Check out this very helpful interview with Ryan K. Bolger, one of, if not the most impressive among the various observers of the Emerging church phenomenon. This interview has prompted me to begin work on another article on the emerging church. Here are some of the issues and questions the interview stirred up in my thinking:

1. It seems that for Bolger, the term “emerging” was encountered among some of the communities he studied because he viewed them as possibly “missional” in their understanding of church. Bolger contrasts “missional” models of church to “attractional,” models. This is fascinating not least because it reveals Bolger’s prior interest in a particular way of being the church as the motive for the research he and Eddie Gibbs have pursued.  

2. How does the issue of authority function in these missional churches. They appeal especially to the Gospels to legitimize their preference for missional models of being church. But does that mean that they would accept Bible-based challenges to their views as appropriate critique or do they rather assume the prerogative to stand above the Bible and pick and choose according to some other commitment, say matters related to their understanding of the culture? Are the answers different for Gibbs/Bolger missional communities compared to Mars Hill based Acts29 churches?

3. To the extent that they intend to submit to the Bible as the authority for their conception of being the church, do they accept what I like to call an historical/grammatical approach to hermeneutics? What I mean is this: does apprehension of a Biblical author’s intention at least limit and, in best case scenarios, determine legitimate readings of passages? This is important because, if so, the task of determining where Jesus, as presented in the gospels, intended to provide models for being church and where he did not, determines the legitimacy of particular appeals to the Jesus of the gospels. If “missional” pastors reject the legitimacy of such critiques then, in what sense can they call their communities of faith biblical? How are they protected from the same kind of “reading into” the text alien norms that they decry where other models are in view? Again, what about the comparison with Acts29?

4. Do we find in these missional churches an effort to recover the gospels for understanding the proper shape of communities of faith, or something akin to the old protestant liberal contrasting of the gospels with the Pauline corpus where the former is preferred to the later? If so, the Barthian critique becomes operative. A self-conscious application of an alien norm (probably along the lines of cultural considerations and felt relevance concerns) is being employed to make selective use of Biblical material rather than an honest effort to submit to the Scriptures as the very word of God. Acts29?

5. A test in regard to the relationship between missional churches and the Bible arises wherever lack of enthusiasm for Bible teaching surfaces. The most blatant examples of this of which I am aware are on the questions of biblical teaching regarding the substitutionary atonement and homosexual behavior. With respect to the latter especially, the hem-hawing of Brian McLaren combined with his star status among many raises real questions regarding the place of the Bible among some of the missional leaders. A real naiveté regarding the ineluctably theological nature of Christianity seems apparent in much of the conversation that I suspect gains much energy from the protest dimension and leads to a Baby-out-with-the-bathwater effect. The contrast with Acts29 is stark here, is it not?

6. My concerns regarding the authority of the Bible matter to me precisely because I believe that some of the missional thinking does involve faithful recovery of neglected Bible truth and that is what followers of Jesus should celebrate. A danger, though, is that missional leaders will imagine that they can pick and choose what suits them from the Bible without lapsing (albeit unwittingly) into Feuerbachian projection and idolatry.

7. Bolger’s missional churches call for the sacralizing of secular space in contrast to the idea of Christendom in which the Church stands in sharp contrast to the world and paganism. This notion that the modern world created the division between sacred and secular is interesting and may be accurate to some extent, but it seems unaware of how compatible the collapse of the distinction between sacred and secular is to the notion of Christendom!! The collapse of the distinction does offer promise of a recovery of the Biblical notion of Christ’s Lordship over the entire world. But, it may not comprehend the Biblical conception of the church as a witnessing, pilgrim (resident alien) people where the distinction between church and world is retained without resulting in the relinquishing of the church’s responsibility to the world or the world’s answerability to Christ. I suspect there is a third way here that I do not hear from Bolger but which may apply somewhat to Acts29.

8. The Mars Hill based Acts29 network of churches may be rightly denied the “emerging” tattoo by Gibbs/Bolger but it does think of itself as missional in just the way Bolger articulated it in the interview, namely that the church must go into the world where the lost live rather than expect them to come to a worship service to which they have been attracted. (as an aside, while I do see evidence of the dangers of attractional models to the gospel message and to a serious practice of community, for example in certain seeker models, I do not see why an attractional model is, in and of itself, necessarily unbiblical or otherwise pernicious.) Is not the superiority of Acts29 the clear, formal acknowledgement that the Bible must be the authority for its faith and practice? Does not the anchoring of Acts29 in what one might call a fully-orbed and historically impressive theological self-understanding provide a check and balance for its development as it seeks to be missional that the Gibbs/Bolger types may lack?