An Emerging Church?

Emergence of the Butterfly

Daniel 12: 4 Many will go here and there to increase knowledge.

The modern era of history is over. We still say things are "modern" when we mean they are "up-to-date." But there is another meaning of the word. I'd say the Modern Era came into being with the printing press and the rise of secular science. It was the time of reducing everything to its simplest form. The keys to the universe could be unlocked by locating fixed laws, by observing nature in the raw, by a starkly honest and uncompromising approach to finding "truth" in the material world. And it produced some miracles. It also shook the foundations of religion and politics.

Europe was the breeding ground for the modern revolution. And when it was over, the old Catholic/Monarchy system of the Middle Ages was placed in mothballs. Kings and popes were replaced by forms of representative government. And the separation of church and state is still an issue.

The modern revolution, with its humanistic and mechanistic attitude, also affected the church. Protestantism ~ with its emphasis on protest ~ also rose up to challenge the model of the Middle Ages. Anybody could now have a Bible and figure out what it meant. The result was division.

But it also heralded a day of a very rational and literal approach to interpretation, reducing Bible ideas to simplistic and formulaic "universal" laws. The result was a stripped-down, austere Christianity, freed from any mysticism and ritual. It was shiny, metallic, and robotic. The idea was that the Christian life and the Bible could be de-coded and understood and that the true meaning of it all could be realized by finding the bottom-line. But whose bottom-line would win the day?

As the 20th century closed, after 500 years of modernism, technology was again revolutionizing the way things are done, perceived, and understood. Modernism reduced populations to individual cells of dogmatic ideas, where subcultures all staked their claims to "ultimate" truth. Now, with the onset of postmodernism, all subcultures become suspect. Or, as Pontius Pilate once put it: "What is truth?"

It doesn't matter any more what is "right." Right is how you see right. Right is what you define as right. Moderns said, "There are absolutes....fixed laws." But post-moderns said, "You can't prove it. Your definition is right as far as it gets you. But my definition may be different, and just as reliable." So we live today in a tension between these two ways of seeing reality, which affects how we practice our religious lifestyles.

Enter Postmodernism, where everything is post-something. It is the aftermath of the modern world. No longer are we so sure about E=Mc2. Physics has moved from self-assuredness to abstract chaos. Globalism is deconstructing whole cultures. Boundaries are becoming confused.

A few in the church have picked up on this changing climate of social mechanisms. They are embracing the postmodern world instead of demonizing it. But because postmodernism threatens to undo absolutes, modernist Christians cling to their dissolving securities. And those trying to process the changes sound like so much white noise to their modernist brethren.

Postmodern Christians are now describing themselves, loosely, as "Emergent." That is, they are in a petri dish of new ideas, trying to reconcile these things with their faith. So they are emerging, growing in the freshness of the new environment. Is it dangerous? Isn't it always dangerous to explore?

Regardless of how well the Emergents fare in Christianity, postmodernism will affect the church, for the church must roll with the flow of these changes. Many, particularly those with the most fundamentalistic bent, are kicking against the emergents. Rather than good news, they think postmodernism is the death knell for good religion. They are afraid of releasing their absolutes. They are inflexible and they like it that way.

But the postmodern world cannot long abide with fundamentalism: in religion, science, or politics. The two concepts of reality will meet like two rams locking horns. But this is not a call for the church to let go of her moral fiber, her faith in Christ, or her missional trajectory. Instead, I think, the Holy Spirit is saying, "Come up higher." We have muddled around in the modernist/literalist puddle long enough. Those who remain behind will become quaint anachronisms. They will make a lot of noise and still lead souls to Christ (who is not dependent on our systems), but they will ultimately have difficulty relating to an environment they don't understand.

The postmodern church will still have her denominations ~ her splits and splinters ~ leftovers from the modern Protestant era. But they will lose their aura as exclusive clubs.
They will be appreciated on their own merits. And they will lose the sense that they hold monopolies on truth. They will cease to think of themselves more highly than they ought.

When the fair lady, the glorious church of Jesus Christ, comes to love all her members in particular, she will love herself, and she will be walking in love with God who is love. But the painful shedding of the modern skin must commence.