Congratulations to Ed Stetzer and to Southern Baptists. Ed Stetzer, missiologist and Senior Director of the Center for Missional Research at the North American Mission Board (NAMB), will become director of LifeWay Research as part of a three-way collaborative effort between NAMB, the International Mission Board (IMB) and LifeWay Christian Resources, all SBC entities. I encourage Southern Baptists to read this paper by Stetzer, heed its warnings, and embrace its challenges.

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?

Go to Free Theological Resources on this site or just click here to access my article forthcoming in Midwestern Journal of Theology.

Oh how I love Southern Baptists! Oh how I thank God for them! How good they have been to me. It was from them that I was told about Jesus. It was from them that I was taught that I was a sinner and offered the gospel of Jesus Christ. They gave me a Bible and told me it was the Word of Almighty God. From them I learned of the Great Commission of our Lord and was habituated to concern for the billions who have not yet heard His name. They, the millions of Southern Baptists, many of them poor dropped their smallish but still sacrificial tithes into offering plates from Spartanburg South Carolina to Sacramento California and I used to get an education to serve on the mission field in Bangkok, Thailand and now to teach theology in one of her seminaries. I could say much, much more. Through the benefits enjoyed from people of God called Southern Baptists I have incurred a debt that can never be fully repaid.

I wonder now, though, if we Southern Baptists have become proud and find ourselves set for divine correction. I wonder and I tremble.  The Psalm of the day is number 12:

Save us, Yahweh! There are no devout men left,
Fidelity has vanished from mankind.
All they do is lie to one another,
Flattering lips, talk from a double heart.

May Yahweh slice off every flattering lip,
Each tongue so glib with boasts,
Those who say, “In our tongue lies our strength,
Our lips have the advantage; who can master us?

“For the plundered poor, for the needy who groan,
now I will act” says Yahweh.
“I will grant them the safety they sigh for.”

The words of Yahweh are without alloy,
Nature’s silver coming from the earth seven times refined.
And you, Yahweh, hold us in your keeping,
Against that breed protect us always.
The wicked prowl on every side,
Baseness stands high among the sons of men.

I want to work through the implications of my last post in a different way. This is my thinking given my reading of Gibbs/Bolger:

1. Gibbs/Bolger are concerned about the decline in numbers in the church in the West.
2. They believe the shift from the modern world to the postmodern world is the main factor determining the viability of contemporary ministries (especially in urban contexts).
3. People now in their 20’s and early 30’s are thoroughly postmodern and thus virtually unreachable by ministries shaped by modernism.
4. The ministries they analyze and call “emerging” are culturally indigenous to the postmodern context and thus more suited to reach these thoroughly postmodern 20 and early 30 somethings.
5. Alas, Mars Hill Church (and by implication, Redeemer in NY and The Journey in St.Louis) is a modern Gen X church. And in the case of these three congregations they have the added problem that they love the Reformation and doctrine and preach about election and the substitutionary atonement, all of which are variously eschewed or radically re-interpreted or re-packaged by the Gibbs/Bolger bona fide emerging communites.
6. But the 20 somethings keep pouring into these congregations while those first reached are retained and now older believers are joining them. And this is happening in Seattle, Manhattan Island and urban St.Louis.
7. The 20 and early 30 somethings Gibbs/Bolger are so concerned about are not behaving as Gibbs/Bolger expected. Instead they are finding relevant what Gibbs/Bolger thought they wouldn’t.

So where does this leave us?

1. The Gibbs/Bolger book remains the best single source for comprehending the phenomenon they call “emerging.”
2. Gibbs/Bolger’s help in comprehending contemporary urban culture in the West is greatly compromised. By this I just mean that they are not adept at predicting what urban 20 somethings will find relevant.
3. Given Gibbs/Bolger’s stated concern for the decline of Christianity in the West, one would expect them to train their attention on churches like Mars Hill, Redeemer, and The Journey which obviously “get it.” If they do not become champions of such ministries it raises the question of whether we are really looking at preference and advocacy of certain kinds of ministries, the role of doctrine in them etc., rather than just straightforward concern to see the decline of Christianity in the West reversed. Which is fine, but let’s just be clear about our motives.

