Worship Leader Sidebar

Worship Leader Magazine asked me to write a short sidebar for a lengthy upcoming piece by Chuck Smith, Jr. on Emergent. Here are their three questions and my three answers:

What is emergent? Emergent is a fairly loose gathering of pastors, artists, missionaries, church planters, songwriters, bloggers and others who are engaged in a quiet revolution within the church. Disaffected with the reified structures and theologies of both the Protestant “Left” and “Right,” a dozen of us began meeting together in the late 1990’s, and as our work has become more public, many more have joined in. Currently, we are forging friendships with church leaders around the world, all of whom are on a similar quest of rediscovering the gospel in their contexts.

Why are you engaged in this? Personally, I became involved with Emergent (formerly Young Leaders Network, then TerraNova) because I longed for a place to talk about these issues while in ministry. While getting my M.Div. at Fuller Seminary in the early 1990’s, I was introduced to postmodern (a.k.a., postfoundationalist) philosophy and theology, and I really thought it held a lot of promise for a renewal of the gospel mission in the lives of people. When I was a youth and young adults pastor (1997-2003), it was hard to find people who agreed with me. But this group did.

Seeing as one of the emergent values is missional, who is your mission? At the very beginning, the terms of the emerging church conversation were about how to reach young adults with the gospel. Then it was about how to reach people with a “postmodern mindset,” no matter their age. But now the conversation has changed again. Rather than “who is your mission?”, I would answer “what is you [UPDATE: your] mission?” The mission that we are trying to recover is the Kingdom of God, with which Jesus (and, to a lesser extent, Paul) seemed to be obsessed. Thus we are trying to develop churches that are able to respond to the missional call of the Kingdom of God, however the Holy Spirit chooses to bring that call to us.