John H Armstrong

Burning Questions for Missional Christians

Christianity began as a tiny movement of Jews who believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead. They spread this message to Jews and Gentiles and planted churches across the Roman Empire in the first three centuries of the common era. There is abundant evidence that these churches were generally small and that most congregations numbered something like 30-70 people. Issues regarding how to develop and govern these churches arose over time. It seems apparent that there is no extant blueprint that has been passed on to us regarding how this should be done down through the centuries. Christianity seems incredibly adaptable to various cultures and for this reason it could spread into all cultures. 

What we do know is that in spite of many faults the church acquired it eventually provided the basis for a new era of learning, industry and civil order that arose from the impact of the church upon society. In the sixteenth century the Reformation not only divided the church in the West but it led to renewal in the Catholic Church. Eventually this resulted in a great rise in missionary activity from both Protestant and Catholic sources. By the twentieth century a worldwide exportation of products and ideas followed and this global expansion opened the door even wider for global missions. At the same time Europe's civilization began a long, slow slide toward secularism. There is an almost astonishing correlation between the decline of births with the decline of the church and its influence throughout Europe. The question remains what this will mean for North America. Will we follow this European pattern? There is growing evidence that we might follow Europe but there is considerable reason to think that America could follow a very different model. 

By 2050 Patrick Johnstone says that less than half of Europe will claim any adherence to Christianity. This leads Johnstone to conclude that there are "uncomfortable parallels between the situation in Europe today and the collapse of the Greco-Roman civilization of antiquity."

But here in America the situation does not entirely parallel that in Europe. Two centuries of Protestant immigration and numerical growth combined with periodic revivals have shaped a different kind of situation. Here church and state were never connected in the same way. The church in America was free to innovate and develop new ideas. (This is a double-edged sword I realize!) The result of these developments is a Christianity that has a huge variety in church life, teachings and worship styles. In the midst of this chaos some very good things have emerged at various times in our history. Cults have grown, for sure, but so have genuine Christian churches and movements that have given us both health and numerical growth. 

The rise of non-Christian immigration, in recent decades, and the gains of the non-religious (or "nones") in our religious demographics, makes things extremely problematic for the church going forward. (We are in a period of church decline, make no mistake about this fact.) The influence of secularism remains strong, especially in higher education and among the culturally elite. The problems these changes present will not go away anytime soon. But the separation of church and state makes for a unique opportunity for thoughtful Christians to emerge into new missional thought and practice in America. Let me explain.

Could a new kind of civilization, one not rooted in empire or in dependence upon religion linked with the state in any form, arise in the twenty-first century? Simply put, could a new kind of Christianity emerge that produces a more tolerant, less proud and more deeply caring expression of public faith? Could a vigorous, but less politically motivated, Christianity take the place of a church deeply engaged in culture wars and partisan, divisive bickering? 

I do not believe that we know the answer to these questions quite yet. There are signs that give me hope but there are signs that I find deeply troubling. This leads me to ask the question I've been asking for some years now:

"What will Christianity look like in North America when the impact the church once had upon the culture is gone and Christians must then learn how to live meaningfully in a setting where they do not get to directly determine the cultural outcomes of their society?"

How should Christians prepare for this future? 

I believe we need to train leaders who are genuine missional-ecumenists. These will be leaders who grasp the central importance of Jesus to all of life. Such missional faith is not privatized religion. It must be very public. But it is not public in the way we've known it in the past. It is not boisterous and in your face about its truth claims. What we need, especially in the face of religious pluralism, is a developed imagination produced by the Holy Spirit. This developed, Spirit-filled imagination, will guide is in knowing how to proceed in our "brave new world." Without this we will not thrive in being faithful to Christ's mission in the decades ahead of us. With it then who knows what kind of civilization might we become under God's grace? 

One thing I am sure about in asking these kinds of questions. We cannot go back. The America I knew as a child is gone. Political elections, revival campaigns, new church plants, and a myriad of other religious and social solutions, will not bring back that America. We cannot work ourselves out of this new diverse context. It is here to stay. The question is how the church will respond and what our role will be in a new American reality? 

Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Steps

I have read about half of Brian McLaren’s published books. Some have moved me and some have left me puzzled and have not proven entirely helpful. Brian is an eloquent man, a good thinker and a serious Christian. My personal relationship with Brian has included both private and public conversations. He has always proven to be vulnerable, gentle and receptive.

When Brian’s well-known book, Generous Orthodoxy, was published I read it with great interest. I even required a grad class of mine to read it as one of our texts. There is much in it to like. There is some in it to question. I think Brian intends this, at least so far as I understand both his thinking and his writing style. Eventually, I decided to devote a serious group of review articles to this book that were published in our quarterly journals. (The journal is no longer published, sadly. It suffered the fate of most print journals during the last five years or so. If you want to do some searching you can find this journal online for free.)

One of the things that impressed me so much about Brian was his complete willingness to encourage these reviews and to personally engage with them. He later reflected positively on the tone of these critiques. I was pleased because I thought we accomplished a real service without attacking (and dividing) the church or Brian's ministry.

Well, I recently picked up Brian’s new book, Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words (HarperOne, 2011), at my local library. I have read about half the book as of today. I heartily recommend it and believe it is one of Brian’s best books to date.

Brian, like any author, writes from within his own life journey and perspective. He grew up in a fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren context. This showed in his earlier work. In this book there is nothing of the old style and a great deal that is old, or ancient, in the best sense. This is by far the most ecumenical of Brian’s books. He draws from the whole Christian tradition—Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox—to give us a simple, readable and compelling account of learning to live in God’s presence moment-by-moment. He leaves old debates aside, uses nothing remotely like polemical theology and in general gives us a great book on how to slow down and know God. The book is wise, clear and easy to read.

