mckinley on the emerging church

May 6, 2008

This comes from the blog of Rick McKinley, lead pastor of Imago Dei in Portland. It’s a little old, but I think it shows an amazing pastoral heart in regards to this new movement. I resonate with much of what he says. Check it…

My Thoughts on the Emerging Church
Rick McKinley

It seems everywhere I go and speak these days people ask me the same question. It is, in some form or another, a version of this: Are you part of the emerging church? If they ask it another way it may be are you Emerging or Emergent? The letter “T” has become very important to them.

My common reply is; We seem to get put in the camp of Emerging, so I suppose we are.

Then the questions move to what the Emerging church believes about this or that. To which I reply the same things Baptists believe about it.

They scratch their head, think about what I have said and then ask, Which Baptist?

To which I reply, “exactly”.

The truth is we don’t know what exactly the emerging church will become. There is a great effort to try to divide it up into categories. I suppose I understand that desire from the vantage point of good people who simply are trying to understand what is going on out there among Christians and they need to have it broken down for them.

The problem I see with the categories, however, is that they appear like a helpful tool but it’s just not that cut and dry. There are no teams yet. They may be forming but there are a lot people just getting into the game, or showing up at practice or just signing up to play.

The danger that I see is that people, particularly Americans love to quickly categorize people so they can either turn them into a celebrity or a demon. We really don’t want to read what they have written or take the time to get to know them. We simply want to know what category they fit in so we can pronounce our judgment if we disagree with them or subscribe to their podcast if we like what they said.

These categories are going to turn out to be very harmful to the church. The emerging church has not been around for very long. There are some beautiful expressions that are sprouting up all over the place, they are organic works of the Spirit of God living in and through the life of his followers. We should be very cautious to squelch this. It is a young and fragile thing that if we fail to create a safe context for it to grow it will either shrivel up and die, or become high jacked by the more mature plants and therefore will not really be a fresh move of God at all.

This is a new thing that God is doing and we should respect it as such. When we force the emerging church to define themselves in order to put them into camps it is the equivalent of telling a ten year old to declare what his major in college is going to be. Telling him that if he does not hurry up and figure it out, then there is no telling where he will end up. We are essentially scaring the hell out of him. Putting a yoke upon him that will crush all the life and creativity that is, by nature of being young, the thing we are all attracted to in the first place.

I don’t want to appear naive about what is going on. Some of the theological conversations in the emerging circles are of concern. What is great about this however is that we have 2000 years of orthodoxy to help us determine what heresy is. Our common cannon and creeds allow us to determine what the Gospel is and when we have departed from it. The further breakdowns of evangelical, protestant, Catholic, Anglican and Eastern orthodox break it down even further. When we move outside the boundaries of orthodoxy then we cease to be part of “the” church. It is the equivalent of that ten year old telling us that he wants to be a dragon when he grows up. We need to correct him and let him know thats not going to be possible. If he does grow up to think he is a dragon he will no longer be any good to anyone, just like a church that lives outside the boundaries of orthodoxy. Jumping around flapping your wings thinking your are breathing fire and sounding like a nut job.
Historical orthodoxy allows us to make sure that what does grow up in the emerging church does in fact grow up to be a part of “the” historical Christian church. If they grow up and leave the roots of orthodoxy thinking that somehow our cannon and creeds have bound them up in some sort of oppressive legalism they will simply be the equivalent of adult men bounding around trying to fly cursing the “oppressive” laws of gravity and winglessness.

In short there will be emerging churches and leaders who after emerging will in the end no longer be part of “the” historical church of Jesus Christ. We will know that because again, we have our cannon and creeds that tell us the core message about the Triune God. If we depart from that we move from Christian brother or sister to a harmful wolf.

The truth is though that for every one of those who grow up to be a useless “dragon”, there may be thousands who emerge to produce amazing new wine skins that will take the gospel to countless people who would otherwise not have heard it or seen it in action. There will be important contributions made to theological and ecclesiological work. However if we insist that this young emerging church declare their college major right now, we may be killing the very thing that God is doing by putting a yoke upon them that God did not ask them to carry, but was one that we invented out of the fear of what they might become.

It equally important that we help the emerging church grow up into “Adulthood” not “Dragons”, but as we do it is just as important that we give them space to grow up into what God is “emerging” in them. They need to know about the theological conversation that has been going on for two thousand years and just where those boundaries are between orthodoxy and heresy are.

As for me and Imago, we are part of this emerging movement of God, however we were on the front end. Those of us that have been at this for awhile now are far enough along on our trajectory. We are well on our way to being adult expressions of “the” historical church or to leaping about trying to be dragons. It is not us that I am primarily concerned with.

I feel a certain amount of responsibility to create space for what is coming up behind us. I have built my faith on the foundation of orthodoxy and the gospel of the reformers. I am grateful beyond measure to our great theologians. Yet I hope that we will add to that foundation for what God is emerging. I think there is a lot of room for theological progress. Not denying the foundation but building on it. The cultural questions we are wrestling with are not the same questions as Calvin and Luther or Edwards. The God that we believe in is.

That means there is much for us to learn from the dead men who are still speaking while we seek to find the theological truths that will be good news to our culture and their questions.

Given that, I hope that we can leave the next generation great theology on the Kingdom of God that seems to have gotten confused in the enlightenment. I hope that we can expand our theology of the Trinity from a static doctrine to a dynamic and living theology of community and transformation. I hope that we can shut up long enough to listen to the voices in the rest of the non-western world so we can learn from them a theology of suffering and sacrifice.

In the end I am most familiar with the American version of the emerging church, and as good Americans we tend to be pioneers who can build and out build the other guy. We are winners who do it bigger and better than anybody. But it may be just this that will cause us to miss the point of what God wants to emerge. Perhaps God is emerging something that is counter cultural to the way we have been doing it. He may be bringing about something that is seemingly small and insignificant but that will over time grow into something richer and fuller and more transformational than we have seen in some time.

We will never get to see it however, if we are impatient with the process, if we don’t have time or grace to allow it to emerge and if we insist that it be just like it always has been with newer logo’s and cooler hair cuts. If we do this then we may never get to see the very thing that God was doing.
In the end I hope that we don’t force this young church to hurry and grow up. I hope that they will find the sacred space to discover who God is calling them to be and imaginative new expressions of our historic Gospel will be set out on display. I hope that those young children that want to grow up to be dragons when they are older will get grounded in some good theology that sets them on a healthy road. And finally, I hope that those of us that have gone before them will not be so full of fear that we kill their vision and quench the Spirit, for I fear that we will have to answer for that one day.

Posted in Christianity, emerging church, relevintage