The folowing is an excerpt from my upcoming article on the Emerging Chruch and Southern Baptists: 

 I “had thought” my exposure to Mars Hill marked my introduction to the emerging church only to realize later that Donald Miller’s bestselling book Blue Like Jazz had already brought me into that world. But not so fast. The taxonomy troubles where the emerging church is concerned go deeper. Gibbs/Bolger insist that Mars Hill is not emerging but Gen-X. About such churches Gibbs/Bolger contend:
 

“. . . to generalize, the church services were characterized by loud, passionate worship music directed toward God and the believer (not the seeker); David Letterman-style, irreverent banter; raw, narrative preaching; Friends (the popular TV series) type relationships; and later, candles and the arts. The bulk of church practice remained the same as their conservative Baptist seeker, new paradigm, purpose-driven predecessors; only the surface techniques changed.”

So who is right? What we can say is that Redeemer Church in New York, Mars Hill in Seattle, and The Journey in St. Louis have been spectacularly effective at reaching precisely the demographic the heroes of the Gibbs/Bolger type churches insist will only respond to sufficiently postmodern immersed and shaped ministries. Note the implied warning from Gibbs/Bolger:
“We both [Gibbs and Bolger] believe the current situation is dire. If the church does not embody its message and life within postmodern culture, it will become increasingly marginalized. Consequently the church will continue to dwindle in numbers throughout the Western world. We share a common vision to see culturally engaged churches emerge throughout the West as well as in other parts of the world influenced by the Western culture.”

Gibbs/Bolger contend that young people now in their 20s and early 30s are thoroughly postmodern and will not respond to ministries shaped by “modernity.” Fine. How might we then identify ministries that “get it” and thus can help stem the ebb tide of dwindling numbers in the West? How about 5000 plus urbanites in their twenties and thirties streaming to church demanding Bible preaching on the right and left coasts of America and 1600 in three locations in St. Louis? No, say Gibbs and Bolger. Yes, says Stetzer. Perhaps we should let the Stetzers and the Gibbs and the Bolgers duke it out on the nomenclature front. However the semantics “emerge,” we already see much that can inform evangelical church planting.
A dispute between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann of yesteryear with a little bit of Paul Tillich thrown in might help us here. Bultmann complained to Barth that he had no notion of changing the gospel message. His only aim was to translate the gospel message into contemporary language. Barth responded that he had no problem with that, as long as the translator remembers his first task—accurate comprehension of the original to be translated, in this case, the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is just at this point that the mischief enters in. Remember that Bultmann considered the question of the bodily resurrection irrelevant to modern men and women. Barth expected that once God got Bultmann out of the ground and to a standing position, the relevance of the bodily resurrection would likely lock in for Rudolf in short order. For his part, Tillich discovered that the word “God” had lost its relevance and so he proposed an alternative—“the ground of our being.” Oops! That didn’t catch on did it?
Once you set yourself up as the relevance police, the put-up-or-shut-up test becomes operative, nicht wahr? When your perceptions and prognostications don’t pan out, you find yourself running around frustrated that folks keep finding relevant what you just told them they couldn’t and shouldn’t. So, are Redeemer, The Journey, and Mars Hill emerging or not? The jury is out, but what we do know is that these communities of faith are concretely being found relevant by exactly the demographic deemed most resistant to church and gospel in the Western world. It is a fact that kids are dropping out of church in droves (especially seeker and purpose-driven churches) when they reach their twenties. But churches like Redeemer, Mars Hill, and the Journey attract them! And they do so not with less Bible and theology compared to seeker and purpose-driven churches already ensconced within the Southern Baptist Convention, but with more!

The following excerpt from Christianity and Culture of 1940 is one example among many of Lewis’ fascinating and nuanced takes on the relationship between culture and Christianity (in this case culture understood as study and enjoyment of the arts):

“There is another way in which [culture] may predispose to conversion. The difficulty of converting an uneducated man nowadays lies in his complacency. Popularized science, the conventions or ‘unconventions,’ of his immediate circle, party programmes, etc., enclose him in a tiny windowless universe which he mistakes for the only possible universe. There are no distant horizons, no mysteries. He thinks everything has been settled. A cultured person, on the other hand, is almost compelled to be aware that reality is very odd and that the ultimate truth, whatever it may be, must have the characteristics of strangeness—must be something that would seem remote and fantastic to the uncultured. Thus some obstacles to faith have been removed already.”

