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Getting Beyond 'Whatever': What the Church Can Learn from Emergents
Postmodernism. In the Christian world, it's a word often synonymous with "bad" or "wrong." But are there some positive things that postmodernism can bring to the Body? Lindy Keffer explores the emergent church.
I am, and have always been, a bookworm. When I was in middle school, my mom discovered (to her dismay) that I could carry on an entire conversation while reading and not remember a word she'd said to me. In response, she learned to tell me to put the book down and look at her before she started talking. In other words, she had to become a significant disruption to pull me out of the world of my book.
Over the past several years, I've been having experiences similar to that on a regular basis. At church of all places. Or when discussing Church. Something keeps butting in and disrupting corporate worship as I've always known it. That something is postmodernity. It's changing the way we do Church. But maybe that's not a bad thing.
Usually when my mom interrupted my reading, I was annoyed. Looking back, I have to admit that at least some of the things she had to say were worth being interrupted for. And though the clash of the postmodern age with our familiar routine is uncomfortable, I believe it has something worthwhile to say as well.
Throwing Out the Bathwater, Keeping the Baby
Let me say this up front: I am not claiming that postmodernism in and of itself is good for the church. Postmodernism at its core denies a metanarrative, or overarching story by which all other stories can be interpreted. And that's not its only fault.
My point is that modernism1 also had faults. And I know a significant number of Christians who equate postmodern with bad or ungodly, but wouldn't level the same critiques at modernism because they're so accustomed to living Christianity in tandem with modernism that they don't bother to think any more about the ways that the two aren't compatible.
Postmodernism may be just the disruption we need to make us look critically at how live as the Body of Christ. I propose that the ways the postmodern Church does Christianity well will be different from the areas in which the modern Church excelled. In fact, I think that as more postmodern people fill our pews, some of the mistakes of modern Christianity might get corrected. That's what this article is about.2
(Of course, this coin has two sides. While the church can learn something from postmodern Christians, there are things about modern Christianity that the postmodern church shouldn't jettison. That's the subject of the next article in this two-part series.)
By the way, many of my thoughts on this subject stem from reading a growing body of literature written by — or appealing to — a group of believers who call themselves the "emerging church."3 Brian McLaren and Donald Miller are two big names that come to mind here, just in case you want to read more.
Other Ways of Knowing
The first thing I love about the emerging church is its willingness to consider truth that comes from sources other than science. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with science. However, there is something wrong with the way modernism treated science. Instead of seeing it as just one source of truth, the modern world touted the scientific method as the way to discover whether something is true. So my beef here isn't really against science, but against scientism.4
Christianity has always had a love-hate relationship with this modern idolization of science. On the one hand, believers are reassured by the fact that our faith is logically consistent and that good science repeatedly argues for — not against — its tenets. (This has been the basis for books like Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict and Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ.)
On the other hand, there are important things that cannot be proved by science and comprehended by logic. At some point everyone has to make assumptions and live as if they are true.5 I call that faith. And in the face of modernism, the Church has sometimes been embarrassed talking about faith. It's as if our belief is second-rate because it isn't exclusively scientific.6 That sheepishness is unnecessary. It isn't our faith that's inadequate; it's our definition of truth.
So in some ways, postmodern disillusionment with science as the end-all-be-all answer is a relief. The emerging church is encouraging believers and seekers alike to seek out truth that's non-scientific. As Donald Miller says in Blue Like Jazz:
"Love, for example is a true emotion, but it is not rational.7 What I mean is, people actually feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love, yet love cannot be proved scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light we see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don't make any sense."8
To the modern thinker, this sounds crazy. But it's actually a biblical idea — not that we should believe things that aren't true, but that we should believe things that are true, but not scientific.9
"My Ways are Higher Than Your Ways"
As a child of the modern church, I love friendly theological debates. Trading arguments about doctrine has sharpened my knowledge of Scripture and helped me to develop a more thoughtful faith. But sometimes when I'm debating, I get uncomfortable. I wonder if we're trying to put a fine point on things that God left hazy for a reason. I mean, if we work at it, we can use logic to explain away every shred of mystery in the Bible. From miracles to spiritual gifts to the coexistence between human choice and divine sovereignty, we think we can get rid of anything we don't understand.
Doing so is not worship, and it is not Christian. It is re-making God in the image of man, simplifying his infinity so our finite minds can grasp it. The old adage is true — if we can figure out everything about our God, He's not worth worshipping.
God himself has said that His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts bigger than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). The emerging church responds to this truth by leaving room for mystery.10 I think the church as a whole needs to do this — especially when our need to categorize everything results in a loss of perspective on what's really important.
Being vs. Doing
My friend Emily is the administrator of a mission school on a small Honduran island. Recently, she had to gently dispossess one of her students of his idea that she wasn't a Christian because she doesn't always wear a skirt. The boy's conception of Christianity — presumably gleaned from modernistic missionaries who originally brought the Good News to the island — highlights what modernity got wrong about the gospel. The modern mind needed to categorically divide Christians from non-Christians.11 But the true fruit of the Spirit of Christ is hard to measure. I mean, how much peace, patience, joy, kindness, obedience and love for God and your neighbor is enough? Too often, modernism reduced mind-boggling truth to a checklist of good behavior: don't smoke, dance or chew or go with girls who do.12
Philippians 4.
