Meylan France, July 1, 2008
A couple months ago I was asked my a missionary friend here in France about the emerging church. We got talking and I was trying to explain what I've seen going on for the last 10 years or so... It turns out we will both be at a conference for missionaries in August and at that conference there is time for workshops. So now I'm leading two workshops on "The Theology and Practice of the Emerging Church."
This page is going to be the ressource place for those workshops.
Introduction to the workshops:
Our discussions will start with Scot McKnight's Christianity Today article. See it here on the web or download a pdf copy.
Scot is specifially addressing the quesiton of the emerging church in the North American context. So this is really a starting point. There are a number of issues that he raises that we can explore together looking at the European scene.
One of my main resources for thinking about the emerging church and the related subject of all things missional is Andrew Jones and his blog Tall Skinny Kiwi. I met Andrew in Prague in June of 2002 and have worked on few projects with him.
At its heart the emerging church is a missionary response to the rise of postmodernism. The concern here is not the philosophical aspects of postmodern thinking but the practical aspects... how we talk about what we know (epistomolgy), suspicion of power structures represented by institutions or by systems of thought. This then leads to deconstructing systems of knowledge and power. How does the church enter into this kind of world? A complementary paper that I found useful is An Ecclisiological Assessment of the emerging church movement by John S. Hammett, Professor of Theology, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. You can find the pdf here.
Another aspect of postmodernity was the end of the idea that progress is linear and always better. And with this comes a willingness to question ideas (decontruction) and to discover that some ancient ways offer fresh insight to today's situation.This is especially true in the discussions surrounding the atonement. Where we see a clear division between those who see penal substitutionary atonement as the finest expression of the Christ's work on the Cross and those who would argue for a more nuanced position in keeping with the language of the Bible and the diversity of the ways the Christ work is presented. Andrew Jones did a great post on this called Penal Substitution: 2 Years Later and We Still Cant Get No Satisfaction.
One of the other areas where theology comes into play concerns the nature of the Gospel. Is it only about proclamation in word or can we also proclaim the Gospel through our deeds. Tied to this is the idea of the Gospel not just being about a personal individual salvation but also a corporate dimension. Tim Keelers CT article point this out. Here's a link to the pdf.
Related to the emerging church is the value of being missional.
Alan Hirsch defines missional in this way...
Missional church is a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people. [page 82 The Forgotten Ways]
Here's the link to his article that was a part of a synchroblog (a number people wrote about missional on the same day). Here's the link to the list of blogs that wrote for the synchroblog.
There's also a great site called Friends of Missional that explains everything missional.
That should be enough for now.
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