Emerging Relevance
“During dinner one evening with a friend, Dan Kimball, who wrote ‘The Emerging Church,‘ I was struck by his distinction between the emergent church and the emerging church. There has been much confusion on this matter, partly due to the similarity in names. The emerging church is a growing, loosely connected movement of primarily young pastors who are glad to see the end of modernity and are seeking to function as missionaries who bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to emerging and postmodern cultures. The emerging church welcomes the tension of holding in one closed hand the unchanging truth of evangelical Christian theology (Jude 3) and holding in one open hand the many cultural ways of showing and speaking Christian truth as a missionary to America (1 Cor. 9:19-23). Since the movement, if it can be called that, is young and is still defining its theological centre, I do not want to portray the movement as ideologically unified because I myself swim in the theologically conservative stream of the emerging church.
I am particuarly concerned, however, with some growing trends among some people: the rejection of Jesus’ death on the cross as a penal substitute for our sins; resistance to openly denouncing homosexual acts as sinful; the questioning of a literal eternal torment in hell, which is a denial that holds up until, in an ironic bummer, you die and find yourself in hell; the rejection of God’s sovereignty over and knowledge of the future, as if God were a junior-college professor who knows only bits and pieces of trivia; the rejection of biblically defined gender roles, thereby contributing to the “mantropy” epidemic among young guys now fretting over the best kind of looffah for their skin type and the number of women in the military dying to save their Bed, Bath and Beyond from terrorist attacks; and the rejection of biblical names for God, such as Father, which is essentially apologising before the unbelieving world for the prayer life of the flamboyantly heterosexual Jesus, who uttered the horrendously politically incorrect “Our Father” without ever having the decency to apologise for being a misogynist patriarchal meanie. This is ultimately all the result of a diminshed respect for the perfection, authority, and clarity of Scripture, all of which was written by patriarchal men. After all, how in the world can we possibley know what anything means after we have a college degree? Come to think of it, I’m not even sure what I mean when I say that I’m not sure what Scripture means - know what I mean?
For some Emergent leaders, this critique may be as welcome as water on a cat. But I assure you that I speak as one within the Emerging Church Movement who has great love and appreciation for Christian leaders with theological convictions much different from my own. And because the movement has defined itself as a conversation, I would hope there would be room in the conversation for those who disagree, even poke a bit of fun, but earnestly desire to learn from and journey with those also striving to be faithful to God and fruitful in emerging cultures. Standing with my brothers and sisters in our great mission, I hope this book can in some small way help the greater church emerge in biblical faithfulness and missional fruitfulness.”
- Mark Driscoll, Confessions Of A Reformission Rev., 22-23
Mark does have a way of putting things, doesn’t he?
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