Reading comments to Scot McKnight’s post on “Emergent Theology” I was struck by something… the debate had gone into that all too familiar “us vs. them” language thing. Anyone who reads Scot’s blog with any regularity knows he isn’t being divisive when he speaks of Emergents as “them,” so I don’t even want to address that issue. What got me thinking were the practical divisions we actually have in churches.
When I was in established church ministry (as a youth pastor I think at that time), I read a book called, Primary Purpose. If I can summarize, Ted Haggard – now President of the National Association of Evangelicals – put forth a local ecclesiology where all Christians would see their identity in Christ and pray for their city without respect to growing their particular church. It was brilliant. I’d like to reread it (I think I lent my copy to someone and never got it back 
).
What I realized today is the problem of churches keeping hold of what is theirs. Most often, when Christians talk about unity it is either the fundamentalists trying to get us all to believe the same things, or everyone else trying to get us to all just get along. We’ve seen so much back-stabbing and mean-spiritedness, we’re content with just not hating each other. But our churches are still separate, even when we are playing nice.
Although worship styles will differ by preference and tradition, most of what Christians do could be done together. What would a city’s churches look like if they worked together at whatever they could and did not worry about where those ministered to might end up “going to church” on Sunday mornings?
But the reason Scot’s post got me thinking about this… the emerging church still has proprietary features. We have our territory, our ministry, our styles… not all of these things are bad, but if we define unity as just not being mean to others we fall far short of God’s plan for the body of Christ. A hand and a foot don’t work together in one body just because they do not hate each other… they are only useful if they work together. Those at the forefront of practicing their faith in emerging church structures should also be at the forefront of doing ministry with other local churches, whether they are emerging or not.
While the language in Primary Purpose will almost definitely read evangelical, I think it should be required reading for every church planter. Let’s think about our churches less as “our” churches and more as a part of the body of Christ embedded in a particular time and place. And in the United States at least, that usually means embedded amidst pockets of a lot of other parts of the body of Christ. We need an open ecclesiology that recognizes the church in regions and cultures rather than individual assemblies.
Leave a Reply