Brian McLaren, like him or not, is a committed ecumenist who seeks to build bridges with all Christians. His evangelicalism has been roundly attacked from many quarters but the result is a wiser, more mature and deeper thinker who still has a lot to say to the church, all of it.

Thanks Brian! I am willing to be misunderstood once again by saying so but I do believe your journey reveals a genuinely hungering soul joined with a deep love for Jesus, the Jesus who saves and loves those who truly seek him. You live with real grace and this book reveals how God has helped you to do it.

The Self-Esteem Gospel and the Faith of Christian Parents

Three out of four American teenagers, in a recent survey, say that they are Christians. But fewer than half of these who claim to be Christians practice their faith. And among those who say they practice their Christian faith most cannot talk coherently about it.

What's more, many American teens who do say they are Christians have actually embraced what is being termed for good reason “a watered-down ‘mutant’ form of Christianity, one that portrays God as a ‘divine therapist’ whose primary aim is to boost people's self-esteem.”

What is very clear is that neither churches nor parents are adequately helping teens to see, or comprehend, what true Christianity is. Thus the faith of “Christian” parents has now been passed along to their children.

These observations come from the conclusions of minister and author Kenda Creasy Dean, Professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. She formed them after helping conduct research for the National Study of Youth and Religion. Dean says the season she spent interviewing teens about their faith was "one of the most depressing summers" of her life.

Her conclusions are in her new book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, which I just began reading. Dean’s study involved in-depth interviews with more than 3,300 American teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17,and included both Catholics and Protestants from both conservative and liberal denominations.

She discovered that the previously used term, coined by Christian Smith, fit the actual beliefs and practices of this generation: "moralistic therapeutic deism." The term implies a religion that helps you feel good and do good, but where God mostly stays out of the way except when called upon. These were kids who "went to church a lot," Dean said, "but weren't really affected by it." She added, "That was the thing that was really shocking to me."

Dean said the "Christianity" many teens believe in can be expressed in the following beliefs:

• A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

• God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions.

• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

• God does not need to be involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.

• Good people go to heaven when they die.

Deans says these views are further reduced to a "gospel of niceness. If teenagers lack an articulate faith, it may be because the faith we show them is too spineless to merit much in the way of conversation.”

Dean said that being nice to each other is not a bad thing, but added, "if the church settles for that as being all that we stand for, then I think we have missed the mark. There are a lot of cultures that would say we shouldn't kill each other, but they would not call themselves Christian."

The problem, said Dean, is that "moralistic therapeutic deism" -- or more plainly, "feel-good, do-good religion" -- is simply contrary to what the purpose of the church is. Theologically, the church is supposed to exist for the world. We don't exist to perpetuate ourselves or to make ourselves happy. It's nice if that can happen, but that's not the purpose. If anything, that might be a fringe benefit. The gospel story that animates the church is about self-giving love and dying in order to live."

Dean says that the committed Christian teens who do have a good sense of the real faith have four things in common: They have a personal story about God they can share, a deep connection to a faith community, a sense of purpose and a sense of hope about their future.

Christian parents can help their youth glimpse real Christianity by getting "radical," Dean suggests. I love what she recommends. She believes that parents who perform a radical act of faith and explain to their teens, "this is how Christians live," will teach more about Christianity than many sermons and youth mission trips. Or another radical thing could be giving away 20 percent of one's income to help others, going to a struggling church instead of a successful one, turning down a lucrative job offer to stay in a situation where one can really do some good, taking abused children into one's home, spending a summer in Bolivia working on an agricultural renewal project or something similar.

As I read this I realized this is exactly how my parents lived in the 1950s. They chose to live simply in terms of monetary means (my dad was a dentist), did not move to bigger cities and better jobs, sacrificed for the poor, helped a needy and poor mission church and took teens into our family routines in order to help them. Our home was a hive of missional activity and the term was not even around in those days. Was I blessed or what?

Explaining to one's teens the motivation for engaging in these radical acts is critically important according to Kendra Dean. She said. "If you don't say you're doing it because of your faith, kids are going to say 'my parents are really nice people.’ It doesn't register that faith is supposed to make you live differently unless parents help their kids connect the dots."

The study found that teens who were best able to articulate their faith came from evangelical churches. Teens from mainline Protestant churches were the least religiously articulate. But before evangelical parents assume their kids are just fine they should realize that the evidence says this watered-down view of Christianity was found in teens from all church backgrounds.

One thing from the study finding has made Dean "strangely hopeful.” The youth who see only the watered-down Christianity aren't giving their lives to it. "It's not big enough, it doesn't matter enough, it's not substantial enough, it doesn't have enough teeth for them to give their lives to it," Dean said. "So I actually think it's a good thing teenagers are ho-hum about what they think of Christianity -- because that's not Christianity. ... But if the gospel is presented in full -- and by presented I don't mean just verbally, but lived, in all of its radical implications -- I think that will get young people's attention in ways that moralistic therapeutic deism doesn't."

Here are two other links on this story that fill in more of the important information you can gain from Kenda Dean’s provocative and important work.

Author: More Teens Becoming "Fake" Christians: CNN Living

Almost Christian: An Interview with Kenda Creasy Dean. Patheos

A Parody That Rocks

North Point Church in Atlanta is one of the better known mega-churches in America. Led by Andy Stanley the church is known for taking the gospel seriously. It is also a church that is not afraid to look at a lot that is being done today with a biblically critical eye. This video will make you laugh and it just might make you cry too. It is not a blanket condemnation of modern music but rather a biting critique that should make you pause and ask important questions, especially if you are leading such a congregation.

