why can’t we all just get along?: part 2

April 2, 2007

Here is the second installment of my presentation on worship at Missouri Baptist University last month- Why Can’t We All Just Be Reconciliators: A Third Way. Here’ s Part 1 if you missed it. I left you hanging with my last entry. I was about to suggest a third way that was neither purely traditionalist or innovationist. Here’s where we left off:

So this begs the question, how do we navigate the tension between these two poles? I would like to suggest a third way that is neither purely preservationist or innovationist.

This third way is what I call: reconciliationist.

In Christ, we have received both the “ministry of reconciliation” [2 Corinthians 5:18] and the “message of reconciliation” [2 Corinthians 5:19]. And because of this, God asks us to approach all things with a heart of reconciliation that springs from the state of our heart, mind, and soul, not anything else.

But let me put some outer bounds on what I mean by reconciliation. I am not talking about ecumenicism. For the sake of our discussion, I am narrowing the idea down to reconciliation within evangelicalism which is the more conservative subset of Protestantism.

With that said, let’s be honest, there are a lot of ministry contexts that exist within the evangelical world today. Just look at the ministry/worship models that we know about: traditional, blended, contemporary, emerging, house church, nu monasticism, all the way to internet churches. Add to that the multitude of denominational contexts and the cultural storm of premodern, modern, and postmodern perspectives, as Creps says, all swirling and combining in the same social space.

You know, this might really cause us to think that all this diversity is a mistake. In other words, are the various expressions of worship really just an example of our unwillingness to agree on what worship should look like? Are we missing a silver bullet that the Bible is clear about but we can’t see it for our shortsightedness?

Or are the myriad of worship contexts that exist actually representative of the freedom that God gives us to express ourselves in worship? And that he give us freedom based on the contexts we are ministering in so we can truly honor those in that context? And if so, can there be reconciliation?

Creps says that he thinks that the statement “methods change but the message does not” ironically would be agreed upon by all parties. The problem comes into play when we don’t make an earnest attempt to understand one another and resort to labels and generalizations.

Another reason for this underlying conflict is the diversity in models in the American church. So let’s break this down a little bit.

In the 21st century, the American Church has been organized around three major philosophies: traditional, contemporary, and emerging. And as you will see, in some way, each philosophy took the best and rejected the worst of the previous model before it. Some call each model “reacting” to the model before that or “reactionary.” I think that is a fair statement.

To react means to exert a reciprocal or counteracting force or influence. It also means to change in response or opposition to a force, influence, or stimulus. And I think that is what is happening to some extent with these philosophies.

My attempt to describe these philosophies are not meant to be endorsements for one over the other but merely as descriptors of them.

The traditional church

According to Creps, the traditional church takes its position closest to the preservationist impulse. The idea here is that we inherit the best forms of ministry from the past. If there is a problem with this impulse, it is that traditional churches tend to locate its favorite nostalgia point and freeze there. But the truth is, every church tend to freeze its nostalgia point at times to depict their best and brightest memory of themselves. Also, the traditional church tends to shut down and have an apathy towards anything that is perceived as new. Some even get to the point where they aren’t even listening at all.

One of the most contentious issues with traditional church is the extent to which we engage culture. Those with a preservationist bent struggle with openness to the outside culture. Culture represents, to some, a group to be resisted at all costs. The preservationist says, “Aren’t we supposed to counter-cultural?”

The contemporary church

In between the preservation and innovation impulses, is the contemporary church. Those in the contemporary church model refuse to look exclusively to the past for ministry forms. This brand arrived with the post-WWII suburbanization.

Contemporaries tend to stay conservative theologically. Further, it brings study of leadership arts to the church, with a consistent focus on growing ministries and designing processes to disciple people.

In short, the contemporary church offered the ability to escape traditional ministry approaches that consume resources without producing fruitfulness.

The criticism of the contemporary church is that is too highly organized, especially in the area of worship, packaging spiritual experiences into highly produced and managed events.

The emerging church

To prevent confusion, a distinction needs to be made between “emerging” and “Emergent.” Emerging is the wider, informal, global, ecclesial (church-centered) focus of the movement, while Emergent is an official organization in the U.S. and the U.K. Emergent Village, the organization, is directed by Tony Jones, a Ph.D. student at Princeton Theological Seminary and a world traveler on behalf of all things both Emergent and emerging. Other names connected with Emergent Village include Doug Pagitt of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis, Tim Keel of Jacob’s Well in Kansas City, and most notably, Brian McLaren, author of Generous Orthodoxy and A New Kind of Christian, to name a few and pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church.

