Where Should We Be Emerging?
Congratualtions! You are now officially a "member" of the Emerging Church.
You're sufficiently alienated from traditional concepts of "being church," from a rigid doctrinal point of view, from Evangelicalism as popularly construed. You're sufficiently versed in the Emerging Conversation to realize that it may not be able to articulate all the answers, but that may be just the point. You've come to value relationships over sermons, inclusion of each member’s experiences over dogma, conversation over conversion, living true to the life and teachings of Jesus over judging others who don’t look/act/think the same.
So, now the big question. Do you leave the old, tired church behind and go off to emerge?
Short answer first: For the love of God, NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Please! Please! Don't do it!!!
Let me tell you about an another emerging movement that began from within a similar religion, oh, some 2,000. years ago. You can call it Emerging Judaism, if you'd like. And unlike the current emerging movement, this one had an identifiable leader.
Now imagine if that leader had chosen not to die for and at the hands of the people through whom He had come to redeem the whole world, but instead established the Emerging Temple?
Let's go back some more. Imagine for a moment if the great Prophets of the Old Testament, so frustrated with the blindness and disobedience of Israel, decided to break off into splinter groups in which the “true faith” could now be practiced.
No. Please don't do it! Please don't make the same mistake that the Reformers did.
I know. Blasphemy. The Reformers were inerrent, right?
No, they weren't.
Luther and his brethren had a monumentally important protest against the theology and praxis of the Roman Church, the momentum of which, at that point in history, had all but erased any trace of the Gospel from within the boundaries of the gargantuan institution that it had become. Again, I truly believe that the Reformers were right, that the problems they recognized and sought to remedy needed to be found and remedied. But I believe the Reformers made one critical mistake (not so much Luther as the later Reformers, but that's a topic for another time). Rather than lift their voices of protest and allow God to work, in his glorious way, to cleanse the church as a whole, they made the critical error of tying to do God’s work for him. Their failure was precisely a failure of patience, a failure of ultimate trust, of trust in the long-term goodness and might of God. It was, in short, a failure of faith. They demanded their righteous reforms to be implemented now, within their lifetimes, when their King had so clearly taught and demonstrated that our task is to plant the seeds that God will eventually harvest, when their ancestral forefathers had taught them that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. The result was the second great schism of the Western Church, the severing of the arm and the foot from the already beheaded body of Christ.
And the further dissection has continued ever since. Because one of the great and true Reformation proclamations was that people should be able to read the Bible and to worship in their own languages. The danger, since disastrously realized, is that people started to worship in their own isolated culture groups, and then sub-culture groups, and sub-sub-culture groups, etc., when what God is longing to create is “one new humanity,” to gather up all things in heaven and on earth in His son, to declare that all those who believe and trust the Gospel of His son belong at the same table here on Earth as a sign that they will one day sit at the table of the great banquet at the initiation of the New Heavens and New Earth.
Each renewal or reform movement in the Church’s history has naturally seen itself as the new, improved version of Christianity, quick to leave behind all their brothers and sisters who were not wise or courageous enough to immediately buy into their reforms. As the early Christians recognized, the central goal of the church within its own boundaries, as opposed to how it dealt with the outside world, was to “love one another.” Not the warm, fuzzy feelings that the world today mistakes for love. They meant practical love, agape. Paul said that his heart was gladdened when he heard how the church loved one another, and that he wanted them to do it more and more. He didn’t mean that their feelings about one another should grow even warmer and fuzzier, he meant the kind of love that he saw revealed in Jesus Christ should grow stronger and manifest itself more consistently.
And that kind of love simply cannot leave behind a majority of its brothers and sisters because it feels it has found a truth which they are not accepting. That kind of loves dies in order to bring that truth to its beloved.
Wanna follow Jesus in a more authentic manner?
Wanna be less like "The Church," and more like Jesus?
Then stay put.
That's what Jesus did.
