On the Emerging/Emergent Theological Movement and Missional Ecclesiology
As I read and reread emerging literature relating to the emergent church movement, I feel at times as if I were standing on the edge of an enticingly tempting precipice that seems to be luring me into ever increasingly realizing the consideration of jumping off the cliff of a tall multiple story building scraping the sky like Peter in one of the episodes of “Heroes” on NBC TV. I can see the paradigm shift[ing] over the horizon into an other vast “[N]Ever”/”[N]Ether”-Land of vistas yet to be fully viewed, experienced, engulfed by and immersed in. Here are some modified excerpts that may help me imbibe and process this material more and more toward further progress as we move forward in faith, forging onward through the journey ahead of us.
…the center of the [emerging/emergent theological] movement is about [missional] ecclesiology not epistemology. …the emerging [missional] church movement …is a definite threat to [what has been the] traditional [praxis of] evangelical ecclesiology. [And yet,] Jamie Smith, in his “Who’s Afraid of Postmodernity?”, argues… that postmodernity is compatible, at times, with classical Augustinian epistemology. …emerging thinkers embrace a proper confidence and a chastened epistemology. …they are wary of propositions and they believe in faith, or trusting in God who is Truth, but not in our constructed statements about God and the faith. They stiff arm criticism when they announce, rather boldly at times, that only God is Absolute Truth and that nothing – emphasize that: nothing – we know can be grasped absolutely. They speak of orthodoxy as a way of believing in the right way, or of the preeminence – or at least egalitarianism – of orthopraxy vs. orthodoxy. They think the gospel is lived and seen and embodied, that the gospel can’t simply be known noetically but must be experienced, and they sometimes say truth is relational rather than rational.ÂÂThe central element of this missional praxis is that the emerging movement is not attractional in its model of the church but is instead missional: that is, it does not invite people to church but instead wanders into the world as the church. It asks its community “How can we help you?â€? instead of knocking on doors to increase membership. In other words, it becomes a community with open windows and open doors and sees Sunday morning as the opportunity to prepare for a week of service to the community, asking not how many are attending the services but what redemptive traits are we seeing in our community. It wants to embody a life that is other-oriented rather than self-oriented, that is community-directed rather than church-oriented.ÂÂ
–�What is the Emerging Church?� (p. 7, 9-11, 13, 21) by Scot McKnight, delivered during a conference in October 26-27, 2006 at Westminster Theological Seminary
