Embarking

I’ve found the conversation around mega-churches and emergent churches lately quit fascinating. (cf. Fitch’s first post, and his redux post] I’ve heard many people for awhile saying, “the fruit just isn’t there with the Emergent Churches.”  By fruit, this usually means converts.  So, when David Fitch went after Mark Driscoll and talked about this issue, I found it quit interesting.  Being someone emergent at heart and history (and in some ways theologically, but not others) but also being currently a pastor at a mega-church (where I sometimes fit in, and other times feel like an odd-ball) these conversations are quite intriguing.  I’m particularly interested in numbers 4 and 5 of the 5 points Fitch makes, which I’ve listed below - this from the Out of UR Blog:

4. Having said all this, I think that the missional communities that do persist probably have a higher conversion rate than the Driscollesque mega churches. Missional churches are much smaller, so 6 conversions from a group of 25 over ten years would match (or exceed) the percentage growth of a typical mega church. I think it would be interesting to measure how many dollars per conversion are spent in missional churches versus mega churches. It makes me smile knowing missional churches are probably more cost effective when it comes to conversions because we resist spending money on buildings, programs, and “the show.”

5. We must recognize that “missionary conversions” take longer than megachurch conversions. The conversion of a post-Christendom “pagan,” who has had little to no exposure to the language and story of Christ in Scripture, may require five years of relational immersion before a decision would even make sense. If you do not have this immersion/context, any decision that is made is prone to be little more than a consumerist decision—it is made based on the perceived immediate benefit. It lasts as long as this perceived benefit remains important. It does not lead to discipleship.

So a true missionary conversion, which I believe missional churches are after, takes a much longer period of time than the kind of conversions most often generated through a megachurch. The megachurch is largely appealing to people who grew up in old forms of church and know the Story but quit going to church many years ago. These “unchurched people” require the old messages to be made more relevant. They need to be “revived” or called back into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we should recognize there are fewer and fewer of these kinds of people left.

These are some arguments that I myself have made in the past.  Knowing, realistically two things: 1) how inefficient mega-churches really are in reaching the lost per dollar spent and 2) how really unconcerned most members of these churches are to reach anyone.  Emerging churches are still too young to measure long term fruit and effectiveness, but it will be interesting to see the longer term effects of churches that spend less money, focus more on community, tend to care more about “holistic transformation”, and are committed to individual people over programs.  The percentages of transformed lives to Jesus Lordship and Kingdom per capita and per dollar (though even talking about it that way seems, somehow, wrong) would be very intriguing to see.  So… someone do the study already.

I’ve been away from blogging for awhile now.  For those of you who read regularly, I apologize for not writing.  I don’t share much personal/ family stuff here, but for a long time now, my family has been very sick and I’ve been on a couple of vacations.  We’ve had a number of crazy illnesses, including all 3 kids each having pneumonia twice.  We’ve had an average of about 2.5 doctor, hospital, or ER visits per week since November, and it’s been wearing us down.  In addition, our house got struck by lightening and our dog almost died twice.  (No, I’m not joking).  I don’t talk much about spiritual warfare, but nothing else explains it.  Yesterday I was talking to a doctor from the Infectious Disease Clinic at Devos Children’s Hospital, and told him to continue to run tests, but that I was asking a lot of people to pray for us. 

I’ve been continuing to read as much as I can, which isn’t enough, and continued to think.  I had a lot of ideas for posts, and then they got lost along with the sleep that seemed to disapate right before my opened eyes.

Recently, I’ve been reading some critics of what are called either postfoundationalists/ postconservatives like Stanley Grenz, John Franke, Roger Olson, et al.  I’m interested in the conservative evangelical response to projects which seek to take postmodern thinking seriously while also holding strongly to evangelicalism and scripture.  I’ve been reading all sides, but I tend to tip towards the Grenz, Franke, Olsons as well as some of what James KA Smith, Carl Raschke, Kevin VanHoozer, John Stackhouse, and others like them would say.  I like to read the critics because it helps to clarify and challenge my own thinking. 