It is not surprising and it is a good thing that so many emergent/emerging believers display, initially at least, something like a congenital predisposition towards the writings of C.S. Lewis. I think it a safe assumption that Lewis himself will exceed virtually all if not all of his readers in knowledge and appreciation for culture and so will be in position to satisfy and instruct but also to warn others similarly enamored of the arts as to their potentialities but also their limits, weaknesses, and dangers.

The “tiny windowless universe” Lewis describes may also characterize the “believing universe” in some quarters, and many emerging believers point to the conservative Christian communions from which they have emerged and against which many now pride themselves in protesting. Well and good. Now liberated from the suffocating narrowness and pat-answer-permeated confines of conservative evangelical churches, some preen and pose proudly in the new superior world of mystery they now inhabit. Elasticity of meaning and belonging before believing now shapes the religious milieu they prize.

Lewis will be in a position to calm them down I expect and demonstrate both proper and improper acknowledgement of mystery. Where God has revealed truth, escape into the vagueness of mystery for the sake of peace or unity or to evade politically incorrect recognition of and submission to divine commands (Brian McLaren and homosexual behavior is a case in point) is not deep or sophisticated, legitimately modest or loving, but a cop-out at best and willful blindness and disobedience at worst. Beware indiscriminate lovers of mystery wading into C.S. Lewis with your guard down. A conservative, dogmatic, evangelicalish Christian lurks within.

C.S. Lewis was not known for aggressive proselytizing during his tutorial sessions at Oxford and Cambridge. J.I. Packer once had the privilege of attending a Lewis lecture. “There was no clue that the man might be a Christian” Packer reports. There is nothing new here. It has long been known that Lewis, as Packer puts it, abhorred “the parading of one’s religion.” But how does such hesitance and reticence square with our Lord’s Great Commission to be his witnesses and make disciples?

Well on that score it appears most of us have got some catching up to do if Lewis’ reprimand is our aim. Reports and concrete evidence of Lewis’ astounding and continuing effectiveness in bringing sinners to faith and making disciples abound. Just ask Lye Dorsett, longtime curator of the Lewis collection at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. Dorsett, during decades of worldwide travel and lecturing on Lewis always asked his audiences to raise their hands if Lewis was instrumental in bringing them to faith and/or nurturing them in the faith. It never fails. Many hands go up.

But still. Is it not a wimpy spineless cop-out to keep one’s mouth shut about the Savior when confronted with a stream of known unbelievers? I know. Lewis sought to avoid the ostracism and possible reprisals with which his Oxford and Cambridge contexts would have greeted any Christian proselytizers among them. Well, if that was Lewis’ aim, he failed miserably. Through his writing, public speaking, and radio broadcasting, the ostracism and reprisals came in by the buckets. I suspect Lewis’ selection of contexts for speaking out and keeping quiet owes nothing to cowardice but much to his highly developed sense of propriety, which is not that dissimilar from a sensitivity to differences in cultures or even sub-cultures (such as that between an Oxford conclave and a soccer stadium). However that may be, late in his life, Lewis admitted that from the time of his conversion in 1931, he understood his whole life as one of evangelism. To know Christ is to want Him known. Clearly, Lewis’ selective silences did not hinder his outstripping of many a Bible thumbing collar-and-back-into-a-corner style evangelist in terms of effectiveness.

Let’s shift gears slightly. Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle verbalizes a strong evangelistic understanding of the mission of the church and the Christian life but also adds “we don’t do anything silly such as knocking on doors or passing out tracts.” Skipping such well worn approaches has not prevented Mars Hill from drawing more than 7000 20 and 30-somethings to downtown Seattle for exposure to quite conservative Bible teaching on a weekly basis.  Prolific author, professor at Chicago’s North Park University, and enthusiastic friend of Emerging/Emergent, Scott McKnight, consistently raises one concern regarding the emerging/emergent movement—squeamishness where evangelism is concerned.  McKnight writes, “Any kind of Christianity and any kind of Christian that is not evangelistic is woefully inadequate. Unless you proclaim the good news, there is no good news at all; and if there is no good news, there is not Christianity.” Again McKnight, “I speak personally. I’m an evangelist—not so much the tract-toting and door-knocking kind, but I am the Jesus-talking and Jesus-teaching kind.”

