[Faith-talk] Good Night Message for Saturday, April 13, 2013

[Paul]

Hello and good day to all of you, whether that be morning, afternoon or evening depending where you live.  Here in the Americas it's evening, and thus a good night message.  I hope and pray that, by God's matchless grace and His providential care, that your day went well or is going well.

Joel Edwards wrote an article some time ago entitled "Come Out of Your Cave," rendered as follows:

Engaging with the emerging church is vital, insists Joel Edwards.

It's amazing what you can find in caves.  Scary bats, prehistoric paintings and those funny ice things which change name depending on their direction.  Sometimes, if you look really closely in the right cave, you may strike lucky and discover a perfectly preserved metaphor for a contemporary ecclesiological phenomenon.

That's what I found anyway while traveling the pages of 1 Samuel.  Chapter 22 led me to Adullam's cave with David and 400 hangers-on, all of whom were in distress, in debt or discontented.  Try as I might, I just couldn't cheer them up with Kumbaya.  What was remarkable was that this bunch of gloomy raggamuffins emerged from the cave and went on to become a formidable army and the bedrock of David's ascendancy.  Disquiet, it seems, is not always a bad thing.

The contemporary evangelical church is faced with its own growing band of cave dwellers (in the nicest sense of the term).  They may not all be in distress or in debt, but for most of them there is a plentiful supply of discontentment.  They are the "emerging church" (although they prefer "movement" or "conversation" to the label church) and they present us with some fascinating challenges.

How are we to respond to this hugely diffuse group? Do we claim they have sold out to postmodernity? Or are they the new reformation? Should we be blowing up our church buildings and following them to Starbucks?

The answer, as usual, is somewhere in between.

The first thing to note is that, as in David's time, these folk have not given up on God, just on the existing order.  This is nothing new in the church.  We must not be negative about what God can do with the dissenters.  Just look at Luther, Wesley, Spurgeon or the Pentecostal movement.

>From time to time dissenters are an essential corrective.  It is they who ask the hard questions.  Why do we do things the way we do? What is biblical and what is cultural? An important function of the emerging movement is to challenge us when we have turned church into another consumer product, or allowed rituals to become sacred cows governing how we conduct services.  Why does the worship band have to be on a stage? Why are many of our churches laid out like lecture halls? Why can't a sermon be a question and answer discussion session instead? In its experimentation and question, the emerging movement is to be applauded.

Secondly, in its stated aims to be incarnational and missional, there is little I can disagree with as an evangelical leader.  In its desire to focus on Christian community and to practice the way of Jesus rather than just to talk the theology of Jesus I find much to be excited about.

Thirdly, we should not underestimate the strength of this movement.  Boredom and discontent are more endemic than many church leaders realize or are prepared to admit.  We do not have the option write the emerging church off as a flash in the pan.  It is a serious and growing conversation with the potential to radically affect the future shape of our church.  It is vital that we join in with this conversation.

At the same time we must be prepared to proceed with caution.  Any movement formed out of dissent risks being defined by what it is against rather than what it is for.  This has always been one of the dangers of post-evangelicalism.  Disillusionment does not build anything new.  And the emerging scene must resist the urge to raise up a simplified straw man version of evangelicalism so it can spend all of its time knocking it down.  It must be prepared to see that much of what it advocates is already being done by many mainstream evangelical churches across the land.

The movement's biggest challenge will be how it handles discipleship and evangelism.  These are both potential blind spots in the context of fluid non-hierarchical forms of leadership and a spirit of inclusivity which can be reluctant to inform somebody of their need for personal salvation through Christ.

The emerging crowd must not get so enamored by postmodernity that they become indistinguishable from the culture.  The cross will always be an offence.  If it is not, then there is a good chance that the message has been watered down.  In all of this it is vital that we come out of our respective caves and talk.  Part of our witness to the world will always be in how we handle our differences.  We have got it badly wrong in history.  Let us not do so now.

And there you have Brother Edwards' article.  I hope that you derived some benefit from reading it.

And now may the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob just keep us safe, individually and collectively, throughout this night or day and especially in these last days in which we live.  Your Christian friend and brother, Paul