And if you get crucified by your brethren for the new beliefs you are expounding, or if you get spat upon, ridiculed, and called a heretic and a blasphemer, then consider yourself as having finally and truly emerged.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
You're sufficiently alienated from traditional concepts of "being church," from a rigid doctrinal point of view, from Evangelicalism as popularly construed. You're sufficiently versed in the Emerging Conversation to realize that it may not be able to articulate all the answers, but that may be just the point. You've come to value relationships over sermons, inclusion of each member’s experiences over dogma, conversation over conversion, living true to the life and teachings of Jesus over judging others who don’t look/act/think the same.
So, now the big question. Do you leave the old, tired church behind and go off to emerge?
Short answer first: For the love of God, NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Please! Please! Don't do it!!!
Let me tell you about an another emerging movement that began from within a similar religion, oh, some 2,000. years ago. You can call it Emerging Judaism, if you'd like. And unlike the current emerging movement, this one had an identifiable leader.
Now imagine if that leader had chosen not to die for and at the hands of the people through whom He had come to redeem the whole world, but instead established the Emerging Temple?
Let's go back some more. Imagine for a moment if the great Prophets of the Old Testament, so frustrated with the blindness and disobedience of Israel, decided to break off into splinter groups in which the “true faith” could now be practiced.
No. Please don't do it! Please don't make the same mistake that the Reformers did.
I know. Blasphemy. The Reformers were inerrent, right?
No, they weren't.
Luther and his brethren had a monumentally important protest against the theology and praxis of the Roman Church, the momentum of which, at that point in history, had all but erased any trace of the Gospel from within the boundaries of the gargantuan institution that it had become. Again, I truly believe that the Reformers were right, that the problems they recognized and sought to remedy needed to be found and remedied. But I believe the Reformers made one critical mistake (not so much Luther as the later Reformers, but that's a topic for another time). Rather than lift their voices of protest and allow God to work, in his glorious way, to cleanse the church as a whole, they made the critical error of tying to do God’s work for him. Their failure was precisely a failure of patience, a failure of ultimate trust, of trust in the long-term goodness and might of God. It was, in short, a failure of faith. They demanded their righteous reforms to be implemented now, within their lifetimes, when their King had so clearly taught and demonstrated that our task is to plant the seeds that God will eventually harvest, when their ancestral forefathers had taught them that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. The result was the second great schism of the Western Church, the severing of the arm and the foot from the already beheaded body of Christ.
And the further dissection has continued ever since. Because one of the great and true Reformation proclamations was that people should be able to read the Bible and to worship in their own languages. The danger, since disastrously realized, is that people started to worship in their own isolated culture groups, and then sub-culture groups, and sub-sub-culture groups, etc., when what God is longing to create is “one new humanity,” to gather up all things in heaven and on earth in His son, to declare that all those who believe and trust the Gospel of His son belong at the same table here on Earth as a sign that they will one day sit at the table of the great banquet at the initiation of the New Heavens and New Earth.
Each renewal or reform movement in the Church’s history has naturally seen itself as the new, improved version of Christianity, quick to leave behind all their brothers and sisters who were not wise or courageous enough to immediately buy into their reforms. As the early Christians recognized, the central goal of the church within its own boundaries, as opposed to how it dealt with the outside world, was to “love one another.” Not the warm, fuzzy feelings that the world today mistakes for love. They meant practical love, agape. Paul said that his heart was gladdened when he heard how the church loved one another, and that he wanted them to do it more and more. He didn’t mean that their feelings about one another should grow even warmer and fuzzier, he meant the kind of love that he saw revealed in Jesus Christ should grow stronger and manifest itself more consistently.
And that kind of love simply cannot leave behind a majority of its brothers and sisters because it feels it has found a truth which they are not accepting. That kind of loves dies in order to bring that truth to its beloved.
Wanna follow Jesus in a more authentic manner?
Wanna be less like "The Church," and more like Jesus?
Then stay put.
That's what Jesus did.
And if you get crucified by your brethren for the new beliefs you are expounding, or if you get spat upon, ridiculed, and called a heretic and a blasphemer, then consider yourself as having finally and truly emerged.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
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