I’ve also been toying with some article and book ideas, but haven’t recently found the time to write with the kids’ being sick and life in general.  Some space/ time to write would be awesome.

Anyway, I’ll be back with what are, I think, some interesting posts coming from my interchange with Jim Speigel on Gum, Geckos, and God starting on Monday.  I couldn’t limit my questions to one, so we’re going to go back and forth a bit on a number of questions.  I hope you enjoy it… and the book is a lot of fun to read.

I spent the week last week at a Camp on Lake Michigan called Camp Geneva.  It’s actually where my wife and I met, and where we held our wedding reception.  I’ve been going out there each year to be a chaplain.  My kids get to experience camp, and I get to give back to camp a little bit.

Well, it’s a great week.  The week I’m there is  the 4th to 6th grade all week.  Now, I love these kids, but precisely because of their age, it requires some thinking in a good part of the brain - the child “translation” side.  This age group is filled with questions and curiosity and they’re really beginning to try to make sense of the world. 

Half way through the week, a counselor came to me with her cabin and asked if they could spend some time with me asking questions.  “No problem,” I said.  Well, that’s what I thought.  It was so much fun - for an hour we sat and just talked about everything you can think of from what will we be like in heaven to what are ghosts to how could Jesus really be God if he was also human to whether or not God spoke every language?  We talked about whether we’d know people in heaven and whether babies who died would always be babies in heaven.  (These kids were fascinated with the afterlife.)  They wanted to know if people could hear us from heaven so that we could pray to them after they died, whether we would become angels, and how God sees kids with disabilities.  Later in the week, another counselor asked if I’d do the same thing with her cabin.  It was a pure blast.

I wish at that point I had Jim’s book Gum, Geckos, and God  available (see previous post) or had already read it because he promises to look at some of these things in conversation with his kids in the book.  I’m excited to read this and rethink conversations I’ve had with my son Isaac about what I call our heavenly “super-bodies” and what God looks like and my daughter Aliya’s concerns about how on earth (literally) it’s possible for Jesus to come back to life (faith is amazing).

I’m participating in a blog tour for Gum, Geckos, and God.  The stop here will be on August 4th and following.  Basically, I’m going to ask Jim some questions on the book, and he’ll respond, and you can join in.

Setting:  Walmart bathroom; 3 year old in one stall, 5 year old two down – so they’re yelling.

3 year old:  [Singing Jesus Loves Me modified]  Jesus doesn’t love me; Jesus doesn’t love me. 

5 year old:  That’s not right.  Jesus loves you.  He always does.

3 year old:  I don’t like Jesus.  He won’t let me touch these blue walls, so I don’t like him. [Pauses]  Jesus, it’s me!  I’m sorry Jesus.  Jesus, it’s me!  I’m on da toilet!!” [Now to mommy] I just talked to Jesus, mommy.  Just for a minute.  He’s upstairs.

5 year old:  Jesus isn’t upstairs, he’s in the sky.

3 year old:  Not in the blue sky.

5 year old:  Yes he is.

3 year old:  In the blue sky!?

5 year old [yelling]: YES!!

3 year old:  How does he fly?

5 year old:  He doesn’t.

3 year old:  The angels fly.

5 year old:  Yes they do.

3 year old:  With their wings.

(And it went on… but who can ever re-create these things?)

This happened a few years ago when my now 8 year old was 5 and my now 5 year old was 3.  I was reminded of this when I read the first few lines of a new book by an old friend (well, he’s not old… we were just friends while I was in college and he getting his doctorate) called Gum, Geckos, and God.  It’s a book about God, theology, and questions that James S. Spiegel wrote from conversations with his kids and interaction with his philosophical mind.

