Emergent/ Mainline Conversation

It's Thursday morning in an icy and rainy Atlanta.  This is the last morning of the conference hosted by Columbia Presbyterian Seminary (a beautiful place) that is a conversation between Emergent and Mainline folk.  Ok, so who are these people?  Emergent folk are pretty well described by earlier posts, so please check those out including the good article in Christianity today.  But, to be more specific, the people who are actually here representing this diverse collection of leaders are from Atlanta, the host city and from Solomon's Porch, which is a church in Minneapolis, MN.  Brian McLaren is also here.  He's from suburban DC in Maryland, and he is the public face of emergent for most people, having written Generous Orthodoxy and A New Kind of Chrisitian.  McLaren was named by Time magazine a few years ago as one of the 25 most influential evangelical leaders in America.  I have enjoyed several good conversations with a couple of these folks where I got to pick their brains and listen to their stories.  It's been fun, encouraging, at times confusing, and more than a little frustrating.  If you don't have any other handle, think of emergent as the people who are following Jesus outside of traditional Christian churches.  It's people who are comfortable in a post-modern world.  When a post-modern has a question about something, she googles wikipedia to see what the wikipedia community has to say and maybe adds a comment of her own or blogs about the tension she feels between the 'answers' given and what she senses in her own heart.

 

What is mainline?  Mainline is the term used to describe people following Jesus in exactly traditional Christian churches.  It's the people who enjoyed being the cultural elite and still do to some extent.  It's the people you can trust, the big church on the corner with the big steeple, the bricks, the programs, the pastor who writes the weekly devotional for the local paper.  It's the church with people who wear suits and dresses, go to Sunday School, and who are proud when its their pastor who is asked to give the invocation at the high school football game.  It's Episcopalian, Presbyterians, Methodists, and some Baptists.  An argument can be made that while Baptists tend to be more conservative than most of the mainline denominations, they are the 'mainline' church of the South.  It's people who are comfortable in a modern world.  When a modern person has a question, he pulls his encyclopedia britannica off the shelf to find the answer from the expert and replaces it on the shelf satisfied that he has been enlightened.

 

Much more could be said about both groups, but moving on . . .this has been an interesting week.  I wanted to find out what emergent was all about.  What is most obvious are the worship practices.  These vary widely, but they are anything and everything but 3 hymns, an offering, and a didactic sermon from a suit.  Some of their practices are really compelling, others seem weird, but I can mostly respect the desire to engage God in different ways.  But don't get caught in thinking this is just about doing worship differently or creatively.  That's just part of a new generation.  What's really at stake is the location of authority and activity for and in the congregation.  In emergent there is a very high appreciation for the role of the individual in shaping group discernment.  Theology is not handed down either from a pastor or from history.  The ancient creeds are a 'conversation partner' not a determinative force.  The pastor is a thought leader, but his/her thoughts are not necessarily normative for any particular person in the group.  They are comfortable with this tension. 

 

If this sounds familiar, it probably should.  Seems to me that baptists like John Smyth and Thomas Helwys were the 'emergent's of the early 1600s.  Their forms rejected highly structured, but spiritually empty forms.  Their ecclesiology returned authority to the laity through their understanding of priesthood of the believer.  Their theology would be described as confessional rather than creedal--boiling up from the shared discernment of the gathered community.  And, like emergents, they were considered 'nuts'.  And they were.  John Smyth baptized himself one time.  Very strange people.  But they had an itch that couldn't be scratched in the religion that was handed down and prevalent in their society. 

 

I think that a lot can be said about the parallels between emergents and the formation of the CBF.  I follow Jake Myers in this assertion.  These two groups do actually have a lot in common, even though they are saying it in very different ways. 

 

I also think Broadus is trying to scratch some of the same itches.  I'm certain that Broadus folk would struggle with a lot of what these emergent folks are all about, but there is more in common that you might think.  We have something to learn from these folk and maybe something to add, which is a delightful conclusion when you look at the age of our congregation and the age of these folks.  It's encouraging to think that we are pointing in the same directions, toward a post-modern future which looks very different from the hierarchical structures of the past. 

 

I'll write more about this later. . .the key words of this movement seem to be: intentional, missional, gathering, conversation, friendship, post-modern, and generous.  Enough for now.  If you can help refine any of my definitions, please do.  I welcome your comments and questions.