The Emerging Church: Right and Wrong
— Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 —
Blogger Trevin Wax interviews my friend, doctoral student, and assistant Robbie Sagers about Sagers’s recent writings on the emerging church. Sagers is precisely right to see the so-called “emerging church” as a more complicated issue than either the label’s enthusiasts on the left or critics on the right are willing to grant.
The left wing of the emerging church has, Sagers is right, replaced the gospel with an anti-gospel. Shame about the cross of Christ, the judgment of God, and the reality of hell may be “emerging” but it is not from the church. But Sagers is also right to note that what is often called the “emerging church” doesn’t fit this paradigm at all. Brian McLaren is not, I would argue, a gospel preacher. But Dan Kimball emphatically is. They cannot be said to be part of the same “movement” either by critics who would like to lump them all together to attack or by leftists within the movement who would like the “cover” of their orthodox counterparts.
Sagers is also correct to note that the criticisms of traditional conservative evangelical theology and spirituality and missiology is often on target in its diagnosis, if not always in its solution. American evangelicalism is indeed too captive to a story-less rationalism in both its academy and in its pulpits, just in different ways. The academy often seeks to replace mystery and paradox and narrative with syllogisms, true enough. Have conservative evangelicals in recent years often ignored issues of poverty, social justice, and the stewardship of the earth? Without a doubt. And evangelical churches often seek to replace story and water and bread and wine with principles, programs, ideas, and “worst of all” products to be bought and sold.
Read the interview, and let me know what you think.
Thanks for the heads up, Dr. Moore. I appreciated the interview and appreciated Robbie’s wit,
“Certain segments of the emerging church movement certainly did emerge from something – in the case of those on the most radical wing of the movement, they emerged right on out of Christian orthodoxy.”
I tend to reach “across the aisle” for encouragement myself at times… what can be difficult is cutting through ambiguity tends to be my first step in discerning good from bad, and if a discussion is intentionally (or unintentionally) vague, that makes gleaning encouragement more difficult. At that times, it’s easy to flee to Lloyd-Jones and be refreshed by someone who’s quite clear.
So, if someone could repackage the good from the movement with clarity and plenty of Bible, I bet I’d buy it.
Good closing quote from Robbie,
“My hope is that conservative evangelicals … will avoid the temptation to a more-doctrinal-than-thou mentality that can be destructive to the soul.”
(On a side note… after retweeting your Morris Chapman vs. Vestal Goodman showdown, I’m now being followed by Southern Gospel news on Twitter. ; )
Agreed. What would also help American evangelicals would be for them to get more perspectives, especially in mission, from other than American sources. The Emergents have correctly pointed out that we read the Gospel through lenses which have been tinged by the culture we are in - I once heard the SBC described as “the state church for the American south”, which for years it probably was(!) So a view of thing from someone and somewhere different would have its uses.
But what would true evangelicalism for post-moderns look like? The same as your grandfather’s SBC? I suspect not :-)