I’m going to tell you some more about it in the next post or two, along with maybe one or two kid stories… but first a little about its author, James S. Spiegel (click to read his bio).  Jim is a Philosophy professor at Taylor University, a wonderful thinker, and a mean basketball player (at least he used to be).  You can read the official bio, which you should do… but I’m going to write a few other rememberances.  Jim and I played in a band back in college days, and I was often inspired by Jim’s wit and his intelligence.  I remember playing with him at the Michigan State Student Union, at a local bar, at a retreat, and at our church.  I remember Jim getting mad at me for some bad decisions I was making with some friends who were a negative influence.  Jim is a thinker and a lover.  He loves God and he loves his family and he loves his friends.  Jim also loves music, philosophy, and certain sports and TV shows.  

Honestly, I haven’t seen Jim since a buddy of ours got married several years back, but I have fond memories of jamming late into the night to the strange mix of Cranberries and Classic Rock.  I’ve only started the book, but I’ll be participating in a Blog Tour, and I hope you’ll not only read along, but get the book.   It’s funny, helpful, and serious all at the same time.  If you have kids, you’ll certainly recognize some of the great theological questions of 5 year olds from your own experience and Jim takes the deep philosophical and theological issues to bear and tries to put them into concepts that even a child can understand.  What a concept.

On his blog, Peter Enns has been sharing portions of a paper he delivered to the faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary in response to his book, Incarnation and Inspiration that got him into trouble and now into suspension.  In a recent post on the authority and cultural expressions of Scripture, first speaks of the mixing of Jesus divinity and humanity in his person.  Enns says that these are “essential” to who Jesus is, and that the combination is important.  I would be wrong to try to pit the humanity against the divinity or to raise one above the other.  Interesting, I was just relistening to a podcast recently by Seattle’s Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Seattle  entitled “The Supremacy of Christ and the Church in a Postmodern World.”  Driscoll was making a similar argument, accusing the Emergents of raising the immanence and incarnation of Jesus too high and accusing the New Reformers of raising the transcendence and exalted Jesus too much.  In any case, Enns argues that the authority of Scripture comes from its divine origin, in other words - in God’s words, but that it is encased unescapably in humanity, or cultural expression.  Here is a short passage from his post:

What I argue in I&I is that Scripture works in an analogous (not identical) way. Scripture is God’s word because it is of divine origin. That is the locus of authority, and no discussion of its humanity in any way compromises that authority. What a study of Scripture’s humanity does do is help us see the manner in which the divine author speaks authoritatively into particular ancient cultures. How this authoritative Scripture translates to different times and places, in both its timeless affirmations and contextualized particularity is (I trust this is not too reductionistic) the task of theological study. It is my firm experience, however, that evangelical lay readers, those to whom the book is addressed, are not accustomed to understanding the nature of Scripture this way.

This is one of the issues that I find so fascinating about how we understand Scripture, and one that I’ve mentioned in various ways here on my blog.  One of the ways it has been raised among some like myself is how much we can “purge” the human side, the cultural side, and get to pure propositional truths.  Again, don’t read what I’m not saying, and from what I’m reading of Enns, he’s not saying either but being accused of.  I’m not saying there isn’t truth, or objective truth for that matter or that God’s truth isn’t propositional in any way.  What I am saying is that our access too it is always enculturated, always incarnated, always spoken through word and cultural and interpretation from God into human cultures and persons.  God communicates, he doesn’t philosophize.  God relates, speaks, and loves rather than providing pure platonic visions of himself.  God is God, “I am who I am” and not philosophical categories and platonic idealism or Kantian pure reason.  God is interactional and in his divine goodness has chosen to speak, act, and even come incarnationally.

