The Bible Nerd

I know that in every movement there are buzz words which always end up being used so much that I almost barf when I hear them. The funny thing is that I am not even sure “missional” is a real word (Microsoft Word spell check doesn’t seem to think so, which of course is always right! Thanks Bill!) Basically, when people use that word today, they mean that the church should get up off the pew, head out into the streets, and do something to make this world better. It is not necessarily direct evangelism, but the thought is that if we are out there doing “good deeds”, that is the best witness of Jesus. From picking up trash to providing clean water, emerging churches are rolling up the sleeves on their Old Navy shirts and digging in. Sometimes I feel more like I am in Green Peace than serving the King of Peace.

You know what is coming next. We must look BEHIND what we see on the surface of the Emerging Conversation so that we don’t miss a key piece of our time in church history. In the Seeker movement, many churches’ goal was to create a place where non Christians felt comfortable coming to a service. Polls were used to ascertain in what way that could be done best. The Emerging church says that instead of trying to get people to come to us, we should go out to them, where they are. It is more than that though, in that there is a strong push to live out a “kingdom” lifestyle in the here and now. The traditional church is accused of only caring for people’s eternal state, and downplaying any significance of our lives before heaven.

Though Jesus clearly talked quite a bit about salvation and the eternal destination of man (for example Matthew 25), Jesus’ teaching on His kingdom clearly placed an importance on how we live our lives now. Even more importantly, His miracles showed His care for improving people’s lives here on earth.  Some people say that Jesus never started a soup kitchen, but how about the miraculous feedings? Mark 8:1-3 says, “In those days, when again a great crowd had gathered, and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples to him and said to them, “I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way. And some of them have come from far away.” This passage shows the essence of mercy ministries such as feeding programs and aid to countries with famine.

How about the healing miracles of Jesus? Matthew 4:23 says, “And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.” He could have just focused on proclaiming the gospel and providing eternal salvation only, but He healed people, immediately improving their quality of life. Christian missions has often been in the forefront of developing clinics, hospitals, and teaching medical knowledge because these people understood that the mission of Christ was both eternal and immediate.

Paul seems to catch this “kingdom lifestyle” teaching, as he often repeats the importance of “good deeds”. In Titus 2:11-14 , Paul connects his theology of salvation with the good deeds of a believer. “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.”

Of course, eternal salvation and forgiveness of sins is the MAIN Gospel benefit and goal of Jesus, and Scripture clearly teaches an eternal perspective. However, even if I complain about the over usage of the word “missional”, I can’t argue with placing more emphasis on the church reaching out into their communities, countries, and the world with mercy ministries. What does it profit a church if they have the coolest college age ministry ever, yet ignore the cries of the hungry and homeless around them? When we serve, we do it clearly as believers, not trying to blend in with Earth loving hippies or Starbucks drinking post modern activists. We do so because Jesus brought reformation to His people who had forgotten their God’s love for the “orphan, the widow, and the children”. So, let’s go be mercyministrysional (patent pending on this new church word).

The maze is a bit odd. I have to admit that out of all the creative, interactive, Emerging worship ideas, this one takes the cake. It doesn’t make it any better when they call it a labyrinth. You walk along the path to different stations, candles and incense everywhere, and trippy monk music fills the background. If I just experienced this for the first time, I might think I was in some New Age meeting and later we would hear how to tap “our inner self” to “actualize our god self”. Many Emerging churches don’t stop with worship, but keep going with their new teaching styles. Imagine sitting in couches, surrounding the speaker in a circle, where you all “discover the truth of Scriptures together”. I keep thinking about my Bible school where there was always that “guy” who dragged class out for hours just to hear himself talk.

We must again look BEHIND all the new worship and teaching models to understand something crucial for our generation of church history. The bottom line is that people feel that church has largely become a spectator sport, where the “professional” church leaders do all the speaking, and Joe layperson sits there like he is watching a performance. We have all these educational studies now about the need for interaction and individual thought to create true learning, yet we don’t see these applied in most services today. Not all Emerging churches agree on HOW interactive this service should be. The simple, organic church meeting is almost entirely interactive, with no pastor or worship leader at all. Others use interaction in worship and teaching, but still have worship leaders and pastors who direct and prepare the core of the service.