What Does the Millennial Generation Have to Give to the Church?

Rachel Held Evans is a young woman with an unusual talent to express the Christian faith in ways that relate to her own generation with power and clarity. I discovered her blog last August in the midst of the conflict over the Lutheran Church (ELCA) adopting a sympathetic position on same-sex practice. She was particularly chagrined by the reaction of some conservative Christians, linking the lightning strike on a Lutheran Church in Minneapolis where part of the church-wide assembly was held with evidence that this was God’s judgment. She was asking the kind of questions that I feel too few Christians are willing to ask. I began to read her work and became even more interested after we “met” via the Internet. (I found our Rachel was also an Alabama Crimson Tide football fan so that made things even better!)

Rachel recently finished her first book, Evolving in Monkey Town (Zondervan), will be out in only a matter of a few days. I was excited when she asked me to endorse her book. Here is what I wrote:

“A whole generation of evangelicalism’s brightest young people, based upon a common misunderstanding of 1 Peter 3:15, was taught that vital, living faith is established by a ‘worldview’ that one can explain and defend. Rachel Held Evans, a bright and talented young writer with obvious courage, challenges this ‘sacred cow.’ Her discovery is surely right—we need a faith that obeys, not a worldview rooted in absolute certainty. She will help you embrace the questions without losing the reality of faith.”

Rachel writes as keen thinker in the Millennial Generation but she writes in a way that I think every generation needs to hear, especially the Baby Boom Generation that has so little understanding of what Rachel and her peers have to say to the larger church. Her book officially releases July 1. Here's a link to her blog where the book page can be found on Rachel’s Web site and where you can find the trailer, endorsements, and a preview: http://rachelheldevans.com/book. If you order the book via this Amazon.com link then ACT 3 will actually benefit from your purchase. I urge you to pre-order this lively memoir if you want to see how a young woman, nurtured in a fundamentalist Southern context, has become a mature Christian thinker with a great deal to say to us all. I am actually in Rachel’s debt since she helps me to speak as a faithful Christian to those I hope to mentor and teach for the rest of my life.

Recently, another noted blogger interviewed Rachel and asked her a number of important questions. With permission I give you what I felt was the most important question and Rachel’s wonderfully helpful and insightful answer. I think she nails this question so I share it with complete support for each point that she makes. In some ways her answer explains a major reason for my own blogs.

What does this generation of Christians have to offer the next generation?

There are a few things that I really hope our generation does differently, for the benefit of the next. First, I hope we choose to pledge our allegiance first and foremost to the Kingdom of God, not to any one political party or platform.  Second, I hope we transcend the false dichotomy between faith and science and have the courage to start some tough conversations about how to embrace them both.  Third, I hope we agree to call a truce and stop using the Bible as a weapon. Fourth, I hope we take a more loving posture toward the gay community. And finally, I hope we re-prioritize caring for “the least of these,” the hungry, the sick, the poor, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the thirsty, and the homeless, both in our own neighborhoods and around the world.

Do you think she is right? Why or why not?

Confessing the Faith Faithfully

It should be apparent, if you have read my previous three posts, that confessing the faith is important business. It is not to be taken lightly by the individual or the church. Jaroslav Pelikan, in his magnum opus five volume work, The Christian Tradition, says in volume one that Christian doctrine is "what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches and confesses on the basis of the word of God." He says in a later book (Credo, 53), that the proper emphasis should be seen in the subtitle of his work: "A history of the development of doctrine." The real point he wants to make is that the Christian faith must be taught, that is, passed on by and through faithful confessing. Thus Pelikan's emphasis in his last great work on doctrine was on "confessing the faith" (Credo, 53).

The relationship between believing and confessing is both close and complex. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf (photo at right) puts this well: "Without personal identification with Jesus Christ, cognitive specification of who he is remains empty; without cognitive specification of who Jesus Christ is, however, personal identification with him is blind" (quoted in Credo, 53). Read that again. It is rich.

But just as believing has multiple meanings, as we saw the last few days, so confessing does too. The attempt to present a proper understanding of these multiple meanings led the great doctor Thomas Aquinas to classify the multiple meanings of confessing by three distinctions: (1) A confession of the truths of the faith, which bears on the end of faith; (2) A confession of thanks and praise, which is the virtue of faith; (3) A confessions of sins, which is the real end of the virtue of penance. Augustine, in his famous Confessions, says confessio means "accusation of oneself; praise of God."

I am quite sure of one thing in this doctrinal development: what is to be "confessed" and "believed" is Jesus Christ as Lord. We are right back to Romans 10:9-10. It seems that Paul may have actually been developing doctrine within this statement in the Roman Epistle. Early Gnostic heresy separated "Jesus" from the "Christ" as two different entities. For Paul this clearly was not possible. 1 John 5:1 (as well as 4:2-3) make the same point I think. Tertullian would later say that the object of our worship "is the one God" and such confession is crucial to the faith that is in Christ.

But confession and confessing are not the same. In the twentieth century this became apparent in Germany where Karl Barth, in the now famous Barmen Declaration, was quite right to make such a distinction in the face of a German church that was saying a confession but not making a clear, biblical confessing faith position the center of their life together. A confession, in modern usage, can easily become a declaration of one's articles of belief (there again is that hard word in English).