I don't mean that real Christians should light up, get down and philander with abandon. Only that avoiding these things is not the heart of Christianity. Instead, "being transformed into [Christ's] likeness with ever-increasing glory" is the center of our daily walk (2 Corinthians 3:18 [NIV]). The postmodern church gets the idea that Christianity is more about the kind of person you are becoming than the "legalistic righteousness" you achieve — an idea straight out of Philippians 4.
No Man is an Island
Modern Christianity has focused on what individuals can do to better their relationship with God: read the Bible, pray, memorize Scripture, etc. That's not wrong, but as McLaren puts it in his book, A New Kind of Christian, this has created a church culture primarily concerned with getting our individual butts into heaven.13 That mentality leaves out a big chunk of what Christianity is about: being redeemed into a family and sanctified corporately as well as individually.
If the emerging church is about anything, it's about community. Emergents don't talk about their numbers rising. They say, "discussion is growing." They go out of their way to extend hospitality to outsiders and make everyone comfortable with "come as you are" church gatherings. I'm not saying that postmodern people are generally less selfish and more outwardly focused than modern people are. Like all humans, postmoderns have to deal with the sin of self-worship. But once that is brought "under the blood," they seem to be more willing to embrace true community than their modern counterparts. That's a good thing.
Ancient and Future Faith
A while back, Mark Galli protested in Christianity Today that the emerging church isn't actually coming up with anything new — that emergents' best ideas are just core truths of Christianity recycled for the postmodern culture.14
To that I say amen. If emergents were actually generating new stuff, I wouldn't be writing this article. Isaiah 40 tells us that the Word of the Lord stands forever — not faddish methodologies. What emergents are doing right is harnessing the advent of a new age and using it as an opportunity to examine Christian belief and practice. Like my mom interrupting my immersion in my book, they're interrupting the Church's immersion in modernism and pointing out that modern Christianity is sometimes more modern than Christian.
To whatever extent the emerging church is rejecting modernism's misinterpretations of biblical faith, the rest of the church would do well to follow.
What's Next: Part 2
C O F F E E S H O PIn the second part of this article — titled, "But ... Pitfalls the Emerging Church Needs to Avoid" — I'll ask: In an effort to find new ways to discover truth, has the postmodern church been too soft about the truth of the Bible, too accepting of mystery, and not firm enough when it comes to calling sin what it is? Part two will be online soon!
- Characterized by conquest and control; machines; analysis; secular science; absolute objectivity; criticism; the modern nation-state; individualism; Protestantism and institutional religion; and consumerism. Back^
- Notice I didn't say that postmodernism will correct the mistakes of Christianity. Pure biblical Christianity doesn't have any mistakes. But as each age has a different kind of embodiment of Christianity, I think it's fair to hold these up for critique. In this case I think it's fair for Christians in the postmodern period to critique the modern embodiment of Christianity. Back^
- Right here, I need to define "the emerging church," so that you will know exactly what I'm talking about. Problem is, in typical postmodern style, emergents don't want to be pinned down by definitions. So let's loosely say that the emerging church is a group of ministries who are 1) trying to figure out what it looks like to be the church in the Postmodern period of history and 2) Ministering to postmodern people. Other characteristics of the emerging church that I discuss in this article represent quite a few, but maybe not all, congregations that would consider themselves emergent. Back^
- According to Webster's Third College Edition, scientism is "the principle that scientific methods can and should be applied to all fields of investigation." Back^
- Those assumptions should be based on evidence of course — blind assumptions are hardly ever a good idea. Back^
- Even belief systems that pass themselves off as totally scientific necessarily include faith. Darwinism, for example, rests on the assumptions that a) there is no Creator, b) the universe started with a big bang, even though there is no way to prove either of these things scientifically. Back^
- Of course this doesn't mean that love is completely irrational. My love for my husband, besides being an emotion , is also a decision of my rational will. But if you just look at the rational part, you won't have even scraped the surface of what love is. There are very real parts of love that aren't calculable. Back^
- In quoting Miller here, I don't mean (and I don't think he means) that there are things that we can call true that don't correspond to reality. I mean (and I think he means) that not everything that is real is quantifiable by our brains. Furthermore, if we limit "truth to what we can test, understand, explain and define, our idea of truth is pretty impoverished. By the way, the excerpt is from Miller, Donald. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003, p. 54. Back^
- By "not scientific," I mean that you can't propose a hypothesis and test it by the scientific method to discover if it's true. Back^
- I don't mean that the emerging church is the only part of the Church that's doing this, but that the emerging church seems to hold this as a core value. More thoughts on that in the next article. Back^
- Check out Matthew 13: 24-30, which says the weeds and wheat grow together, and it's the harvester's job to separate them. Back^
- The modern Church is by no means the only historical embodiment of Church that has struggled with legalism. But scientism's love for quantifying everything made the modern Church particularly prone to this "list-making" form of legalism. Back^
- Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass, 2001). Back^
- Galli, Mark, "The Virtue of Unoriginality," Christianity Today, 4/4/02. Back^
Lindy Keffer is a contributing author for TrueU.org. She has written for a variety of organizations, including Cook Communications Ministries, Acquire the Fire, and Focus on the Family. Lindy earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Education from Taylor University, and she currently works with college students at the Focus on the Family Institute. Lindy lives in Colorado, and, therefore, climbs lots of mountains. She has even climbed international mountains, like Mount Kenya. We're still trying to figure out exactly which country it's located in.
Image created by Luke Flowers. Copyright © 2005 Focus on the Family. All rights reserved.
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