The third philosophy is the emerging church. For many, the movement is so new that there is a considerable amount of misunderstanding about what is really is. Because of this, we are going to hang on this description for a while to help us all understand what this movement looks like.

It must be said that by the very nature of the word, emerging, this movement is still in the process of defining itself. I guess at some point the emerging church won’t be emerging anymore, but for the time being, it still is.

The emerging church holds the position closes to the innovative impulse. This experimental brand looks to culture, making the leader, as Creps says, a combination native guide and spiritual director.

The idea that somehow we lose our cultural identity when we walk through the doors of a church seems unfathomable for those in this camp. They see no disconnect from the secular to the spiritual. All of life is God’s and we are to live missionally in our families, neighborhoods, jobs, and in our churches.

And because of this journey, they emphasize that the weekend experience a just a part of the Christian walk, not the event that defines the Christian walk.

According to Creps, the beauty of experimentation finds expression in the open architecture of its methods. This resonates with cultural natives who find traditionals too exclusive and inflexible and contemporaries too controlling and inauthentic. Further, this movement is not made up of just young people, as critics of this movement erroneously make. It is diverse in age, denominational affiliation [or non-denom in some cases], and theology.

Within the emerging church movement, there are a variety of models. Even though people like Gordon Conwell Seminary’s David Wells, Nothern Seminary’s Scot McKnight, and Stand to Reason’s Brett Kunkle have attemped to categorize the movement, I believe Ed Stetzer, who is the lead Missiologist and Research Team Director for the North American Mission Board, had done an excellent breakdown, although some have construed it to be a generalization.

He says there are three general groups in this movement:

1) Relevants

First are the relevants. [By the way, he made this word up]

Stetzer classifies this group as one that are really just trying to make their worship, music and outreach more contextual to emerging culture. Ironically, while some may consider them liberal, vthey are often deeply committed to biblical preaching, male pastoral leadership and other values common in conservative evangelical churches.

Here is how Mark Driscoll, lead pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, talks about this group:

When you put your principles [theology] and methods [practice] in your open hand [open to change], you are a classic liberal. When you put your principles and methods in your closed hand [closed to change], you are a classic fundamentalist. So I suggest a two-handed approach to ministry is this: you keep your principles in the closed hand and your methods in the open hand.

2) Reconstructionists

Second are the reconstructionists.

Stetzer says the reconstructionists think that the current form of church is frequently irrelevant and the structure is unhelpful. Yet, they typically hold to a more orthodox view of the Gospel and Scripture. Therefore, we see an increase in models of church that reject certain organizational models, embracing more non-traditional models. They are responding to the fact that after decades of trying fresh ideas in innovative churches, North America is less churched, and those that are churched are less committed.

Stetzer’s concern about this, and I would agree with him, is that God’s plan is deeply connected with the church. Ephesians 3:10 says that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known. God’s Word prescribes much about what a church is. So, if emerging leaders want to think in new ways about the forms (the construct) of church, that’s fine — but any form needs to be reset as a biblical form, not just a rejection of the old form.

Further, he makes the point that if reconstructionists simply rearrange dissatisfied Christians and do not impact lostness, it is hardly a better situation than the current one.

3) Revisionists

Much of the concern about the emerging church has been addressed at those called revisionists. Revisionists are questioning (and in some cases denying) issues like the nature of the substitutionary atonement, the reality of hell, the complementarian nature of gender, and the nature of the Gospel itself. Stetzer says the revisionist emerging church leaders should be treated, appreciated and read as we read mainline theologians.

Describing the American church with sweeping terminology obviously has serious limits. There are other factors that affect church models like ethnicity and geography. If anything, it helps us step outside our experience of the Church and see if from a different perspective.

And interestingly enough, this posture of learning is exactly the posture of a reconciliationist. As Creps says, this recognition of differences and their sources needs to grow into a form of reconciliation that makes it easier for us to actually ‘accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.”

So how does this put us in a better position to talk about what being a reconciliationist means?

Posted in church, culture, emerging church, missiology, music, worship