself is particular and local and that one cannot put “gospel” and “local manifestation” into tidy and different boxes and analyze them separately. This is precisely what the Emergent movement is not saying. Since God is a person, the community becomes the place where the gospel is seen and experienced.

Two observations: it is unlikely that past church reflections are entirely looked over in this process for just as orthodoxy has its own defining moments that will stay with us forever, so also does ecclesiology have its own moments. And, I think there needs to be dialogue over time about “what works” and “why it works” among the Emergent folk so that things can be learned about gospel work among postmodernists. For all the emphasis on the local, there are some important similar threads between these local churches.

In addition to these, we need to recognize that the Emergent emphasis on the particular leads each of us to do more “local work” on what makes up our community, what needs it has, and how we can manifest the gospel in our own community. The manifestation of the gospel in the inner-city will have a different emphasis than those in the suburbs (and I don’t want to walk down that path just yet, but there are differences, and I’m keen on Christian Smith and Michael Emerson’s Divided By Faith). One of the themes of the Emergent movement is to quit worrying about what other churches are doing, especially big “successful” ones, and to start focusing on what can be done in our own back yards.

Next blog: holism.

DA Carson and the Emergent Movement, Part 2

Last updated on: April 16, 2005 at 9:06 am By Scot McKnight

I didn’t think I’d get to a second part until tomorrow, but I just got the book for review, so here we go.

In this second installment we will look briefly at what DA Carson says positively about the Emergent movement. I am sad to say that I’ve seen some bloggers jump on his case before they have listened to him, and they are doing just what they are accusing him of doing. Whether or not some Emergent folk think Carson has listened to them is not the point; the point is to listen to him. (As I am writing this I got a paper copy for review. So, now I’m going on my own read.)

DA Carson finds some positive features in the Emergent movement and he sees five features that are commendable, even though from what I see he doesn’t expound these five features by showing what and how this takes place among the Emergent leaders. In fact, this section comes off as a backhanded compliment. Ten pages of compliments, no genuine citations of their writings and how they do these things, and then the rest of the book a pretty stiff critique. I say this only because it is true (and authentic): it appears to me that this is cursory affirmation because that is how one is supposed to treat an opponent.

First, they “read the times” and by this he refers to how they are concerned with understanding culture. Second, there is a push for authenticity among the Emergent folk. Third, there is a genuine perception of our own – whoever we might be and wherever we might be – social placement in the world and how that shapes our gospel understanding and mission. Fourth, evangelism is important or reaching our modern culture. Fifth, if I understand what I am hearing, DA Carson sees another good thing in the Emergent concern with historic Christian traditions. He concludes the chapter by showing that other churches are doing similar good things – and this comes off (to me) as a bit of churlish behavior. Do the Emergent think they are the only ones? (If they do. and forgive me DA if I’m wrong here, then they need this reminder. If not, why close down this chapter by affirming other traditions for what is good about the Emergent?)

If this is what Carson sees in the Emergent Church, I think he sees some good things. I’m wondering if this is all he sees – is there no good in their commitment to “community”? to issues of the Bible that are not held by some evangelicals to be part of the gospel – like social justice and the environment and business? what of their courage “to start all over if they have to”?

Questions

#1: Has DA Carson given the Emergent leaders the nuance they deserve on how they read the times? McLaren, for instance, has a pretty sophisticated (at times) understanding of some things and he differs from others in significant ways.

#2: What does “authenticity” mean for the Emergent folk? The Willow model has for years been keen on the word authentic and by this they mean the leaders have to stand up and take their medicine when they have done wrong (and many sermons have such illustrations – Hybels and the whole gang), but is this what Emergent is talking about? My understanding of the Emergent is that “authentic” refers more to the human condition, an almost Augustinian sense of humans being flawed and everything about them is flawed. If this is the case, we have to ask if Carson’s perception here is genuinely an Emergent understanding of authentic.

#3: What role does our own particularism play both in understanding the gospel and fleshing out the gospel? Huge, huge question, and I think at the heart of much of the Emergent. In other words, is the Emergent movement every bit as much an “ecclesiology” as it is an “epistemology”? Further conversations with my source will help me see what DA Carson sees here. Most of what I’ve seen so far focuses exclusively on the philosophical epistemological question, though. We’ll see.

#4: I have been impressed of late with what the Emergent movement means by “evangelism,” and I’m quite sure here that different groups have different understandings. Some, of course, see it as the old gospel shaped for postmoderns but others have shifted the paradigm dramatically (Doug Pagitt, for example). So, the question becomes, What is evangelism for the Emergent? Here this one: is it discerning what God is doing in the world and “joining in” and “saying Amen” and “working with God”? Or is it gospel preaching to postmoderns? Big, big questions here.

#5: I’ve heard a bundle over the last two years about the Emergent concern with the classical traditions, including especially Eastern Orthodoxy. What I have wondered, and many will perhaps know more than I, is whether this is the result of trying to figure out how the 2d and 3d century churches “embodied” the gospel in their day so we might learn how to “embody” it in our day? Or, is it a genuine turn to the classical traditions in order to find a more authentic display of the gospel? I’m not sure if DA Carson talks about this.