In the modern era churches in formerly non-Christian cultures and lands have begun to grapple with this matter in whole new ways. Can a church, say in India, declare a faith that is one with the historic church yet at the same time "undertake its own grappling with the problems of [the] faith, without of course losing contact with all that comes to her through the age-long wisdom of the Church Universal" (cited from an Indian theologian by Pelikan, Credo, 63).

This is precisely where the whole debate with the so-called "emergent church" movement gets interesting to many of us who care deeply for the renewal of the church and the mission of Christ. I, for one, welcome all emerging movements that are faithful to the "the age-long wisdom of the Church Universal." I believe the West has moved so far away from what it means for most Christians to be truly "confessing" believers that undertaking a "grappling with the problems of [the] faith" is welcome and truly needed. I also believe in generous orthodoxy if I can use a term that can be used and abused. But this "generous orthodoxy" must be carefully rooted in orthodoxy. It must confess the faith faithfully, which means it must be deeply sensitive to the confessions of faith from the past, especially those that come from the first seven centuries. The problem, it seems to me, is not that the church and its mission emerges in new times and contexts, the problem is whether or not this emergence is both orthodox and emergent. This is why the Barmen Declaration, in my opinion, is so crucial to us right now. What Barth and Bonhoeffer were doing in Germany in the 1930s was serious theology in an emerging context, a context that was radically departing from those roots put down in Reformation German soil centuries before. 

I heard early church scholar Christopher Hall say last week that 95% of his students at Eastern University are heretical in their faith at some very basic and critical places. Most of them, he said, were Sabellians or tri-theists. Few were real trinitarians. I have found the same to be true all over America in churches and schools. We are so far removed form the ancient faith of the church that what we are now confessing is both unhealthy and unfaithful. The emergence that I long for will be missionally edgy yet confessionally faithful. The categories of conservative and liberal, at least as we used them over the past 150 years, might not be adequate for this new context. We need new wine and new wineskins, which means words that we use must be used carefully and wisely. Given our propensity for the quick fix I wonder if we have the wisdom and patience to do this as we ought.

Whither Brian McLaren?

The journey of pastor, leader and author Brian McLaren is one that has attracted a lot of attention. He has sold a lot of books and spoken to thousands of people around the world. Over the years traditional conservative evangelicals have often reacted against Brian. This growing mistrust, sometimes for good reason, has only grown over the last five years in particular. Others, who are more liberal (some are anti-evangelical and anti-confessional) have followed each new book by Brian with incredible interest and profound appreciation. Consider the endorsers of Brian’s book, first a list of respected evangelicals and now, generally speaking, a list of fairly liberal Christian leaders and authors. I started reading Brian when his first book came out years ago. On the whole I would describe my view back then as one of appreciation. I encouraged missional thinkers to read him and to wrestle with his ideas, especially what he wrote in his first book: The Church On the Other Side. This is a book I still highly recommend. But about five years ago, with the publication of his three volume set of fictional works (A New Kind of Christian), I began to wonder where he would end up in his own faith journey.

First, in total fairness and for the sake of complete honesty, I have spent some time hanging out with Brian. I like him a lot! He is a neat guy. He is a self-effacing, humble and warm-hearted. He puts on no airs, welcomes interaction and disagreement and has always treated me with respect. I have discussed a few controversial points with him and found him as generous as you would expect from the author of a best-selling book titled: Generous Orthodoxy. (I required my apologetics classes, a few years ago, to read this book and discuss it with me. Overall, I rather liked it, with modest caveats.)

When I was still editing the Reformation & Revival Journal: A Quarterly for Church Leadership, I asked Brian if we could review Generous Orthodoxy and invited him to respond to a panel I assembled to critique his book. That panel included a professor of theology from a conservative Reformed seminary, an esteemed United Methodist minister who is a professor of theology in a mainline seminary and a working, thinking pastor who is one of the brightest guys that I have ever known. Brian responded well to the piece we did and in a later edition of Generous Orthodoxy praised it as one of the most fair-minded critiques of his work that he had read. I felt really good about that effort and Brian’s openness.

When Donald A. Carson’s book, Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church, was published we decided to do a major multi-author review in Reformation & Revival Journal. Much of Caron’s debated book was a devastating critique of everything related to the word emergent. It took special aim at Brian and clearly underscored some major problems that Carson saw developing in Brian’s published thoughts. Again I used three reviewers to gain some perspective on Carson’s controversial book. We all had certain reservations about Carson’s take no prisoners approach but we also agreed that we were not sure where Brian was going in his theology, at least from what we could tell by reading him. I think it was safe to say that he was in a state of flux. Brian has never been a true theologian. He is a popular, engaging communicator for mission and new ways of thinking. He is well-read but does not always do the most careful scholarship. This is part of his appeal.

During Jim Belcher’s research on his popular book Deep Church I arranged an interview with Brian, Jim and me to help Jim get information for his now well-known book. We discussed a number of topics and disagreed on some of the things we discussed. Brian never became angry or aggressive but remained cordial, helpful and non-defensive toward Jim and me both. This lunch was related to the Ancient-Future Faith Conference held at Northern Seminary a few years back. What has been increasingly clear to me, for at least five years, is that Brian McLaren was growing tired of evangelicalism. He seemed deeply disturbed by the whole enterprise and was willing to question everything. With each new book his frustration, and his concerted efforts to reform Christian thought around a whole new paradigm, was growing. What was also quite clear, if your have followed Brian’s very public journey through his books as I have done, was that Brian seemed on a trajectory that would take him further and further from ancient-future faith and historic Christian orthodoxy. Evangelicals, like myself, were actually growing weary of the next Brian McLaren book because we feared that it was only a matter of time until he would make it clear that he really had abandoned the confessional and historical markers that are essential to orthodox Christianity.

