Emerge or Submerge
Without theology, we’ll be right back to pragmatism (What works?!) ruling the church. Without question, theological education and training is in desperate need of reform. I’m devoting much of my energy in that direction. But without theology altogether, we’ll merely have so-called pastors who are little more than technicians offering hollow experiences to people struggling through their chaotic, random lives.
Protesting the absence of a metanarrative in mainstream culture and protesting the pragmatism of the church is the primary reason we need to be teaching God’s Word as Story. Everyone is talking about the value of preaching and teaching narratively these days. It isn’t new information that narrative teaching is often more engaging to audiences than outlined, alliterated points. But effective communication is not the driving reason for teaching God’s Word as story, otherwise we have relegated the “Story” to just one more culturally relevant tool with little long-term impact. However, as we seek to see how our very lives and ministries are shaped and guided by the essence of God’s Story, and as we consider the ways God continues to script His story in and through our lives and ministries, suddenly God’s Story takes on revolutionary meaning.
Viewing life and ministry in light of the metanarrative brings context to what we are doing by showing how it’s connected to what God has started in the past and what he continues to do in our midst. Suddenly the Exodus becomes part of our story, not just “Israel’s” story. We are connected to the persecution the Ephesians believers experienced in the 1st Century. This is just the beginning of what it looks like to use the metanarrative to shape how we live and minister. “People who allow their own personal story to be shaped around the story of Jesus himself, discover that they are the assembly of the living God, as opposed to various gatherings of the gods of popular culture” (Wright 2003, p. 41).
As we live and minister in light of God’s Story, we are protesting the modernistic categories of the past and protesting the contemporary notions that our lives exist without any sense of greater meaning. May we be very culturally irrelevant when it comes to thinking that there are multiple grand stories that lead us all to some nihilistic hopelessness. Instead, “As we come to understand the Grand Story that gives our lives meaning and purpose, the countercultural nature of God’s People begins to take root” (Webber p. 154).
The emergent church must also find creative and transformational ways to protest the predominant threads of American culture considered earlier—Individualism, Isolationism, and Consumerism. In the broadest sense, theology and shaping our lives and ministries through the Story of God is the most important way to protest these vices. More specifically, the emergent church must carefully and completely embody the value of authentic community centered on our shared story.
Community is the obvious antithesis to all three threads (Individualism, Isolationism, and Consumerism). Community doesn’t sound all that antithetical to American culture because cultural icons like Starbucks laud it as a value of their own. But a countercultural community that finds its identity in the redemptive story of God goes far beyond going to a place where the barista calls me by name (and where the experience is ultimately intended to increase the bottom line of the stock holders). Community begins to take on a countercultural, transformational effect when we not only enjoy the friendship and encouragement of a community but are also willing to surrender to the authority of the local church community. Communal authority becomes a tangible revolt against individualism, isolationism, and consumerism because the formation, discipleship, and care of the whole are of greater value than just each individual’s rights and agendas. Protesting the threads of American culture comes in developing communities in churches where individuals surrender to the community their schedules, their career goals, their money, who they should date, and more. We’ve all seen community as the middle name of churches where there’s little sense of true community. Worshipping in a coffeehouse like atmosphere isn’t bad but it’s not going to give us the countercultural revolution we’ve been called to lead. Protesting through community means forming a diverse community whose identity lies in Christus Victor and His Story rather than in the affinity of race, age, or socio-economic disparities.
These methods of protesting culture are just the beginning of how emergent ministries can have a revolutionary impact upon culture. The greatest understanding of what it looks like to protest culture is simply to live out kingdom values—wherein we value money, safety, status, independence, and the like in radically different ways than those who don’t follow Jesus.
Embrace
The other side of what it looks like to be a relevantly countercultural presence of Christ lies in embracing some of the redemptive qualities of the culture in which we live. We must not allow a countercultural approach to lead us down the road where the American fundamentalist movement lead its followers in the 20th Century nor where the Amish movement has lead them. The tension of being church in the 21st Century requires living in the radical middle between those cultural realities we must protest, and those realities which we should embrace and reform.
Postmodernity is wrought with some God-honoring values, including the quest for spirituality, a craving for intimacy, and the need to move beyond mere science and reason amidst our epistemology. We need to embrace the current emphasis on these values and reform them in order to more effectively embody Christ.
For example, we need to embrace the way postmodernity acknowledges mystery, tension, and pain. Modernity tried to explain all those things away and all too often, our culturally relevant messages have done the same thing. As a result, we’ve sucked the very life out of God’s Story. Simplistic, formulaic approaches to life and ministry are not an accurate reflection of how God relates to his people through his Story. We need to embrace the authenticity and honesty that permeates much of our culture as we serve emergent ministries. We need to pursue people in our communities and embrace their honesty about their restlessness, so that together, we might join St. Augustine in declaring, “Thou has made us for thyself, O God, and our souls are restless until they find their rest in thee” (Augustine 1992 ed.).
Another thread of postmodernism for us to embrace is some elements of constructivist epistemology. Before you write me off as heretical, I already acknowledged our need to protest the fallacy that there is no grand metanarrative. Absolute truth exists in the Person and Story of God. However, there is some deeply redemptive value to a constructivist epistemology that comes with postmodern thought. While we don’t get to create what truth is, we do come to know truth in constructivist ways. There are some things that can be deduced positivistically; however, a great deal of life and reality is constructed through experience and in community with others. My family, my church experiences, and my life journey shape my understanding of God and His Redemptive Story.
Our understanding of truth is always thwarted and shaped by our contexts and limited perspectives. So as we embrace the constructivist notions of learning, wherein we acquire knowledge in community with other learners, we have the potential of gaining a much more accurate understanding of truth. We should embrace a constructivist spirit in thinking about how we come to know truth, including the role of our experiences, our own reading and research of the Bible, the work of the Spirit, and discerning the meaning and significance of discerning truth in community, with other members of Christ’s body.
We also need to embrace the value of relationships and the craving for intimacy expressed in much of our current culture. After all, what could be more culturally relevant than living life with people in their worlds?! When defending cultural relevance, we usually point to Jesus. At times we do so carelessly by suggesting Jesus was culturally relevant in every way. Over-turning tables and telling a Jewish audience “I AM the temple” was not very seeker-sensitive or culturally relevant.
Yet the incarnation of Christ is the best picture we have of contextualizing God’s mission in a language people can understand. If we poured half as much energy into pursuing incarnational relationships with people, understanding their worlds, and knowing what it means for them to live out the countercultural nature of God’s Story, we’d be much further ahead than spending twice that much energy, not to mention financial resources, on doing the latest and greatest trendy ideas. Effective tools for communication and good environments are not bad. But incarnational relationships trump those more hollow forms of contextualization every time (Argue & Livermore 2002, “MTV…”)! The most important way we embrace any part of culture is to embrace people themselves, accepting them for who they are, where they are.
Category: Ministry, Winter 2007
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