It is hard to argue that there are ample Scriptures which point to the body being involved when the church gathers. Both 1 Corinthians 14:26 and Ephesians 5:18-19 seem to point that direction. “When you come together, each of you has a hymn,or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.” “Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord” The point that Paul is making is that when the church meets, it needs the whole body to encourage each other and share their gifts. In fact, he spends most of 1 Corinthians 12 building the body analogy to drive this point home.

This doesn’t mean that there weren’t parts of the service that were not interactive. Paul also says that the service needs to have both teaching from the elders and order (which often comes from planning and leadership). 1 Corinthians 14:33, “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace —as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people.” 1 Timothy 5:17, “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.” The New Testament service wasn’t a free for all, where everything was spontaneous and interactive. Paul believed in the importance of sound doctrine being taught, and this requires study, preparation, and gifting.

I grew up in a charismatic church (others might use the word Pentecostal), where for many years we had under 100 people total in our congregation. Our worship was led by teams of church members, but every week had interaction from different members. People would share a prophetic word, vision, or revelation that God had given them. There was order as an elder or the pastor directed this along with the worship leader. The worship team itself was mostly made up of “laypeople” so that too was interactive. Even though we didn’t use mazes, poetry readings, or art, we still knew that worship had to be interactive and participatory if we wanted to hear all that God wanted to share with us. Who knew each week who God would speak through?

I will have to admit that I have never been in an interactive sermon. I don’t think the old “turn to your neighbor and say….” really counts as interactive. I am a Bible teacher by call and experience, not a preacher, so it is always odd to me not to have interaction when I preach. I am so used to posing questions and having discussion, that I often leave preaching feeling unsatisfied. What I mean is that the interaction shows me as a teacher that people are learning (or not!), following with me, and guiding the teaching occasionally to a great area of need that they have. I train new teachers 0n all the interactive teaching methods I know, but then toss them out the window for preaching. I realize in churches with hundreds of members, interactive teaching seems not possible, but I believe we have to look at this issue as a church.

So, I don’t think you should run out and fire your church leadership, abandon your normal liturgies, and have a 100% interactive service. I do think though that the Emerging conversation has a valid point here, that we aren’t going to a show. Coffee bars in our churches are one thing, but if we start serving popcorn and slushies, then we may have a problem. Our churches reach full potential when the whole body is involved. That doesn’t mean everyone gets to teach or lead worship, but it does mean that we need to pull apart how we do church and seek to create space for involvement and interaction. Otherwise, there will be no reason to go to church in person when you can sit in your chair at home and watch the live stream on the internet. No, I am not recommending that!

The Trek. Journey. Expedition. Imagio Dei. Solomon’s Porch. Mars Hill. If your church doesn’t have a cool name today, you might as well lock up the doors and call it quits. Seriously though, if you were thinking about naming your new church “First Baptist” or “Parkville Methodist”, you might want to rethink that decision. Emerging churches, for the most part, have chosen “non traditional” names that express their mission statement more than their location or denomination. Often, you are left scratching your head at exactly what their name means (especially when they chose Latin names, tre chic). People have been in emerging churches for months before realizing that they are actually in a Assemblies of God or Baptist church!

To continue our series on the Emerging Church, we must look BEHIND all the names to see what the movement is expressing, so that we don’t miss something key for church development. A common complaint about the Seeker and mega church model is that is more about form than it is about the function of the church. Change was needed, but these models only changed musical styles, preaching strategies, and the look of the church. Coffee bars and trendy bookstores can’t be what Jesus had in mind for His reformation. The names these new churches have chosen represent their desire to address the functional changes needed, putting the focus on the gift instead of the gift wrapping. At first glance, you would assume that these hip names are continuing the marketing strategies of the church, but in reality, they are distancing themselves from that.

Most people use Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well to talk about how Jesus brought reform to worship. While it is true that worship is mentioned, the core of the issue is more in line with the function over form argument. The woman wants to know if the Jews in Jerusalem have the correct form of worship, or if she can continue in her Samaritan’s traditions and location. The Jews had the Second Temple, Levitical priests, and their worship was located on Mount Zion. The Samaritans had their own temple on Mount Gerizim, had created their own priesthood, and carried out sacrifices in their own way. Jesus as always gives much more than a simple answer to her question in John 4:21-24.