Now comes Brian’s newest book: A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (HarperOne). Scot McKnight, one of the most respected orthodox blog writers on the Internet, refers to this new McLaren book as Brian’s “latest iteration of a project of deconstructing the old and reconstructing a new kind of Christian faith. In it, he poses . . . a question he asks of himself: "How did a mild-mannered guy like me get into so much trouble?" Or, as he asks one page later, "How did I get into this swirl of controversy?" Here is how Scot begins his very important review (which I urge you to read in full to get the whole of Scot’s powerful treatment of Brian’s newest book):

As a friend and a chronicler for two decades, I have watched Brian's work. Generous Orthodoxy, gave us a critique of both sides and some glimpses of a third way, even if the book frustrated to no end by leaving too many loose ends dangling. I thought both The Secret Message of Jesus and Everything Must Change provided us with what could become an evangelical social gospel. Along the way, Brian has poked evangelicals in the eyes and chest by fixating on sensitive spots that bedevil them—not the least of which is the uneasy connection between the "spiritual" gospel and the "social" gospel. If evangelicalism is characterized by David Bebbington's famous quadrilateral—that is, biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism—then Brian has poked and, to one degree or another, criticized, deconstructed, and rejected each.

But Brian is not just pushing back against evangelicals in his new book. As Scot McKnight further notes: “He is also calling everything about Christian orthodoxy—from the ecumenical creeds through the Reformation and up to present-day evangelicalism—into question.” There are two major themes in Brian’s new book, themes which shape his ten questions. These two major themes are: (1) A critique of the Grecco-Roman narrative, and; (2) a proposal for a new way of reading the Bible. The topics of the ten questions that Brian suggests are transforming the faith of Christians as narrative, authority, God, Jesus, the gospel, the church, sex, the future (Scot says this chapter a kind of open-theism version of eschatology), pluralism, and praxis.

Brian paints a picture of what he believes is “conventional Christianity.” He has been doing this with increasing vigor in his last several books. The problem is that his picture here is not even close to the real thing. Brian suggests that what we need to do is re-read the Bible. When we do this what we get is “the evolving God” (McKnight’s term). 

McKnight sees some keen insights in Brian’s thinking that we can learn from, insights which are almost always there in Brian and very often provocative and helpful. This is part of what brings me back to Brian even though I am growing weary of the whole enterprise with each new McLaren book. Scot suggests that Brian’s most important contribution is to encourage us to read the Bible in a way that keeps Jesus Christ central to the narrative. So far, so good. But the problem becomes self-evident if you know the history of the last two hundreds years of how various people have read Jesus and interpreted him, especially in the liberal circles of higher-critical reconstruction of the Bible. Brian uses, “Jesus against the God of Israel he worshiped and prayed to and loved and obeyed and pits us against what Jesus himself is doing” (McKnight). The problem is that Brian’s approach to Jesus has been tried and it has proven to be highly questionable to put this mildly. McKnight adds, painfully it seems to me since we have both loved and highly regarded Brian, “Unfortunately, this book lacks the ‘generosity’ of genuine orthodoxy and, frankly, I find little space in it for orthodoxy itself. Orthodoxy for too many today means little more than the absence of denying what's in the creeds. But a robust orthodoxy means that orthodoxy itself is the lens through which we see theology. One thing about this book is clear: Orthodoxy is not central.”

The problem with Brian’s new book, as Scot McKnight suggests, is that his ideas are not really new. They are very old. They are built, consciously or otherwise, on the kind of things taught by the famous Adolf von Harnack and then popularized by modern liberal theology of the most extreme sort. McKnight concludes: “For me, Brian's new kind of Christianity is quite old. And the problem is that it's not old enough.”

Sadly, I have to agree. I thank Scot for having the grace to write such a generous review and the courage to tell thousands of readers how Brian McLaren has moved away from ancient-future faith, or robust orthodoxy. He seems to have been moving this way for some time but there is not much doubt that this is where he now is in this new book. This is no cause for celebration. Some bloggers and reviewers will say, “I told you so.” Others will use this book to attack other authors and Christian leaders who they believe are following Brian on this road to something that is generous but no longer orthodoxy. (I have been so accused, which anyone who reads me fairly can tell easily enough is patently ridiculous!)

Frankly, it grieved me to read Scot McKnight’s review. I never celebrate when a man I have known and loved, and still love, wavers off the beaten path of the ancient faith. I will continue to follow Brian McLaren but my guess is that he will have less and less to say to me personally given my deep commitment to the gospel of Christ and the creeds of the ancient church. I am sure that he will now and again force me to think in healthy ways but overall I simply cannot follow his obvious course when “orthodoxy is not central.” Orthodoxy, by the very word itself, means that which renders health. Brian’s agenda will bring spiritual illness to man. I have personally given my whole soul to the paths of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Brian seems to have wondered off that path. I find this a great sadness, especially for Brian himself. I hope he will write a book, someday, that reveals a Brian who turns back toward the ancient paths, the way of faith confessed by classical Christians for two thousand years.

Skye Jethani and Dan Kimball on the Emergent Church

I attended a dialog on the emergent church Wednesday afternoon at Wheaton College (January 20). Authors Dan Kimball (photo at left) and Skye Jethani (photo at right) made presentations (Dan’s was given the evening before) and answered questions. The event was hosted by Dr. Vince Bacote and the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College. I tried to restrain myself but ended up making several comments at the end of the hour-plus meeting. I likely said more than I should have, given the time constraints. (Time flies when you are thinking, listening, reacting in your mind and wanting to speak while sensing you should say something or maybe you shouldn’t.) I find such events encouraging and just a tad frustrating. The encouraging part is that these two guys were humble, gracious and insightful. I loved listening to them both. The frustrating part is that a lot has to get simplified and they made sweeping generalizations. I understand that these are necessary but, in the process, they are frustrating to me as an author and speaker. I could have talked to these two guys for hours. (I did speak to them both afterward and they were as gracious in person as in speaking, an all too rare occurrence! I had met Dan previously but not Skye, yet Skye lives locally.) They are both articulate and they both clearly love the church and missional and theological ideas, an all too rare combination.

