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"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." –John 1:14

Incarnation and Constancy in the Information Age

This new era can be unnerving, especially if you are a creature of habit. The constant stepping into a new palette, the continual discovery of fresh ground, the never-ending job of being a pioneer can take its toll on some. But there is something common to even the world moving at our speed today. It is a thing that anchors and gives basis and meaning in this fast-paced flow. It is the person and presence of God.

The Scriptures say before the mountains were made, God was, and that he is God from generation to generation. And that one generation comes and another goes, but God remains the same.

The formula of incarnation is not just being present. John 1:14 makes it clear that Jesus was present with a fullness of Truth and Grace. Those are unchanging attributes of God. They existed before the incarnation. It was God being present in human form that amazed the Galilean fishermen.

Temptations of the Ages

Presence alone leaves us imbalanced and with only the empty draw of the age. The Industrial Age could tempt people into pragmatism, to think that simply by creating an acceptable system, they could make something work without the presence of the Holy Spirit.

This world without artifacts—the world of constant change—can mesmerize many with dizzying daily revelation of the new. In the Information Age, the nightmare is that people, especially church leaders, could become so enamored with the novel that they could forget the Eternal and the Permanent. They could leave Christ out as they incarnate. They could move into time without Truth, excitedly entering an age without God, and bringing to flesh—incarnation—only themselves.

Sociology to Missiology

Without understanding our cultural environment, we could become self-marginalizing people, holding the truth in an odd isolated bunker, sadly outside of the cultural norm. And yet, if we become people who are obsessed with culture without the love of Christ—hip without being grounded in the Eternal, trendy without Truth—ironically we are made irrelevant by our idolatry of relevancy.

Sociology is only valuable to the church when it connects to eternal truth and becomes missiology.

To be continued.

Rain City Hymnal

The first offering from Re:Sound is the Rain City Hymnal. Listen online and get the record from the Re:Sound website. Find out more.

Christianity is not the same as ecclesiasticism. Christianity is centered upon Jesus Christ, as he is presented to us in the foundational document of Christianity, the Bible. Ecclesiasticism is centered in the church-its development, dogma and practice. Make no mistake about it, we cannot have Christianity without the church, at least in one vital sense, but the church is reformable and "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). Christ does not change, thus the Christian gospel never changes. But the church must change if it is to be truly faithful to both Christ and Scripture.

This principle, and the point I am making through it, is both vital and dangerous. It is vital because without it you have a tradition rooted in particular times and debates, but not a tradition that is alive and vital for the present time. It is dangerous precisely because a church that is subject to the spirit of continuous reformation is a church that can go badly astray in any age or place, and often has. It can become a church that seeks to get so close to the culture that it is virtually indistinct from the culture.

Witness the influence of liberalism on the church in the twentieth century and the resultant bankruptcy of many churches and schools that bought into this deadly form of existentialism. Liberalism presented itself as a necessary reform movement and some of its call was, in actual fact, quite correct. (This is precisely the problem, some of it was correct but the central truth of the gospel of Christ was profoundly threatened over time as the seeds of destructive process infected the church.)

The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) introduce participants to the Contextualization Spectrum (C1—C6), a helpful missiological tool for describing Christ-centered communities in the Muslim world; (2) modify this tool so as to render it useful in assessing the emerging church phenomenon; and (3) apply this modified contextualization spectrum to assess some representative samples of actual emerging churches. At the heart of my proposal is the conviction that the emerging church phenomenon is, in part, a contemporary attempt at contextualizing the gospel and the church of Jesus Christ in a changing (postmodern) world.¹ If this is the case, then the emerging church phenomenon (1) bears some similarities with contextualization efforts carried out in the past, and (2) manifests a spectrum of embodiments that are contextualized from a lesser to a greater degree.

This paper has a very narrow purpose and so I offer the following limitations: (1) I will not make a distinction in nomenclature between "emergent" and "emerging" as applied to churches and proponents; for the purposes of this paper, I will lump these together under the rubric of "the emerging church phenomenon."² (2) Regarding this rubric, it is simply a placeholder for the ill-defined yet real phenomenon of which everyone listening to this presentation has (at least) an intuitive awareness. My purpose is not to write a definition but to do an assessment of a phenomenon. (3) One may agree or disagree with my placement of a specific church along the modified contextualization spectrum. Despite agreement or disagreement on the specifics, I will establish that the emerging church phenomenon manifests a spectrum of embodiments from a lesser to a greater degree of contextualization. (4) I will not consider the house church phenomenon per se. Though it is the case that some embodiments of the emerging church phenomenon are house churches, I will treat those as emerging church house churches and not as part of the house church phenomenon; such treatment would take me far a field from my purpose. (5) I also will not consider the phenomenon of individual Christians who purposely do not belong to any church, opting to pursue interaction with others through on-line venues or occasional gatherings of friends. A more fundamental question—"Do such connections constitute a 'church?'"—needs to be raised first, but this is not my purpose.

INTRODUCTION

Thesis
The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I will raise three areas of concern Evangelicals should focus most of their attention as they assess both the Emerging Church movement (hereafter ECM) and Emergent Village (hereafter EV). Specifically, I will point to some examples of what three prominent EV leaders say regarding each. These concerns culminate with my most serious concern and secondly, I will argue there is a potential drift away from orthodox Christian views in the leadership of Emergent Village and thus, constitutes a serious concern for the larger ECM.

Two Preliminary Remarks
Let me begin with two preliminary questions. If you are privy to ECM conversations, you may see the value in starting with these questions upon hearing them. First, am I qualified to offer a critical assessment of the ECM? Second, do I reject all that comes out of the ECM?

Am I Qualified?
There is considerable concern amongst the ECM's ranks with criticism coming from outside the movement. Certainly D.A. Carson's book, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, has garnered much criticism from leaders in the ECM. Tony Jones has called it "breathtakingly bad."¹ Or listen to Brian McLaren's comments that are simultaneously an endorsement on the back cover of Bolger and Gibb's book, Emerging Churches, and a swipe at Carson's: "If you want to be truly conversant with emerging churches, this is the book to read."² Of course, the implication is Carson's book is not the one to read.