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” The place and form of worship was not what was important here, it was how they worshiped. Led by the Holy Spirit and grounded in the truth was the key for worship, not just in the New Covenant, but the Old as well. Both the Jews and the Samaritans had lost sight of this.

What does this have to do with function over form? My conclusion is that if we as the church are worshiping in Spirit and truth, then you will see that evidenced in how we live our lives both inside and outside of our church meetings. The church functions as a body of encouragement and fellowship if we are living in the Spirit and applying the truth of God’s Word (1 Corinthians 12 – 14). Empowered and guided by the Spirit, we can not help but to share the witness of Jesus as the early church did after Pentecost (Acts 1 -2). You can change from Gerizim to Jerusalem, use Jewish or Samaritan music, or even create a new position of leadership, and still not address WHAT the church is supposed to actually do when they gather and go out into the world.

I realize that the context of this discussion is deeper when you consider how the Samaritans were disobeying many Old Testament laws in their worship (building another temple, creating own priesthood, syncretism with idolatry), which makes it even more impactful how Jesus steers His reformation. He wasn’t interested in making worship more “Jewish” or “Samaritan”, He was wanting a “race-less” church that was more well known for their adherence to the truth and fruit of the Spirit. The Emerging church is trying for the most part to cut through to that question, and not just respond to the latest poll findings. A cool church name looks great on a coffee mug and t-shirt, but if it doesn’t represent a body of believers actively building each other up and reaching out to the lost, it is just another form gimmick. I am still working on my own idea for a church name, but can’t get beyond “Bunch of Jesus People”. Pretty cool, huh?

You definitely get the feeling that some people don’t like going to church. Just taking a stroll through some of the Emerging Church book titles gives you that nagging feeling. “Unchristian”,  “They like Jesus but not the Church”, “Lord, Save us from your Followers”, and “A New Kind of Christian”. After reading through many of the most popular Emerging Church books, I could pretty much guess what the first few chapters were going to be (especially if it was the author’s first book on the issue). Chapter 1: Why I don’t like to go to church. Of course, it takes many paths and gets more complicated, but the core is that these people love Jesus, yet struggled with their church experience. Are they just disgruntled, self-centered Christians, or is there something more to this?

Clearly with the traction that their books have gotten, there is the something BEHIND the movement that we need to see. There will always be people who complain about the church and leave it to start their own thing. That is not what we are witnessing in our generation. What we are witnessing is a large movement away from the traditional, mainstream, historic churches. It didn’t start with the Emerging guys either, but rather with the whole “non denominational” trend beginning with the Jesus Movement of the 1970’s. It is funny that we think of churches like Calvary Chapel and Four Square as “established” denominations, when in reality, they are relatively new expressions of Christians leaving denominations. The next wave hit with the Seeker church (sometimes known as the mega church model) when even more people left their old Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, or Lutheran home. The Emerging church is simply another stage of the larger exodus away from the historic denominations.

This isn’t just a theory, but statistics will back that there is a radical change happening in our generation of church history.  Mainline Protestant denominations continue to decline, according to the 2012 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. The United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the United Church of Christ, all reported decreases in membership in 2011. For several years now, the Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative evangelical denomination, also lost members. Who is growing? (other than Mormons) The non denominational, evangelical church (in these churches who have over 1,000 people, the growth rate was around 83%!!!) It isn’t that these people are walking away from God, but they are walking away from their “old” churches to new ones. Why?

There is no single answer, yet the voice of the Emerging Church writers accurately captures the dominant reason: people don’t “like” going to their old church. This could be because of the music, the lack of community involvement, legalism, fire and brimstone preaching, lack of women in leadership, boring services, etc… You can’t make everyone happy in a church, and we shouldn’t be trying to anyway. We should be staying faithful to the Bible and Jesus’ heart for the church. BUT, when this many people walk away, there is something these churches were not seeing. As we talk through the issues of the Emerging Church, we will have to ask ourselves the question: are the older churches hanging on to dead, lifeless tradition just like the Jews of Jesus day, or is our materialistic, me centered, post modern generation creating a church to fit their needs, not God’s?