Skye Jethani showed that “emergent” Christianity consisted of seven layers or categories of process or development. Writers who confuse these layers, or do not make these distinctions, lump everything that they read, see or hear about emergent into one large soup. Some reject this soup as postmodern and dangerous and then the label gets kicked around and around and becomes a new “bomb” Christians throw at one another. (One or two major Christian figures have called me “emergent,” a label that is downright ludicrous if it wasn’t so humorous.) The result is that this term may now have little or no meaning, if it ever had much real meaning to begin with. Skye pointed out how much marketing had to do with the use of the term and just how much publishers drove this in order to sell to the 21-35 year-old segment of evangelicalism. I know this to be true from first-hand experience. This whole debate about emergent people and emergent ideas is more about marketing than about really “new” ideas. I do not deny that there is such a thing as emergent Christians or emergent churches but I do not think emergent reality is as ubiquitous as many advocates and critics think. As a historian I am guessing, at least for now, that this will hardly be a serious footnote in American church history fifty years from now.

What is happening is various types and strands of evangelicalism are blending and converging in various ways. Skye brought this ought very effectively in his presentation. He showed that churches where liturgy would never have been a part of the mix are now more liturgical whereas churches that embrace the gospel of personal salvation are now also embracing a more aggressive and defined social message. Some are redefining the way they understand the gospel, especially the doctrine of the atonement. (This movement is where the levels and layers become more important and doctrinally significant to the health of the church.) Through all of this simplistic definitions of evangelical Christianity (whatever it really is) are getting challenged.

I think the real challenge to popular evangelicalism, or post-war revivalism, began many years before anything called emergent came on the scene. If any single American evangelical thinker and writer fostered this “redefining” and mixing process it was my friend Bob Webber. In 2002, when his book The Younger Evangelicals (Baker) appeared, the late Bob Webber was asked:

If I am a leader of pragmatic evangelical church who came from a pragmatic evangelical seminary who is now faced with what appears to be a very incompatible world, what advice [do you have] for me? Where do I turn next?

I think you have to look at this issue from an immediate and then a long-term perspective. The pragmatic churches have become institutionalized - with some exceptions. They responded to the sixties and seventies, created a culture-driven church and don’t get that the world has changed again. Pragmatics, being fixed, have little room for those who are shaped by the postmodern revolution. A clash is emerging. The younger evangelicals will not have a voice in the pragmatic, fixed mentality. Stay there and your spirit will die (there are some exceptions, pray for discernment). Many pragmatic churches, like old shopping malls are dying. Very few people under 30 are in pragmatic churches. The handwriting is on the wall. Leave. Do a start up church. Be a tent-maker. Build communities. Small groups or neighborhood churches. Be willing to let your life die for Jesus as you break with the market driven, culture shaped, numbers oriented, Wall-Mart-something-for-everyone church. Be an Abraham and take a risk. God will show up and lead the way.

It is this kind of answer that drove all kinds of young people to respect Bob and to listen to him and read him. His message was nuanced, theological and always practical. He was, dare I use the word, “prophetic,” at least for many evangelicals. He introduced them to ancient-future thinking and was way ahead of the curve on most of this “emerging” stuff, maybe even helping to create the curve if a history of this development is written in the future. Bob was nervous about some aspects of the emergent movement, as I am. He also embraced the movement as an indication of a change that was needed in the mission of the church.

I suspect that Jethani and Kimball are correct when they suggest that the term emergent is becoming irrelevant and that it was more a term for publishers to use to market books and conferences than it was a real, lasting and important moment in the life of the church.

What I am convinced of is that something much bigger than a label or a movement is really happening. Christians of all backgrounds, including Catholics and mainline Protestants, are “emerging” into something that will be very different from the “pragmatic” version of revivalism that their fathers and mothers embraced. And new converts will enter the church through many different forms of church expression and models of evangelism. And many lapsed Christians—both Catholics and Protestants (and maybe some Orthodox)—may still “come home” as the very effective television ads put it. I welcome any movement back to Christ and to his church. I welcome the return, as well as the first time seekers, especially in the under 35 generation. I believe there is hope in this trickle of movement to the faith and I am convinced that the message of missional-ecumenism, the message I promote in my forthcoming book, Your Church Is Too Small, is big enough to attract large numbers of these younger Christians and leaders to a new/old understanding of how we can be one and more effectively present the love of Christ to a dying world. I stand on the shoulders of my friend Bob Webber. I believe he would endorse my book if he was still here. I also believe he would be rooting for people to add this Christ-centered, mission-centered, kingdom-centered vision to their experience of Christ and the church and thus continue the journey to an ancient-future faith experience.

Focusing on the Church Outside the Walls

Emergent churches often receive considerable attention in the press because they offer an element of surprise to readers who know little or nothing about them. One such church, with the fairly typical emergent type name of Fusion Church, meets in a Chicago suburb about a 45-minute drive from my home. Fusion Church is in Lake Zurich (IL). It was featured in an article in our suburban paper on the Monday following Easter. Because Fusion represents many of the "trends" we find in similar "emergent" churches this story is worthy of some comment and response.