God is still who he is.  He is still the King and the authority.  What he says goes.  What he wants, will be.  There is no other name under haven by which we can be saved.  But let us be careful not to turn scripture - or God for that matter - into pure philosophical Kantian metaphysics.  We need to find a way to accept the way God has communicated with us - not through theological treatise, but through narrative of his relationship with his people - and then figure out how it speaks to us today, and what God really intends and who he is.  That’s much harder work than black and white propositions, I know, but that’s the work.  Driscoll is right (although I don’t like saying that) that we need to balance the transcendent and immanent God as he is.

In terms of my last post, I’m not the only one who is excited.  Ok, this post is old, but Scot McKnight’s post “Emergent Voices,” March 2, 2006 says some similar things in his own McKnightish way:

Emerging theological voices are running with some of the fast horses in theology and it is lots of fun to watch and listen. Keep your eyes open because shifts are occurring and in ten years theology won’t be what it is today — and it’s a good thing.

Many of the leaders and thinkers of the emerging movement were nurtured theologically on books like those of Donald Bloesch, Millard Erickson, Wayne Grudem, or even older lights like Berkhof. Emerging leaders know this stuff — and often have moved beyond it or have rejected it…

…Take, for instance, LeRon Shults. An emerging thinker, a young theologian, and one who has drunk deeply from seminal thinkers. What I find central to the major discussions of theology in the emerging movement is its turn to seminal thinkers and broad, sweeping trends. Shults deals in his book, Reforming Theolgocial Anthropology, with the turn to relationality and sketches the discussion through Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Levinas. We have Barth and Pannenberg, and we have Leontius of Byzantium. And we have the impact of this turn toward a relational understanding on how we understand human nature, how we understand sin, and how we understand the imago Dei.

Others could be mentioned — John Franke, Stanley Grenz, Miroslav Volf, Kevin Vanhoozer…

…The major impact, as I’m seeing it, will be that bigger questions will be asked, newer approaches will be seen, and over time some dog-eared discussions will find their appropriate corner with questions no longer asked. Theology has always been the attempt to bring biblical theology into a new day, and that is exactly what we find in (to use Westerns) in Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Edwards, Barth, and the like. To stick to the categories and discussions of the 16th Century may be a learning experience, but theology always asks for new expressions in new times. I find the theology of the emerging movement trying to do just that.

McKnight lists a lot of the people that I’ve been reading over the last 8-10 years, people like Grenz, Franke, Volf, Van Hoozer, Shults, and Pannenberg not to mention the many other unmentioned ones - some theologians and some more practitioners too many to name. 

I’ve commented on the Reveal Study before, but given my last post on the subject, I want to follow up a little bit. 

• Reveal Spirituality Survey Results
• Reveal Small Group Data

After reading MacDonald, it reminded me of something that Bill Hybels said in response to the Reveal Data.   I heard him share some of these thoughts at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, but here is how he said it as quoted at the Out of Ur blog of Christianity Today called Willow Creek Repents (There’s a second post as well from Greg Hawkins of Willow.

We made a mistake.  What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and became Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ’self-feeders’.  We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

Out of UR then goes on to says, “In other words, spiritual growth doesn’t happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships.”

Have we gotten so far away from the basics that we’ve lost the very core of what it takes to develop a disciple?

I’ve been writing a bit lately about the issues of “who’s in” and “who’s out” and drawing firm boundary lines within evangelicalism. There are some these days who are tightening up the theological borders, while others are in favor of open borders and new cultural expressons of our faith so long as we maintain our core identity (see posts on The Future of Evangelicalism).

