A Thinking Reed

Speaking of creating traditions…

Written by

Lee M.

in

So, I noticed among the much-discussed Time magazine list of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals” is Brian McLaren who, it appears, is the founder/guru/grand poobah of something called the “Emerging (emergent?) church.” Can somebody fill me in on what this is all about? From what I’ve been able to glean, it seems to be made up of a lot of evangelicals disaffected with the mega-church style and looking for something more “authentic,” including a recovery of traditional patterns of worship (daily office! liturgical worship! candles!). There also seems to be a lot of talk about “postmodernism” and how it’s changed everything (a claim of which I remain suspicious – “modernism” is/was never the monolith a lot of people seem to claim it is/was).

So, is this a new kind of church, a new kind of gospel (heaven forfend) or just new wineskins? As a Lutheran I have what you might call a very thin ecclesiology (some would call it no ecclesiology at all!) that comes straight out of the Augsburg Confession (Article 7 to be exact):

Also they [i.e. the evangelical churches] teach that one holy Church is to continue forever. The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.

And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike. As Paul says: One faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, etc. Eph. 4, 5. 6.

(emphasis added)

So, I have no objection, in principle, to experimenting with different “human traditions…rites or ceremonies.” I don’t get bent out of shape about the debates between “traditional” and “contemporary” styles of worship (though I certainly have my preferences!).

However, I’m curious if the emerging church sees itself as something more than that. Also, how, if at all, is it related to the “post-constantinian” church envisioned by people like Hauerwas?

Comments

2 responses to “Speaking of creating traditions…”

  1. Eric Lee

    I really don’t know what “Emergent” is quite yet, either. My friend Charlie tells me that Brian McLaren is the “posterboy” for it, although I’ve read interviews with McLaren where he says that he’s very skeptical about thinking about it or referring to it as a “movement.” I think the word he and others used is that it’s a new kind of “conversation” or something. Charlie tells me that it’ll make a lot more sense after reading McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian and his A Generous Orthodoxy: (the longest subtitle EVAR).

    All I know is that from reading a few articles by McLaren, he’s the only one I’m glad to see on Time’s so-called list. I cringe at what most of the others on there are known for.

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  2. Joshie

    The Christian Century did an entire issue on the emergant church movement late last year.

    It appears to be a coalition of post-libs and post-cons who are sick of performance based liturgy and are trying to recover some of the traditional “high church” worship styles of Easterners, Roman Catholics, and high church Anglicans. Brian MacLaren being a ring leader. Unfortuately I fear I may have already recycled that issue. It had a numbert of blogs listed too.

    The issue of worship in the early middle ages was a big source of contraversy, in the west anyway. Gregory the Great sought (sucessfully, by and large) to stamp out the idigenous liturgical forms of Northern Africa, Gaul and (as recorded in Bede’s history) the British Isles, and maybe Germany, I’m not sure, and replace them with the Roman rite. The only separate rite that survived, I beleieve, was the Milanese one that survives to this day in Northenrn Italy. The only times the liturgy has been “static” has been when those in authority have made it so, far from what I have read on another blog.

    This forcing of the Roman rite on all the Western churches is probably what the Augsburg fathers have in mind there, although Missori Synod people are the biggest liturgy nazis I have ever encountered in my life. Sometimes I wonder if they should rename it “The Synod’s Supper” as opposed to the Lord’s Supper.

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