Fusion is a small, non-denominational (though connected to various ministries) congregation that is five-years old. It is a thoroughly orthodox congregation in its beliefs and ethical commitments. Fusion says, about itself:

We are a group of people from all walks of life attempting to follow Jesus. We recognize following Jesus is a 24/7 commitment, done in God's power, with the support of intimate relationships [community]. It has incredible implications on how we do life with our families, at work and among friends. We invite you to join us on this journey. You don't have to have everything figured out, you just need a willingness to learn more about Jesus and what it means to participate in His mission.

The Fusion congregation met in a local elementary school until recently. On Easter Sunday about 60 people gathered for an evening service. The "Lead Pastor" Eric Lerew (one of many insider words in this movement) said, when commenting on the church's move to a local church building, "Our main focus is on what's happening outside the walls of the church. We want to live out the gospel in the community where people live and work. What happens inside these four walls is secondary." Lerew, who is 44 years old, says words like "organic and fluid" describe their ministry model. (Again, we encounter two buzz words, that are helpful to some extent, commonly used within this movement!) Lerew rightly notes, as I have indicated in recent blogs, that there are many people who will never set foot inside a church. He then adds, "Our Sunday meetings are just a rallying point from which we go our to reach the community."He says the church is divided into what they call "villages." Members focus on starting friendships and doing service projects in particular geographic locations in and around their town of Lake Zurich.

The goal of these small villages is a "common mission." "Sometimes it's sharing meals with people, phone conversations, anything we can do to show the love of Christ." Last Christmas the people of Fusion not only dropped off gifts but spent the day with various families getting to know them. A 26-year-ld woman who attends Fusion says, "You don't have to pretend to be someone you're not. It's refreshing."

After five years Fusion remains quite small. Lerew says this is fine since attendance is not the real issue "so long as we can make a difference in [people's] lives." One cannot fault this attitude, one which is much healthier than that which often drives membership in so many local churches.

So what should we make of churches like Fusion springing up all across America?

1. Such churches are a natural, spiritual response to the intense inward, consumeristic focus that most congregations and their leaders have developed within a Christendom culture in modern America.

2. Emphasis on getting "outside the walls" of the Sunday gathering is very good. It is also clearly biblical. It feels a lot more like the ancient church than the modern church. This is clearly happening within churches like Fusion. But this missional development is much more widely spreading, even into more "traditional" churches.

3. Getting directly involved with people, where they work and live, and spending time with unbelievers in building relationships, should be a core value for any truly missional church. (Sadly, few churches make it a core value, thus the rise of churches like Fusion!) I applaud Fusion's goal profoundly. I pray that Fusion will impact many lives, in Lake Zurich and beyond, and many other churches for good.

But there is more to say than these few simple (genuine) positive responses.

1. Fusion, like so many similar churches, has chosen (so it seems) to focus intensely on one side of biblical theology and not as much on the other. Their Web site shows both side are present but the pendulum swing does seem apparent. They have chosen being missional over being institutional or developed, or sacramental and ecclesial. This dilemma was not an either/or choice in Scripture or the early church. The church that we see in the N. T. celebrated the sacraments, met regularly for prayer and teaching, catechized and baptized converts (and children) and could be identified by its various markers; e.g. the enrolling of the widows, the choice of elders and deacons, the sending of formal membership type letters to other churches, the practice of discipline. These all infer some form of membership. Fusion does not seem to have formal membership. (I could have missed this in looking over the Web site.) But Fusion's financial commitment is impressive, with a budget of over $130,000. (Impressive for such a small group.) And tithing is strongly taught on the Web site! (I always find the way this principle is presented lacking in clear biblical theology. Personally, I do not think tithing is a biblical concept. Proportionate and sacrificial giving are much closer to the norms of Scripture, which means a faithful gift can be much more than 10% but it also means it could be, and sometimes should be, less.)

2. I believe every church should intentionally seek to grow both spiritually and numerically. The goal is not numbers, for the sake of numbers, but real converts who will become identifiable disciples. The way a church grows best is by reaching the unchurched, of which there are plenty in most towns and cities in the U.S. for every existing church. There is a clear need for thousands more churches to be planted. No matter how you cut this many people will still gravitate to the "meeting" of a larger group over time. This growing group might be broken down into small groups but the fact is larger groups will inevitably develop as the gospel works powerfully within a particular community.

3. The ultimate size of the home base, or the local church, is irrelevant. I wish people would really, truly recognize this point. (I commend Fusion for grasping this clearly!) But this works both ways, in large and small congregations. I am convinced there were, and always will be, many small churches, some mid-sized ones and a few very large ones. This was also true in the ancient church and seems evident in the New Testament.

4. Fusion downplays, at least according the what I read in this Daily Herald article, the importance of the sacraments and the gathered life of a worshiping congregation. (The Web site presents a better picture of the church than the shorter news article did.) Celebration and preaching could easily be lost unless Fusion is very intentional about keeping them as high priorities. Currently these seem to be higher priorities at Fusion than in some emergent churches.

When I read articles like this in my morning newspaper I am reminded that evangelicals, if nothing else, are great at producing new models of the church. There is something profoundly good about this development (mission, outreach, etc.) and something profoundly wrong with it (the loss of discipline, markers found in the sacramental life of a church, etc.) I welcome the contribution of Fusion Church but I long to see so much more.