While some evangelicals would find it very difficult to sanction Lewis’ strong selectivity of venue and audience for his own explicit evangelizing, many of these same folk voice high praise for the “storying” techniques pioneered by New Tribes Mission whose materials and techniques are in use by no less an evangelistically fervent group than the Southern Baptist Convention. “Storying” approaches to evangelism delay the direct presentation of the gospel in settings where comprehension of the gospel is deemed impossible because of deep worldview issues and other meaning-shaping cultural factors. New Tribes starts with Biblical stories beginning with creation and the history of God’s dealings with Israel so as to render the gospel meaningful in a particular cultural/linguistic context. If that takes some time and patience, so be it.

Is not the recognition that Europe and North America are comprised of a mosaic of sub-cultures one of the most intriguing and hopeful insights of the emerging/emergent movement and conversation? Is not actual communication of the gospel message a prerequisite for its acceptance or rejection? Ought not sensitivity to cultural factors result in selectivity of time, place, and mode of gospel presentation, not in flight from bold proclamation but precisely in service to its achievement? What do you think? 

It is well known that C.S. Lewis grieved over the spectacle of public squabbles between professing Christians and took great pains to avoid being drawn into such internecine strife himself. From his conversion forward Lewis exhibited consistent protectiveness of Christian unity. Not at the expense of Christian orthodoxy, but precisely for its defense. Note this excerpt from Lewis’ paper, Christian Apologetics, published in God in the Dock:

“We are to defend Christianity itself—the faith preached by the apostles, attested by the Martyrs, embodied in the Creeds, expounded by the Fathers. This must be clearly distinguished from the whole of what any on of us may think about God and Man. Each of us has his individual emphasis: each holds, in addition to the Faith, many opinions which seem to him to be consistent with it and true and important. And so perhaps they are. But as apologists it is not our business to defend them. We are defending Christianity; not my religion.”

Lewis’s quest for and protectiveness of Christian Orthodoxy parallels Jaroslav Pelikan’s quest for “what all Christians, everywhere and always believe teach and confess on the basis of the Word of God.” Exact identification of the content of this Orthodox Christianity may finally elude us, but recognizing the urgency and appropriateness of the attempt to seek it and insofar as possible distinguish it from “sectarian” matters seems crucial to the church’s ability to display the unity God expects and from which world evangelization would greatly benefit. In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, tolerance.

How did it happen that C.S. Lewis moved to the right rather than to the left as time passed? The more serious and focused an academic he became, the more seasoned a scholar he proved to be, the less impressed he was with liberalism or perhaps we might say, with the so-called “modern” approaches to research and learning then prevailing especially where religion was concerned.

I have in mind particularly Lewis’ approach to old texts (or ostensibly any text for that matter). A couple of excerpts from Lewis’ remarkable 1942 Preface to Paradise Lost will help to illustrate what I mean:

“The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about a cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the object before you. . . . The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be.”

From a certain vantage point, the quest to achieve such utter submission to “author intent” defines the fundamental divide between “liberal” and “conservative” treatment and use of the Bible. A liberal approach knows beforehand the message sought in the text and exerts itself in the search and construal mission necessary for the extraction of that message. A conservative approach is devoted to truth and so submits itself to the object of its interest fully prepared to let the chips fall—to be shocked, amazed, corrected or bored. The conservative fears projection of its own biases, blind spots, and predilections because it wants to learn, it wants to know its object, not use it as such.

When conservatives and evangelicals lose this posture of the true learner, and settle for concordance-fixated ransacking of the Bible for the heaping up of ammunition in the defense of predetermined goals, we unwittingly lapse into exactly the kind liberalism we claim to abhor and eschew. Lewis calls us back to that exacting historico-grammatical posture before the text without which Luther could never have defied emperor and pope for the sake of the gospel.