Thought for the week – Criticism
1 Mar 2004
A very well known NT Scholar, visited our church a couple of weeks ago at a sunday service. Now it was surprise to see him, because I know he has been critical of our church, as we have sunday services, in that if we have them we can’t be being relevant to postmodern people.
So I have have been wondering, why do people who think emerging church shouldn’t have sunday services, visit peoples sunday services to make an assessment of them? :-) When we gather I tell people who are visiting that to understand why we gather they need to see the rest of our church community outside a sunday. I am tired of churches that have sundays as the only thing they do and I am tired of christians who declare sunday services are axiomatic to modernity.
So I reflected on our church, coming up 7 years old, full of new christians (and I mean lots and lots , maybe 60% new christians) from our post-christian culture, a community project with 100 volunteers from our church that reaches 2,000 families this year. And yet because we have a sunday service, we are “irrelevant”. We might be irrelevant for many reasons, but not because we gather congregationally on a sunday.
So much of the emerging church is not what un-churched/pre christians want, but is formed around what burned out christians don’t want to do any more. BTW I found out this NT scholar, doesn’t belong to any church community, now isn’t that a surprise ;-)
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Comment by Finker
5.55 pm on 1 Mar 2004
For me, this is on the money Jason. Polarisation and mutual exclusivity seem to be commonplace in this discussion. The most inspiring examples to me of effective new expressions of church are those that seek to stand together side by side rather than competing or overtly reacting to ‘old’ ways.. Perhaps I see it unfairly as a competitive spirit, but what you have written resonates with me.
Comment by jen lemen
1.31 am on 2 Mar 2004
well said. personally, as some one sick to death of church, i would like to belong to something that doesn’t look like church at all to anyone. unfortunately, the only people who want to do that too are burnt out de-churched crabapples like me. when i think instead of serving or having a missional life that translates to postmodern people, i always come back to simple traditional things deconstructed in fresh ways that are still recognizably ‘church’. i think we’re kidding ourselves to think our hip new ways of being cool about church don’t smack of niche marketing to our reflective pre-christian friends and neighbors. just my .02.
Comment by Jay
3.45 am on 2 Mar 2004
This is so right. The reality is that church may not LOOK a whole lot different — we still engage the scriptures (albeit is new ways), we still share the sacraments, we still meet for communal worship, we still reach out to the marginalized and impoverished. The basic practices of church have remained pretty much the same since the community first gathered at Pentecost and even in the post-Christian world, these basic practices still speak of God. The difference is in the way the church SOUNDS, the content of what we proclaim, the interpretation and meaning of the sacraments, the foci and structure of worship, the justifications for loving our neighbor. From my perspective, this thing that we find ourselves in (which is I think the best description we can have of the postmodern / postchristian / emerging church)is not about form, and maybe even not about function. The challenge for all of us to avoid engaging on the form questions, and continue questioning the assumptions and content that we’ve lived under for so long (well, at least some of us old folks have lived under for so long!).
Comment by Marc
12.32 pm on 2 Mar 2004
I believe part of the problem lies within a misunderstanding of what ‘emerging church’ is about.
It has got to be about being relevant to the people in the area you live in.
A quote from a couple who are friends on mine. They have moved into a council estate in east london.
‘If we were going to do a service we couldn’t do it on a sunday because many of the children only get to see their dads on a sunday’.
Many of the families are one parent and you’d have the service when people can come. Now does that make that service or church post-modern, maybe – does it make it relevant, most definately.
I worry that an ‘Alternative for the sake of being alternative’ attitude may prevail in some quarters.
Comment by steve
2.42 am on 24 Mar 2004
Jason, you sound quite defensive. You sound like you are making the same presumptions about the visitor that you are concerned they are making about you. Is there space for the emerging to learn from our percieved “critics”? the challenge of authentic mission are so large that surely we need every ounce of insight we can glean.
Comment by Jason Clark
7.20 am on 24 Mar 2004
No Steve, Not defensive, just sighing. I heard very clearly what he said. Also I am tired of cynical christians who don’t belong to christian communities, telling others how they should do church.
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