Just a few weeks ago I spoke to the pastor of a large (older) church in the Los Angeles area who has taken a traditional Reformed Church and turned it into a missional outreach movement that I think people at Fusion would applaud. Everything Fusion lives for is being done by this local Reformed Church. These members are in the homes of their neighbors, they are delivering meals, painting houses, serving widely across their city. The mayor has even said that this is the most vital service organization in his city. This church wants to plant 100 new churches in 10 years. Many will be small groups and most will like be in homes. Many will likely be led by non-professionally trained leaders. All will have the same DNA. They will be catholic in their theology, Reformed in their confessional life and missional in their practice and development. I would wish for thousands of similar churches, be they Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox. I think this will get us a lot closer to the biblical model without starting new trends with each new wave of evangelicalism that comes along.

A Visit to One of America's Largest Emergent Churches

Mars Hill Bible Church, in Grandville, Michigan, is one of the better known “emergent” (or “emerging”) congregations in America. Begun as a church plant through the leadership of well-known author and speaker Rob Bell, Mars Hill reflects all that is good about emergent Christianity, as well as some of the weaknesses one frequently encounters. I had the unique opportunity to be in Grand Rapids for a meeting with my publisher, Zondervan, on April 6. I came in a day early for the Monday meeting and thus had a “rest” day on April 5, Palm Sunday.With this unusual gift of time away I decided to visit Mars Hill. (I have visited several of the leading emergent churches over the past four years.) Most of what I expected was what I experienced.

The whole congregation gathers for two Sunday meetings, at 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. These meetings are actually called “Gatherings.” The service I attended lasted about 70 minutes. The first twenty minutes-plus was music. Some of it was familiar, some was new (to me). All of it was led by very good instrumentalists/singers on a large platform situated in the center of an old big-box store in the middle of an old mall. I would guess that there were about 3,000-plus people present. Above the platform was a large screen with the words on all four sides. The musicians all faced the center, thus their backs were to the congregation, an odd arrangement from my experience. (Perhaps this is to draw the congregation to focus on worship, not the musicians. I am unsure.) Anyway, we stood for a long time and listened to the music. I say “listened” because the vast majority of people, so far as I could tell, did not sing the songs. ( I tried but I felt so out of place, at least where I was standing.) This is a consistent experience that I have had in such churches and it is one that I find distressing. The center of this whole time was the people on the platform performing their songs for the crowd that was mostly watching and not singing. The music itself was of the kind that a congregation could sing together if the people chose to sing the words together. Closer to the platform (I was about six rows away) some people sang with more involvement and emotion.

Following this time of music a few announcements were made. The most important, and impressive, announcement was the story of how the church had raised $20,000 for water filtration equipment for people in Africa. It was an impressive display of kingdom ministry and concern. I was moved by this step of commitment on the part of the Mars Hill family.

The sermon was preached by a guest, Dr. Don Davis, the director of World Impact, a ministry for equipping leadership for the urban church in America. Don, a former teacher at Wheaton College when Rob Bell was there as a student (1988-1992), was a powerful preacher. His sermon deeply touched me at a point of real need. I personally thanked him for his Christ-centered word from Lamentations 5. I have visited the Web site of The Urban Ministry Institute since I was at Mars Hill. I am very impressed with the work this group does. I hope that I can get to know Don personally and thus wrote to him after we met on April 5.

Mars Hill is clearly doing a lot right. There are a load of young people in the congregation. And many of these young people have obviously influenced their families since quite a few folks around my age were also present, maybe as many as 20% could have been over 50. Mars Hill is deeply committed to reaching the unchurched. I have no doubt that they are doing this better than many churches in America but I came away with a sense that a lot of those at Mars Hill came from somewhere else, like other evangelical churches that they felt alienated from for whatever reason. (I can think of many.) I would love to know the actual data regarding the number of people at Mars Hill who are first generation disciples of Christ. I have no idea if such data is available.

Where does Mars Hill fit in terms of the Willow Creek “seeker model”? I suppose the answer depends on one’s perspective. I felt like it was a younger version of the “seeker church” when all was said and done.

Mars Hill is surrounded by older churches representing a number of Reformed denominations. Grand Rapids is also the center of a significant Baptist and fundamentalist population. One would guess that the children of many of these churches are searching for something else and Mars Hill meets some deeply felt needs. This is legitimate and I respect it. The teaching at Mars Hill, based on the courses that they offer through the week, and the sermons that I have heard in the past on audio and video, and heard from a guest on April 5, are solid.

I took the opportunity to briefly meet Rob Bell after the service. He was friendly, but seemed a bit shy. This is true of many such dynamic communicators and visionaries. He was accessible and certainly did not seem to be in a hurry to run out, something I appreciated. His skills as a both a writer and speaker are eminent. I already knew all that before attending Mars Hill. What I did not know was how much like the seeker model the Sunday gathering really would be. Maybe I was there on an atypical Sunday but I tend to think not. There was no evidence at Mars Hill of church, as such; e.g, a cross, candles, banners, biblical texts, Christian art, icons, etc. The place was as plain as an old Baptist church and there was no marking even outside that this was a church. And the Eucharist seemed to be held only irregularly, certainly not weekly.

Membership at Mars Hill is treated as a covenant relationship with other believers. This covenant is renewed annually. A clear description of what this means was available in a clearly written form. There is much to love at Mars Hill. The small groups are undoubtedly important and fill in a lot of the life of this church that I did not get to experience. I think Rob Bell is a brilliant practitioner and I admire him a great deal.

Personally, I would starve at a church like Mars Hill. I crave much more than twenty-plus minutes of pop music, an extended announcement on a mission opportunity and a good sermon, at least in public worship. The flow of liturgy, rooted in biblical theology and Christian redemption, is much deeper than this model affords if your heart hungers for deep church.