Catalyst #4: Emergents grew up in a time of serious public failings of evangelical leaders (Ted Swaggart and Jim Baker). This amplifies the feelings of cynicism towards the church as a viable institution...and creates the felt need to start over with greater authenticity.
Huzzah!
Yay for a commitment to greater authenticity and integrity within the church. This is clearly not only a problem for people who grew up in the church but also for people who look at the church from the outside.
The Danger
The dangers here are the same as with any new start-up that's attempting to break away or re-form something that they see as antiquated or no longer functioning: it becomes self-righteous (everyone else is doing it wrong and we've got it right) or more reactive (this is what we're NOT) rather than pro-active (this is who we are and what we're doing).
There's also the temptation/desire to make the break so badly that you chuck stuff that's good. This certainly happened to some extent in the Protestant Reformation. It's certainly happening some here in the Emergent church as well, at least in some parts of it.
I also find in my situation that bashing on the church (both to Christians and non-Christians) garners cheap trust. Hey, I'm cool, I think that the church by-and-large is a really screwed up institution that can't be trusted and is pretty much a disaster top to bottom. So we're all on the same side! Most all of my students are cynical towards the church.
So the danger here is that we feed into cynicism (which is a sin) rather than do faithful re-hab that genuinely acknowledges the brokenness of the church and also the beautiful and glorious stuff about the church throughout the centuries: schools built, drinking water purified, hospitals and orphanages and disaster teams. It's not all bad. In other words, we need to be honest about the church as it truly is--and still love it. Christ does.
The Verdict
I think that there's some good stuff here...just depends on how it all plays out in the individual church and in the individual lives.
1 comment:
i've been thinking about this a lot over the summer and the beginning of this semester. i certainly have a lot of issues with the church, and with the evangelical community in general, and I have spent a lot of time being cynical and wanting to pull away. but i'm starting to realize that just getting angry and separating yourself from the church accomplishes nothing. it just makes you bitter and unhappy, and leaves the church exactly the way it is. what the church needs are people who are dissatisfied with the way things are, but who are committed to remain in the church, offering grace for its shortcomings, and working to make it into the church that it needs to be, the church that it is called to be. no matter what our views of the church and how wrong we might think it is sometimes, it obviously got something right, because all of us have the church to thank for giving us the opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel. St. Augustine says it well, "The Church is a whore, but she is my mother."
i think this applies to our IV chapter, too. there are a lot of people (upperclassmen especially) who are dissatisfied with IV, and disillusioned with our community. and the tendency there is to pull away, to make other things more important, to be quick to judge and criticize the things that our chapter does. but again, that accomplishes nothing. We need people with a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo, who can be patient, but persistent, agents of change. We need people to step up, to commit to making our chapter into the community that God has called us to be. Cynicism is the easy way out, and it won't bring life to our community.
wow, that's a really long comment. hopefully it made some sense!
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