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Emergent church conference explores what movement is, isn’t

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mwkruse
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Presbyterian Outlook: Emergent church conference explores what movement is, isn’t (This site requires free registration.)

Some people in mainline denominations – frustrated, maybe a little desperate – would like the Emergent crowd to hand them a play-by-play they can follow to magically yank young people back in their doors.

It doesn’t work that way.

But more and more, folks in mainline denominations are paying attention, sometimes joining the Emergent conversation and even the action. A recent seminar at Columbia Theological Seminary (Decatur, Ga.) on Emergent practices and mainline denominations drew more than 330 people from 33 states, Canada and South Africa – by far the largest continuing education event Columbia has ever held.

Presbyterian pastors, some young and cool, some with gray hair and bifocals, showed up, trying to figure how a denomination that’s lost millions of members can hold on to what’s valuable from tradition and stop being Uncle David’s frozen church.

…….

“I long for that kind of community,” one Presbyterian pastor said over coffee. But in her congregation, “we really don’t want to be relational. We want to be nice to each other. But when it comes down to sharing our guts, our deepest thoughts, we’re not sure we want to do that.”

There also was frustration that some mainliners want a new approach to be handed over – not to bubble up messily from theology and passion. At this conference, blogs were buzzing with thoughts like “too white” and “too old,” too disgruntled.

“Did someone make them come?” blogged Jan Edmiston, http://www.churchforstarvingartists.blogspot.com/  a pastor from northern Virginia. “Were they thinking someone would offer a quick fix as in: `All you have to do is light some candles and hire an edgy young adult to lead an alt service and everything will be great and your church will thrive again just like in the 1950s?’ ”

She also wrote: “Emergent is not about age (after all). It’s about a willingness to make ministry about the community outside the congregation – rather than the congregation.”

Comments

6 responses to “Emergent church conference explores what movement is, isn’t”

  1. Quotidian Grace Avatar
    Quotidian Grace

    Sometimes don’t you wonder if we’re just over-thinking the church? Jesus made disciples of uneducated fishermen and preached a simple message to the people of his day. Maybe the more we get away from the Gospel, the more people we loose.

    Reply
  2. will spotts Avatar
    will spotts

    QG – I couldn’t agree more.

    Reply
  3. Michael W. Kruse Avatar
    Michael W. Kruse

    “…over-thinking the church?”
    Is that possible? (Asks the Myers-Briggs INTJ)
    🙂
    Seriously, I forget where the quote comes from (I think Twain) but “It ain’t what know that gets us into trouble. It is what we know that ain’t so.” I think our big problem is in unlearning a whole bunch off stuff.
    What I do like about the Emerging conversation is the emphasis on narrative and seeing ourselves individually as participants in an unfolding story. Jesus taught his disciples through story.
    Reading Kenneth Bailey over the years has really help solidify for me how foreign our Western approach to Scripture is compared to people from biblical cultures. The first work I remember reading that crystallized a lot of this for me was Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman’s “The Social Construction of Reality” in the late 1970s while in college.
    Where I find I often disagree with many in the emerging conversation is in their understanding of the “story of Modernism.” Some of the things they tend to reject as developments of Modernism I understand to be developments of Christianity that were hijacked by Modernism and turned toward Modernist aims.
    Recovering the narrative of the Word I think is the key and it would demolish much of the garbage we have piled on top of what it means to be the church.

    Reply
  4. will spotts Avatar
    will spotts

    “What I do like about the Emerging conversation is the emphasis on narrative and seeing ourselves individually as participants in an unfolding story.”
    Wow – that was exactly what most drew me. I think I went a different direction with it, though – than the emergent “conversation” has taken.

    Reply
  5. Michael W. Kruse Avatar
    Michael W. Kruse

    I think we are always living in competing stories. There is the story given in the Word and there is the story given by our cultural context. I think my Emergent friends and I are fairly close on the the story given in the Word. Where I tend to differ is on their interpretation of the cultural story.

    Reply
  6. will spotts Avatar
    will spotts

    “Where I tend to differ is on their interpretation of the cultural story.”
    Yep – that’s one of the things I’ve been trying to put into words. You got it exactly right. I don’t see the current story in the same way – and therefore I don’t come up with the same actions as those often proposed by emergent conversors.

    Reply

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