Allowing the emerging church to grow up
Rick McKinley has what I think is a very well-balanced post: "My Thoughts on the Emerging Church." It's beneficial to read the entire post (CLICK HERE), but this is a little snippet:
The truth is we don’t know what exactly the emerging church will become. There is a great effort to try to divide it up into categories. I suppose I understand that desire from the vantage point of good people who simply are trying to understand what is going on out there among Christians and they need to have it broken down for them.The problem I see with the categories, however, is that they appear like a helpful tool but it’s just not that cut and dry. There are no teams yet. They may be forming but there are a lot people just getting into the game, or showing up at practice or just signing up to play.
The danger that I see is that people, particularly Americans love to quickly categorize people so they can either turn them into a celebrity or a demon. We really don’t want to read what they have written or take the time to get to know them. We simply want to know what category they fit in so we can pronounce our judgment if we disagree with them or subscribe to their podcast if we like what they said.
These categories are going to turn out to be very harmful to the church. The emerging church has not been around for very long. There are some beautiful expressions that are sprouting up all over the place, they are organic works of the Spirit of God living in and through the life of his followers. We should be very cautious to squelch this. It is a young and fragile thing that if we fail to create a safe context for it to grow it will either shrivel up and die, or become high jacked by the more mature plants and therefore will not really be a fresh move of God at all.
This is a new thing that God is doing and we should respect it as such. When we force the emerging church to define themselves in order to put them into camps it is the equivalent of telling a ten year old to declare what his major in college is going to be. Telling him that if he does not hurry up and figure it out, then there is no telling where he will end up. We are essentially scaring the hell out of him. Putting a yoke upon him that will crush all the life and creativity that is, by nature of being young, the thing we are all attracted to in the first place.
I like what he has to say because he's not saying we can just let people do and say whatever they want (that applies to more than just emergent, right?). But he also says we need to be patient, and full of grace. I think he has some very good thoughts. I recommend reading the entire post.
posted by dan at 2:51 PM
2 Comments:
I read the full post. What I found reassuring was the analogy of the correcting the boy who wants to be a dragon when he grows up. Does anyone have some practical approaches to humbly and lovingly correcting and guiding these emerging "children"? In my experience, even raising questions has sparked defensiveness.
Rick had a lot of good things to say, though reading the whole post I still sensed an implied threat, as if he was saying "Go ahead and have your little time of questioning, but watch out, because if you don't eventually land on my particular definition of orthodoxy, we're going to have to reject you."
If I had confidence that Rick's definition of "orthodoxy" was sufficiently broad to actually include most of the historic church, I probably wouldn't worry to much. However, knowing that his church is part of Mark Driscoll's Acts29 network doesn't give me much hope for that.
Besides which, the whole "child" analogy really comes across as rather condescending; especially when Rick says that he and his church are already the emerging "adults".
Post a Comment
<< Home