Brian McLaren

Surely when we think of individuals closely tied with the emerging / emergent church, Brian McLaren is at the top of the list. Since we began our conversation, I subscribed to his blog feed. Recently he posted a sort of Q&A on the question of 'Why do evangelicals dislike you?' If you are interested in his take on why evangelicals are critical of him and his description of the people that should be disagreeing with him, check it out HERE.

This are the folks he says should dislike him. He gives fuller descriptions of why on the post.

1. Religious Right Evangelicals

2. Strict 5-point Calvinists

3. Other kinds of fundamentalists


In this post, Brian suggests that those who criticize him should read one of the books he wrote. I agree and so I am going to begin reading the book he suggests we start with, The Secret Message of Jesus. Look for some quotes and reflections to come.

Evangelical Options in Preaching

I just looked up an interview that I felt was interesting on the preaching subject we've been discussing. It is on the 9Marks blog. A pastor/church planter named Mike McKinley is asking Steve Timmis, one of the authors of the book Total Church, about his claim that preaching need not always be 'monologue.'

I think it will be worth your time to read it.

Check it out HERE.


Here is one quote from the interview:

"What we are doing is challenging the privileged status of the extended monologue. At one level, it's a pragmatic argument: different contexts call for different approaches. But it's a principled pragmatism. The principle is the centrality of God's Word in the corporate life of God's people. How that is secured and sustained depends on the context. If you're in someone's front room, then you have opportunity to invite questions, respond to comments and explore issues 'on the hoof'. But all the time, the Bible is your reference point. You're bringing people under the gospel and showing them Christ. Here's the thing Mike: being Word-centred is not the same as being preaching-centered, and I want our churches to be the former. Now that will always involve formal teaching, and by someone gifted as a teacher, and it may involve preaching as extended monologue, but not necessarily. It might be worth your readers knowing that even if someone is teaching dialogically in a household context, the preparation required is equal to, and probably greater than that for a 30-40 minute monologue. Why? Because you have absolutely no idea what questions you're going to be asked as you are teaching! Someone can ask a doozy of a left-field question and you've got to make sure that your answer takes them right back into the passage your teaching. Dialogical teaching is not the same as a 'pooling of ignorance' where everyone has an equal say. Sometimes, you just have to tell people they are wrong, plain wrong."

Preaching 3 - Control and Authority

Part of Pagitt's problem with preaching (or speaching) is with authority and control. A couple quotes:

"The speaching act allows for the preacher not only to control the content, but also to apply the sermon to people's lives."

"The problem here is not just the delivery system but the assumption that what people need to know exists in the mind and plans of one person who is often little more than an acquaintance for most of the people in the church." pg. 119

Pagitt is not blaming preachers for this really. He says that the problem is that we've been taught that this is what the pastor is supposed to do and we haven't realized that there might be another way.

To those here who pastor/preach - are control and authority things that you think of often? Do you feel that others in our congregations see us as controlling truth? Do others here see their pastor(s) in such a way?

"Speaching" Preaching Re-Imagined - 2

Instead of evaluating Pagitt's ideas in my posts, I think I'll simply quote him and allow the interaction to take place in the comments. All are welcome to weigh in...

"...nearly every preacher would rightly cringe at the notion that preaching is just giving a speech or a lecture. Yet most preaching is done is such a way that it's hard to understand it as anything other than a speech that happens to have religious content. The 'speacher' stands in front of the 'audience.' The speacher is the only one with the microphone and therefore the only one with the power to speak on the subject at hand. The content of hte speech has been decided on with little, if any, input from those who are hearing the speech, and the conclusions are drawn by the speacher and no one else." Preaching Re-Imagined, pg. 48

Responses?

Preaching Re-imagined - 1

I am interested in preaching. I brought up the topic at our last meeting and it seems to be one of some interest. Doug Pagitt's book Preaching Re-Imagined has drawn a lot of attention and strong reactions from many. Let's take a look at it.

Pagitt begins with an assumption that he believes the reader will share - preaching doesn't work - at least not as we've thought of it (pg. 18) This is why preachers read so many preaching books and attend conferences etc. We are hoping to find a 'key' to make preaching work.

Pagitt does, however, believe that preaching is important. The problem, he says, is that we've made preaching into 'speaching' (a term he coins). More on this soon.

He says that we live in a time where the best of 'speaching' is available to us through recordings, mp3, the internet, etc. but it still has not had the desired result.

I'd like your thoughts on the question, is preaching as we know it a broken form of communication? Pagitt's claim is that the problem is not that we're bad at preaching, but that 'speaching' (bascially the sermon as a speach given by one person to a group) is just not effective regardless of how 'good' we are at it.

I have strong feelings about the subject, but I'd like to know yours.

Tony Jones on emerging and emergent

In a recent blog post recap of a speaking event, Tony Jones gives some thought to whether it is useful to differentiate between the terms.

"So, what I'm saying is that maybe, just maybe, the idea of "emerging" does better fit those persons and groups who feel more comfortable with conventional evangelical theologies, and "emergent" is more appropriate for those of us more interested in following the various theological and philosophical rabbit holes that present themselves to us."

How much is really new?