In the midst of this has come the controversy surrounding Westminster Theological Seminary and Peter Enn’s. Apparently, Enn’s published a book (which I have not read) called Inspiration and Incarnation, using an incarnational analogy to describe inspiration and Scripture. He was recently suspended by the board from his position for this book because it apparently went against the Westminster Confession of Faith.  What I’m gathering Enns means by incarnational analogy (again, without having read the book), is that there is a co-mingling (as in Jesus’ incarnation… the human and the divine) of humanity and divinity in the project and development of the Scriptures. My hunch is that the rub here is around inerrancy and defining what “God-breathed” means. If there is too much “humanity” and culture in the Scriptures, then that might soften our understanding of it’s authority, it’s special nature, and inevitably create a slippery slope away from inerrancy. Again… I haven’t read it, but if that’s what it’s about, I can see the issues here. The interesting thing to me just on first blush is that even though Jesus was human, even though Jesus was “enculturated” as a Jewish man in first century Palestine, born into the home of a carpenter - we don’t tend to worry that Jesus is somehow tainted or less than perfect, or diminished in his God-hood. So, why would we worry about an incarnational theology of inspiration? Maybe there’s a lot more too it.

In any case, what bothered me were a couple of things (you can find this info at Christianity Today in an article entitled “Westminster Theological Suspension.” There’s also a good deal of discussion on Scot McKnight’s blog). 

First, it was interesting how split both the faculty (12 for 8 against) and the board (9 for 18 against) were on their decisions to support Enns or not.  Clearly, this is not a cut and dried issue, and one that took 2 years to get through.  Apparently there were not “personal” issues involved.  I guess this was theological.  And yet it came down to such a split vote in both places within Westminster?  Just ask yourself this question… “What does this tell us about the state of evangelicalism?”  I won’t answer that for you.

Second, even though this was supposedly a theological issue, CT said this, “…the board failed to give Enns an opportunity to be heard” and that that boards staement said, “while theological ocncerns were mentioned, there was little board discussion of theological specifics.”  Hmmm.   That’s a head scratcher.

Well, obviously I don’t know enough about the story, but it’s disturbing none-the-less.

There are important clarifications to make when talking about emerg-anything because so much stuff is flying out there because no one knows who is talking about what.  In Lining Up I lamented that there are some who like to categorize everyone in order to decided whose heretical and whose orthodox.  Though I still don’t think that’s a great idea, it is helpful to have some definitions and categories in order to have a helpful conversation so that we’re not talking past each other or attacking people for things that simply aren’t true.  So, here are a couple of helpful things:

Emerging Church is not the same thing as Emergent Church which is not the same as Emergence Theory.

The Emerging Church is something that general means the character of the church that is emerging in the new postmodern era/ culture as our culture and history makes a move from modernism through postmodernity to whatever will be next.  The idea here is that as the culture and humanities ways of viewing and experiencing the world change, so the church will also go through some changes.  (For instance, the church made changes through the Roman Period, through Medieval Times, through the Renaissance, through scientific modernism, etc.)  We are now in the stages of that emerging and we won’t know until we are on the other side what that will mean or look like.

The Emergent Church refers to a particular strain of dialogue and a group of leaders that was originally birthed out of some connections of the Leadership Network in the mid to late 1990’s (most known are Tony Jones, Brian McLaren, Chris Seay, Doug Paggitt, Spencer Burke, Dan Kimball, and Andrew Jones).  You can often hear Mark Driscoll making it clear that he is no longer a part of this groupl, even though he was there in the beginning (more on Mark to come in later posts).

Emergence theory is a particular strain of theories that has a wide span and has been appropriated to the way the brain works, how ant colonies functions, how cities are designed, how people move in crowds, how software is designed, and much more.  Emergence theory is a kind of complex systems theory that, in the most crass way I can put it, posits that order emerges complexly from what looks like chaos - that complex systems are self-ordering in a kind of evolutionary manner from the “bottom up” rather than by design from the “top down.”

Now, this isn’t to say that the Emergent Church folks aren’t applying Emergence Theory to understand the Emerging Church.  (That would actually be a true statement for some.  For instance, though I’m sure where Kester Brewin, author of “Signs of Emergence” fits, he is definitely applying Emergence Theory to how the church should function in the future.  I’ll write about his book soon… one chapter to go, but for the record, I disagree with a lot of it.

