Challenging Times

This is the first of what I hope will be a short series of related posts.

I’m concerned that, out of a genuine desire to be contemporary and relevant, we may be losing the plot of the Bible’s big story.

I’ve read several books recently by respected leaders and theologians, where what they don’t say has been more important than what they do say.

For example, there’s often a deafening silence about the question of the individual’s eternal destiny. OK, I know it’s an unfashionable question, but it still strikes me as being of some personal interest and concern.

I can illustrate my point by talking about the phrase ‘eternal life.’ This is used about sixteen times in John’s Gospel, eight times in Matthew/Mark/Luke (but some of these are parallel accounts of the same event), and eighteen more times in the rest of the New Testament, including half a dozen in John’s letters. In other words, it’s a favourite phrase of John, and is used somewhat, but nothing like as much, by the other New Testament writers.

The rhetoric about ‘eternal life’ often goes like this: It’s talking about a different kind of life here and now. It isn’t talking about what happens after we die. This rhetoric is often backed up by an appeal to the underlying Greek phrase which literally means something like ‘life of the ages.’

What this doesn’t say is more important than what it does say: ‘Eternal life’ clearly includes the idea of a different kind of life which begins here and now. But this isn’t all it means. You can’t just ignore or throw out the main meaning of the adjective. First and foremost, it is about eternal life – life that lasts for ever. It is about what happens after we die.

This is not an either/or choice. We are distorting the Bible when we dismiss or ignore the central nature of eternal life – that it is life that lasts for ever, extending beyond the grave.

The trouble is that as soon as you say this, it raises nagging and disquieting questions about what will happen to us after we die. And I think it’s largely out of a reluctance to take on these questions that some writers dodge the bullet about eternal life.

But quite simply, the most important question you will ever face is: what is going to happen to you when you die? When we lose the plot about this, and start making other issues central, we are in danger of proclaiming ‘a different gospel,’ as Paul says in Galatians 1:6-7.

‘Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: five perspectives,’ edited by Robert Webber, does exactly what it says on the tin. Five emerging church leaders each in turn have the opportunity to describe their take on theology and the emerging church. Then the others have the opportunity to respond to what they have written. The book ends with a brief attempt by Webber to assess emerging theology.

The five main sections are:

• The emerging church and Biblicist theology, by Mark Driscoll
• The emerging church and incarnational theology, by John Burke
• The emerging church and missional theology, by Dan Kimball
• The emerging church and embodied theology, by Doug Pagitt
• The emerging church and communal theology, by Karen Ward

I’ve written earlier about the sheer theological diversity which makes it almost meaningless to talk about the emerging church, or about a single emerging church theology. This book does an excellent job of capturing that diversity, and this makes it well worth reading.

Precisely because of this, Webber’s attempt at a conclusion is the weakest part of the whole book. He tries to synthesize some very different things – or at least, to find some common threads between them. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether or not you think he succeeeds.

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I’ve written a few times recently about preaching (here and here). I don’t think there’s much justification in the New Testament for preaching as we see it, as making sermons. The NT seems to put much more emphasis on teaching.

Tim Chester has just started a series of blog posts called Dialogue on Sermons (part 1, part 2). These are really worth reading. He makes the case I’ve been trying to make – but does a much better job:

‘To be honest, Adams’ six points look very like special pleading to me and only reinforce my view that the status of the preacher is what is being defended. The irony is that those who trumpet their adherence to the word do not teach that word in the way it describes itself being taught!

The case for the sermon seems to be that it reflects the authority of God’s word, because the word is proclaimed without interruption or question. Think about it for a moment. What a bizarre definition of authority. Authority = lack of interruption! Surely the authority of the word is best expressed when we live in obedience to that word. So let’s work the truth down into people’s hearts and lives.

Preach it, Tim!
Or teach it.

Last year, Jason Clark made a presentation to the Council of the UK’s Evangelical Alliance. In it, he identified two dimensions of the emerging church movement:

• Theologically conservative – radical
• Sociologically conservative – radical

So there are some people called emerging church leaders who are both theologically and sociologically radical. There are others who are sociologically radical – they are experimenting with new forms – but theologically they are conservative. And still others are theologically radical but sociologically quite conservative. (I’m trying to make up my mind whether the new monastic movement fits this description…)

This seems to me to be one of the most helpful accounts of the emerging church that I’ve come across. It recognises the huge diversity of the movement (in a way that Carson does not, while Gibbs and Bolger do, and Sine does to some extent, although he muddies the waters by limiting the description ‘emerging’ one of the streams he describes.)

It’s precisely because of this massive diversity that I don’t really think ‘emerging’ is a very useful tag. Some people will want to be called ‘emerging’ or ‘missional,’ just because it sounds trendy and hip. Others, especially following Carson, will use ‘emerging’ as a kind of theological cuss-word to condemn any contemporary expression of church life that they don’t like.

‘Emerging’ has become a bit like ‘evangelical.’ It’s one of those words that has become all things to all people – and because of that, it doesn’t mean very much to anyone. ‘When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean. Nothing more. Nothing less.’ (From Alice in Wonderland – Humpty Dumpty, I think.)

‘Very early on I felt God said to me, ‘Your first calling is to be a worshipper, and you must always remember that as a priority.’ So there are many difficulties, challenges and so on that one faces, but see yourself first of all as giving yourself to God. That puts everything in proportion…’

‘Slipstream,‘ the leaders’ podcast, produced by Focus for the Evangelical Alliance, was launched at the beginning of May. Our first guest is Terry Virgo, founder and leader of New Frontiers International.

Go here to listen.

OK. The first thing to say about Tom Sine’s recent book ‘The New Conspirators: creating the future one mustard seed at a time,’ is that it isn’t a book about emerging church, and if you want to understand emerging church, you don’t need to read it.

But a lot of people will read this book for other good reasons, and Tom Sine talks about four different strands or streams of new church life. He calls these strands ‘emerging,’ ‘missional, ‘monastic,’ and ‘mosaic.’

Here’s the problem: a lot of people use ‘emerging church’ today to describe new expressions of church life, including those which fit in at least three of the strands Sine talks about (emerging, missional, and monastic).

So there’s a kind of broad use of ‘emerging church,’ which covers all three, and there’s a narrower use, which is what Sine calls ‘emerging church.’ All this does is to confuse things. Next time I’m in a conversation with someone and they talk about ‘emerging church,’ I won’t know – until I ask them – whether they’re using this in a broad generic sense, or in Sine’s more restricted sense.

The net effect is just to muddy the waters, and this is unfortunate.

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Andy Peck’s interview with me for The Leadership File on Premier Radio has been broadcast at last.

You can find it here.