DA Carson and the Emergent Movement

Last updated on: April 16, 2005 at 5:48 am By Scot McKnight

As I told Andrew Jones in my blog at his site, I am a former colleague of DA Carson’s at TEDS; I had the office next to his for years; he is my friend; I consider him an expert; I do not have the book but I am in contact with those who know what is in it. I can sketch here only the briefest summaries of what is there, and I am encouraging everyone to buy it. And I am encouraging everyone to read it carefully; avoid reactionary responses and listen to this most careful of scholar. I expect all of us to learn from him.

I’ll be posting several blogs about this topic.

Before we can even begin to discuss the proposals and evaluations of DA Carson in his must-read forthcoming book, we have to observe that “defining our terms” is both fundamental and (at the same time) extremely difficult. For instance, what does “emergent” mean? Will we use it for Robert Webber’s form, Brian McLaren’s form of the Emergent, Doug Pagitt’s form, Steve Chalke’s form, Andrew Jones’ form, the Willow Axis form, or will it be for the many, many who have adapted the Emergent label and are using its ideas in rather normal churches? What has to be admitted up front is that Emergent is not a “fixed” or “reified” Object that can be described the way one can describe Wrigley Field or the Lincoln Tomb or the White House.

DA Carson has himself for a long time been involved in trying to get the term “Evangelical” more “accurately” defined (footnotes deleted) as he and other theologians have sought to find that powerful connection of the Reformed Churches from Calvin to Jonathan Edwards to more 20th Century forms of that theology. But, others have fought hard to maintain a looser, sometimes calling it a more “sociological,” definition. And one thinks here of Don Dayton (who thinks it embraces the Wesleyan movement) or others who think it is even much wider than that (as can be seen in Randy Balmer’s romp through the churches, in his “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”).

So, let’s issue this up front: it is not going to be easy to define Emergent, and so when one gets into this discussion, it is best if one recognizes one is defining and responding to, if I may be so bold to adapt an expression from Hemingway, “A Moveable Feast.”

On top of that, it just so happens that Emergent work is done in the trenches and not in books and journal articles: you learn about the Emergent by talking to its leaders and its people, by reading its bloggers, by attending its conferences and conventions, and by attending its churches. Over and over I’ve been told this: “Scot, you can’t read this stuff in some book. No one has put it all together. You have to get on the internet and attend the churches.”

Now to DA Carson… who is singularly qualified to get into this issue because of his biblical expertise and his previous examination of pluralism, “The Gagging of God.”

DA Carson says this book is rooted in the lectures he gave at Cedarville in February 2004. He thinks a self-identity has been established in the Emergent movement and he says that he will have to generalize to move the discussion forward. The Emergent movement recognizes that culture has shifted and that a new church is “emerging.” DA Carson admits the variety and boundary-shifting ambiguity of the Emergent movement.

He sees the following characteristics of the Emergent Movement: (1) protest and he describes the story of Spencer Burke with his problems with spiritual McCarthyism, (2) protest against the modern and here he will show that postmodernism, while open to various meanings, is essentially discontinuous with modernism and is an epistemology that is anti-foundationalist, (3) protesting on three fronts – not just evangelicalism and modernism but also the seeker-sensitive church.

Questions:

#1: Does “emerging” refer to the postmodern culture in all its varieties, or to the church hat accompanies that shift in culture, or to the ideas that are part of that culture, or to the gospel that responds to that culture, or to the gospel taking shape in a new way in a new cultural paradigm? The answer to this question matters immensely. And I’m not sure DA Carson, or even some of the Emergent folk, are all pointing at the same “thing” when they speak of “emerging”.

#2: Is the “emerging” movement fundamental a church of protest? And, if so, is the primary target of the protest evangelicalism? What are its targets?

#3: Is the postmodernist epistemology of the Emerging folks (and one should not simply equate postmodernists and the Emergent folks) essentially affectional over against rational? inclusive vs. exclusivist? authentic vs. the absolute? is social history more significant that the history of ideas?

#4: Is “emergent” or “integral” thinking superior to traditional absolutist rational thinking?

#5: Has the Emergent movement understood culture accurately? Does it appeal to Scripture accurately?

Randy Travis

Last updated on: April 10, 2005 at 6:30 pm By Scot McKnight

Last night at Willow Randy Travis gave a mini-concert. The place was packed. We are not country fans, but his song on the three wooden crosses was good enough to make it on all kinds of charts, and won our hearts. He then led everyone in a worship song. And then he finished off with Forever and Ever, Amen.

So today I’ve had a hard time getting that kind of music off my mind. Randy Travis has quite a story, and he seems to be quite innocent about it all. I was impressed with his lack of understanding why he was so angry as a young kid. He just knows that Christ took it away, which reminds of the blind man who had been healed by Jesus and he didn’t know all that much theology but he was quite sure that he was once blind but could now see.

Our son and his wife, and my daughter, were here this afternoon. Then we had a nice dinner together. Nice to have all of us together (our son-in-law was absent, away at a church conference in California).

And, how about Tiger? Great tournament, which the Masters always is. And lots of those good southern folk who were at that tournament probably listened to some Randy Travis on their way home. I hope Randy’s story was more important to them.