I would have done this yesterday morning when it was all a bit fresher, but I couldn't get logged in to write. I woke up yesterday having dreamt a fair amount of conversations about the emergent church "movement" (those involved would rather think of it as a conversation). I've apparently had it on the brain a lot and had just finished Dan Kimball's The Emerging Church the morning before.
I had also read the first part of an article that was in Christianity Today about the emerging church that danced around some explanation of what it is, where it has come from and where it might be going (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/011/12.36.html). I finished the article in the morning and then followed a link from it to an interview with Rob Bell (pastor of Mars Hill) that had a lot of very interesting insight about preaching (http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2004/002/1.24.html).
I guess some of my response to these articles came out of what a crap week it's been with wrestling with budget stuff, ministry structure stuff and a fairly good small group meeting where we spent a lot of time trying to come to conclusions where I would rather have been captivated by the mystery of how God works. I'm so tired of trying to control everything and trying to put things in a box that is manageable so that I can be untroubled by things that are going on around me. Where mystery exists, I'd like to let it exist since part of its purpose is to remind me that God is so far beyond my understanding and to move me to awe and wonder. Not that intellectual exercise is bad. God wants to be known and we are to pursue Him in ways that lead us to a better understanding of His character and how we are to live in relationship to Him and to others. I'm just having a hard time intellectualizing everything to the point of uninspiration and am not convinced that we come to a full understanding most of the time anyway. Oh well.
Back to the articles. One of the points of the emergent article was to examine whether emergent ministry is fad or future for the church at large. The opinion that I have at this point is that whether emergent theology is a trend or the future seems irrelevant. The surest way to see the church in America go the way of the church in Europe is to do nothing. If we want to be increasingly in decline in both numbers, influence and relevance to our culture, then by all means, let us continue to do things the way we have been and try to discredit anyone who does anything slightly different than what we're doing now. We are too enamored with the trends that helped us see renewed interest in the church in the 1980's-90's and are failing to recognize the need for diversity in how we approach ministry now. I'm tired of church. That may be me speaking out of stress, weariness and frustration with having too many things going on right now, but I think at heart it is how I feel about experiencing a Christian community that doesn't resemble what God intends it to be.