One of the people I’ve appreciated reading in the past who speaks not from an emergent place, but as a prophetic voice within established evangelicalism has been Ron Sider from Evangelicals for Social Action..  His book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was eye opening to many people when it was published back in 1977 and has remained a seminal book for many people.  Sider tried to articulate underlying causes of poverty, provide some practical solutions, and engage Christians in the task.  He was at it again in his recent book, Just Generosity: a vision for overcoming poverty in America.  Whether you agree with his view, particular the place of the government in solving poverty, you can argue with his call to Christians to be involved in poverty issues around the globe.  But he hasn’t just focused on poverty. 

In 2005, Sider came out with the book, Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, (whose title is ripped off from Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which I hope to talk about in a post coming up.)  Anyway, as we talk about the resurgence of the social conscience of American Christians, particularly evangelicals, this is an important book that tried to sound the alarm.  I recently read an article published in Books & Culture that I printed awhile back by John G. Stackhouse who I like, but was disappointed with both here and recently on his blog.  The article was entitled “What scandal?  Whose conscience?” 

Stackhouse clearly articulates Sider’s thesis this way: 

“American evangelicals fail so badly to live according to the gospel that we are, in many respects, indistinguishable from the world around us.” 

Then, he proceeds to undermine Sider’s work and argument based on several items.  First, he challenges the definition of evanglicalism - which, to his credit is fair.  The problem, however, is not so much Sider’s problem (although he could have talked about how he defined evangelical, as could I because I throw the word around a lot.)  He says that unfortunately Sider doesn’t really tell us who he’s talking about, and therefore can’t make such a judgment.  In fact, Stackhouse goes so far as to say in a sense that because there are so many nominal evangelicals, its unfair to judge them by these standards - that we should only make such valuative judgments when we know people are really committed evangelicals (whatever the definition) and not merely nominal ones.  But that’s exactly the point.  It’s become easy to have and hold the name evangelical precisely because it now means so little and demands, really, even less.  One can don the name evangelical today and still maintain a pretty normal American lifestyle.  No sacrifice; no difficult counter-cultural living; no personal inner struggle from being a sojourner in a strange land.

Second, Stackhouse moves to undermining the surveys of Gallup and Barna (similar research as that used in the UnChristian book).  In fact, he tries to turn the data on its head to say that evangelicals have truly been living lives of holiness and genuine Christian conviction.  He even goes so far as to sound like he’s justifying either to himself or someone else that we’ve done an awful lot, so we should stop asking such questions.  Like this quote when talking about money:

“So should we give more?  Undoubtedly.  Yet is it as bas as Sider says?  I’m pretty sure it isn’t, and we need a clearer picture to know just what God is requiring of us.” 

Do we really need to know more?  Really?  Do we not really know what is required of us?  I don’t think he’s listening to what Sider is saying.  Sider is trying to sound an alarm about how little Christians - or even so-called Christians, or nominal Christians - are making a lasting, impactful, influential difference in major world issues - particularly things like personal poverty, third-world national debt, AIDS, the dessimation of our cities, etc.  However, he does get it at this point at least.  He says this:

“So what exactly is Sider’s concern?  That many Americans call themselves ‘evangelicals,’ or answer a few questions about doctrine and conviction affirmatively, but then do not in fact practice a full-fledged obedience?  One must agree that those are, indeed, valid grounds for concern.”

That is it.  Unfortunately, Stackhouse then moves from that important issue and seems to continue to quiet the alarm Sider is calling by getting us stuck in more and more questions that feel more like justifications or nit-picky issues than dealing with the real, burning question:  Where are all the Christians who are making a real difference?  Sure, they’re out there.  I know many of them, and so do you.  But the question is whether the difference we make in the world is even close to commensurate to the amount of money spent, the number of people involved or who self-identify as Christians, the many words spoken and preached and exhorted and pontificated? 

Stackhouse is brilliant, and I’d have preferred he used his time in Books & Culture to engage that issue and help to mobilize a virtual army of arm-chair Christians.