The skeleton and the muscle

Len, on the Next Reformation site notes that Mike Breen essentially says we have two broad groups in the church, with two orientations.

* the traditional and pragmatic prefer the bounded set .. definition, boundaries, clear ways to identify who is in and who is out
* the “emergent” prefer the centered set.. direction, focus, purpose and an emphasis on process over location

Mike raises the body metaphor to compare these two groups and describe why they need each other. The pragmatic are like the skeleton, the emergent are like the muscle.

You can get a skeleton to stand up, but you can’t get it to move.
You can get muscle to move, but it wont’ stand up.

“We need to ask the Spirit of God to bring a great rattling so the bones will stand up, and then to breathe upon those bones so they will live so we will have a mighty army.”

Mike Breen is one of the founders of The Order of Mission - TOM - in Sheffield. To quote (at some length) from their website, this is what they're about:

TOM is a pioneering movement born out of a desire to fully give ourselves to making disciples of Jesus in this fast changing world. We stand in the tradition of the missionary communities of the past who lived as radical, pioneering pilgrims called to influence, serve and shape society and the church in their time: the Celtic monks and nuns who first re-evangelised these nations, the Methodists and the Salvation Army who called a people back to God in their days, the Protestant missionary societies who re-discovered global mission in the nineteenth century.

The Order of Mission is a dispersed community of pioneers, people called to lead and influence within whatever context and culture they live and work: cities and rural areas, developed and developing countries, business, education, arts, health and social care, public and private sector, family and church. We are a people who have committed ourselves to the vows of simplicity, purity and accountability. We take ‘Lifeshapes’ as our rule or pattern of life and seek to journey together, encouraging and challenging each other, as we follow God’s call on our lives.

Click on the link above to find out more about them.

Posters

On the spurgeon.org site there's a section with a heap of posters.
Yup, so what?
Well, they take a number of issues in contemporary Christianity, issues that are in many cases divisive, and put an ironic/sardonic/sarcastic/witty spin on them. You have to check out the posters themselves, because the captions on their own, while clever, work best in tandem with the pictures. I've included one below (and hope the producers of these (Emergent-See Po-Motivators) will forgive me. (I'm doing it to advertise them, after all!)



Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how you'd use these posters - or whether you need to get permission to use them if it comes to that - but they're certainly worth checking out as thought-provokers, conversation-starters and the like.

Still emerging?

The latest Next-Wave Church and Culture has the following article in it. I've included the first paragraph. (It gets clearer!). Anyone who wants a bit more insight into the Emerging/Emergent Church will find it here - Creech is one of the early starters in the movement.

What I am and what I'm not - or a short history and explanation of the wider "emerging church" by Alan Creech.
one - the winds of culture
Interesting times we live in. Christian people are all over the lot. You can't really pin it down can you. Even those within certain sectors are hard to connect. I've seen a couple of things lately about the "emergent church" or "the emerging church" and what it is and isn't, etc., blah blah. It's all a very confusing sort of mess at this point. It wasn't always. When all this business first started "happening," however it was happening, wherever it was happening, it was much simpler. At least it seemed like it was. Perhaps it was just as complex but nobody was paying attention to it and analyzing the hell out of it like they are now. It's actually getting press at this point, weird.

Meanwhile, over on Tall Skinny Kiwi, Alan Jones is asking: Emergent Church; use the word or dump it? He then goes on to say:
I have been asked to help set up an "Emerging Church Fund" that supports the global emerging church movement which is something I and the people asking me to organize it see as a structure that partners with the World Evangelical Alliance and Church Mission Society and helps financially resource new works in the emerging culture that are simple cell based structures. They are a worthy investment, I believe and have been proclaiming for many years, because the money does not go to buildings or to salaries. Because the emerging churches we support do not have paid pastors but function more like the early church, they are a fruitful way to invest money in mission projects because they accomplish a lot with a little. And despite being worthy from a financial perspective, they are also strategic because the emerging culture, although smaller, is often where the culture leaders hang out. Money invested in emerging church movements goes a really long way which is why I have been pointing to so many of these movements around the world for so long.

See the rest of the post here.

The Forgotten Ways

Alan Hirsch wrote in his book, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church -

Missional church is a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people.

On his blog site, also called The Forgotten Ways, he takes issue with the word 'missional' being made to be the new emergent. In other words, if I'm reading him rightly, he doesn't believe that the emergent church is a new way of being missional. For him 'it was not so much that the church has a mission but that the mission has a church' - that is, mission is what the church does, and the reason many churches fail is that they forget to keep on in mission.

Emergent, Missional, Effective?

David Fitch responds to the statement below from Mark Driscoll by addressing the nature of mission in a post Christian context.

Driscoll said:

And all the nonsense of emerging, and Emergent, and new monastic communities, and, you know, all of these various kinds of ridiculous conversations--I'll tell you as one on the inside, they don't have converts. The silly little myth, the naked emperor is this: they will tell you it's all about being in culture to reach lost people, and they're not.

I often hear this in places where I speak. It usually goes something like this: "We love missional theology, but does it work? How many converts have you had in your missional church?” Once again, the modernist drive to measure success raises its ugly head. Yet it does not offend me because these are important questions. I believe if we are not seeing people transformed by the gospel then "missional" in the end means very little.

Fitch responds to this on the Out of Ur blog, shows that mission is essential for churches, but is also very difficult both to sustain and to see 'results' from.

The emerging church has not really emerged

The title of this post comes from a series of personal observations about trends in Queensland churches - so don't take it as a statement of fact...!

John Sweetman has written ten observations about the church, and has this to say about the emerging church:
Experiments are continuing in Queensland, but there are few success stories yet. Perhaps the conservative nature of Queensland means that new things happen more slowly. Perhaps the emerging church will never have a strong following but will minister to a niche market. Time may tell.

The emerging (or emergent) church idea has been all the rage in recent years. Maybe it's time has come, maybe it hasn't; maybe it's only part of the whole. There's an excellent overview of it on Wikipedia (fast becoming the encyclopedia of choice!), but for an even more detailed view, check on Scot McKnights, 'Five Streams of the Emerging Church' in which he quotes Eddie Gibbs' definition of 'emerging church':

Emerging churches are communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures. This definition encompasses nine practices. Emerging churches (1) identify with the life of Jesus, (2) transform the secular realm, and (3) live highly communal lives. Because of these three activities, they (4) welcome the stranger, (5) serve with generosity, (6) participate as producers, (7) create as created beings, (8) lead as a body, and (9) take part in spiritual activities.

McKnight checks out the points in this definition, and goes much further. Well worth a visit.