All I know is this, people in Acts sure appeared to “like” being a part of the church. Acts 2:46, “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.” Seriously, every day they wanted to meet? I see people struggling to go just for one hour on Sunday. Acts 4:22, “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.” Wow! I see pastors begging for people to tithe to keep the church from going under. Acts 11:26, “So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.” A whole year? great numbers? proud to be called followers of Christ? Now that sounds like people who “liked” going to church.

I know, I know, once again I am weighing in on a subject that has been talked about and beaten to death. Views on the Emerging movement range from those who see the Emerging Church as the salvation of the church, to those who see it as the front man of all that is wrong with postmodern culture. It seemed for a while that if you didn’t have black, pseudo-cool glasses, semi-shabby dress, a church that met in a warehouse (or pub or coffee house), and weren’t writing about how the church needed to change or die, that you weren’t “in” (whatever “in” really means, probably having a million hit website, best selling book, and getting quoted a lot as in “Sean Ellis a true prophet of our times”.)

Why discuss it now? again? My fear is that it will be labeled as a passing fad or “stage” in our church history like the Toronto blessing or intimacy movement. Whether or not you agreed with books that were popular in the Emerging crowd is irrelevant. We all need to understand what was BEHIND the discussion and why those certain topics were considered “hot”. Underneath the authentic diary style diatribes lays the seeds and need for a new reformation of the church. As the reformers themselves said, “Reformed and always reforming”, though it sounds much better in Latin.  “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda” Don’t I seem smarter already?

The concept of bringing reformation to our faith is not new. As many books have keyed on, Jesus was the ultimate reformer. He established the model of not simply accepting tradition for tradition’s sake, and asking penetrating questions to reveal where man had hijacked the faith from God’s intent. In Mark 2, Jesus was challenged by some people who noticed that John’s disciples were observing traditional fasts while His were not. Jesus reply in 2:21-22 is telling, “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”

Jesus was making sure that they didn’t see what He was bringing as “Judaism” as they knew it; not even high powered Judaism. Some elements of the old covenant were coming to an end (sacrifices, priesthood), and Jesus was preparing them for radical change. However, when you think about it, Jesus affirmed many of the aspects of old covenant law and Judaistic life. The two great commandments were STILL to be the two great commandments (Matt. 22:36-40). Many who call Christianity a revolution don’t understand how true Old Testament Judaism was the foundation and foreshadow of all that Jesus came to do. I would argue that Jesus came to reform the Jews, not revolutionize them.

This is never more clear than in Mark 7:8, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.” There was nothing wrong with God’s commands, it was that they had replaced them with their own rules and traditions. The Protestant Reformation sought to do the same by cutting through the traditions of the Catholic church that had replaced the Gospel and God’s Word. Of course, what Jesus did was much more than a reformation in that He provided forgiveness of sins and was the fulfillment of God’s Redemptive History. Yet, in the day to day life of followers of God, much of what He said was simply echoed by Luther, Calvin, and others 1,500 years later.

I believe that the Emerging Movement was part of a wake up call from God that we need to continue to live out “reformed, and always reforming”. The Seeker Movement, Toronto Blessing, Intimacy teaching, and now the Emerging Discussion are all signs of the desire to see some of our “tradition” be challenged and changed where it has strayed from the heart of God. Reformation is messy, let’s face it. There were some very weird teachings that came during the Protestant Reformation, yes, even from some of our beloved forefathers like Luther and Calvin. Perhaps you don’t feel that any of the recent movements I mentioned were “all good”, but I challenge you to ask why they took hold and what they might tell us about the whole time in church history. In Jesus day as well as the reformers, most of the established leadership were not happy about asking tough questions about why we do what we do and believe what we believe.

The next few posts will look at what I believe the Emerging Movement showed us about this time of reformation. My goal isn’t necessarily to evaluate the movement or discuss the merits of all the teaching that came out of it. Instead, I hope to explore the causes behind the issues so that we can see we cannot simply dismiss this as a fad in church history. I won’t make any dire predictions to urge you to read on like “and if we don’t discover the causes of dissatisfaction, we are dooming the church today to a continued slow death!” as that would be just a cheap (but sometimes effective) parlor trick. Rather, I will ask you the question, do you want to be part of the Next Reformation?