I keep running headlong into the word "new" in the titles, expressed or implied. Usually turns out that anything new and exciting has been in the tradition all along; it's the narrow version of evangelicalism that never had awareness of forms of spiritual expression, theological breadth, and pneumatological (how's that for a good scholastic sounding theological term?) freedom. But I also think Pagitt's book A Christianity Worth Believing goes to another level. His simplistic and historically challenged dichotomy of Greek/Hebrew thinking is appalling. It's hardly a new suggestion, but the brush is so broad as to neatly fit everything he doesn't like about the version of the faith he was first given into the Greek (read: bad guys) category, and therefor detrimental to a version worth believing.

I do resonate with his critique of the extreme emphasis of taking care of all the important stuuf in a momentary encounter, important as that has been to evangelicalism. But it can't be the only thing that matters. Still working through the latter portions of the book, so stay tuned.

A Couple Links

• Scot McKnight had an article in Christianity Today on the 5 streams of the emerging church.

• A recently released book that is an evangelical assessment of the emerging church - seems like essays from several Baptists and some other evangelical scholars like Darrell Bock.

• Dan Kimball commented about that book on his blog today and a little of his involvement with the emerging church movement. he points out that he doesn't really use the term anymore and what he had hoped would be that it would focus on evangelism.

• I've looked though this book and I think it helps express the range of those who have been called emerging. There is some healthy debate within this book. There is a wide range I believe.

Post some interesting links that you come across.

Good to Great - Social Sectors

I don't know if anyone has ever read Jim Collins, but this monograph on the social sectors is pretty interesting. In the introduction he states that 30-50% of the questions that come in are from the non-profit sector: churches, schools, NGO's etc.

"A great organization is one that delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time. For a business, financial returns are a perfectly legitimate measure of performance. For a social sector organization, however, performance must be assessed relative to mission, not financial returns. In social sectors the critical question is not 'How much money do we make per dollar of invested capital?' but "How effectively do we deliver on our mission and make a distinctive impact, relative to our resources?''

Later he talks about using subjective criteria, not necessarily quantitiative.

Fitch talked about this in his book, the criteria by which we make judgments. I pulled the Bishops report for the Atlantic Conference of the BIC, in it are three graphs: attendance, giving, indebtedness.

For the emerging church what should be the quantitative and subjective criteria that we might measure ourselves in being successful?

Love is the Final Apolgetic

From Francis Schaeffer

Inside of the Emerging/Emergent framework is the concept of "Missional", what I like to think of as the "conservative branch" of the emerging church. The original writings of the English missionary that came back from India to a post-Christian England (can't think of name right now), probably are part of this line. I read Dave Dunbar's Blog at Biblical which is very much dead center in the missional space:

http://www.biblical.edu/pages/resources/missional-journal.html

His latest posting is pretty interesting.

Schaeffer was really the last person I read in the 80s +/- Stott. When he died and continued to be ignored by the evangelicals, I gave up on the evangelical theories.

Finding Out Your an Emerging Church Person

I gave up reading evangelical books in the 80s, too much self help, too much ahistoricity, too much appropriated corporate and freudian thinking, and too much trust in logic. So i stayed with the Bible, and the old stuff, and read history, economics, and philosophy instead. About five years ago I went to a wedding of my best friend, and had dinner with, two Jews, two Hindus, a converted Jewish Christian and a quitesential evangelical who was the head of world wide missions for the Free Churches of America (my favorite denomination to use as a punching bag).

After 90 minutes of discussion of Hillel, the talmud, the Rigveda, and confucian thought (Mr evangelical said nothing during this entire dinner conversation), I turned the discussion to
Christ and his assertions. At that moment MrE turned to me and said "what are you?", I asked him "what do you mean?" He said he thought I was "into Eastern Philosophy", and I told him that I was (i'm also into Lattes btw). His confusion continued, because I was representing Christ's message, so I told him I was a Christian, this confused him even more, how do you know that other stuff, why do you talk about it - he asked. I told him because I am interested in people and what they think and believe. He then asked me what kind of Christian I was, and I hesitated, other than "heretical", I never really had a label on where I had arrived at philosophically/spirtually. So I said "post-evangelical". He asked me what that was, and I said "picking up the pieces of the last 50 nightmare years is what that is".

When the Hindus told him that they supported "Focus On the Family", he nearly he had a coronary. I told him that marriage and family were universals, lots of people were "into families". Two years later somebody talked to me about the emerging church. Thankfully I never saw him again.

What I like about the really good emerging people (Fitch & Franke come to mind) is that they are trying to understand where the people/culture are and speak to it. In my past experiences of evangelicalism I felt there was a HUGE effort to define what they should become inside some fantastical institutional/cultural mileau centered around 1950 Levitown or something, and to get them there I had some kind of MentalLogic/Incantation to do with them. How does one have a conversation and relationship in this I wondered.

When I talk about the Maronite Catholic Church, worshiping in Arabic, and using Allah
as the name for God, things can get ugly in evangelical america, but tell me this isn't worship of the Triune God at least personally for the singer

http://tr.youtube.com/watch?v=LEtboCk_9BE

There is a little more out there then what is in the Evangelical books, I suspect that simply don't have a big enough imagination and don't want to leave their carefully controlled arenas of experience. This is probably akin to the white western missionary showing up in your favorite missionary country where the "natives" need to be taught the proper sexual postion - man on top aka "the missionary position".

First Assignment for Meeting Next Week

Read, and post if you can or want to, but be prepared to talk next Monday about:

- what are the top thing or things that you like in your experience or readings about emerging/emergent theology

- what the top thing or things that you dislike in your experience or readings about emerging/emergent theology