Why Emergent?

I wrote the following for an online Episcopal Magazine.  Enjoy.

Reflections on the journey: From a Post-Evangelical, Emergent, Episcopalian

The conversation usually goes something like this:

Inquisitive Person: “So, what is the emergent church?”

Me: “Well, technically there is no emergent church.”

Inquisitive Person: (Blank stare)

Me: “It’s more of a conversation than a church.”

Inquisitive Person: (Continued blank stare)

The conversation started for me during college while I was on a mission trip in East Africa.  I was on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania living with a Christian pastor, preaching in the local church, and participating in door-to-door evangelism throughout the island.  More than a million people populate Zanzibar and at least ninety nine percent of the population is Muslim. It seems an obvious statement when looking at the situation from a certain perspective to say that Zanzibar had not yet been reached by the gospel.  This opportunity was rather significant for me.  I had grown up in the Christian & Missionary Alliance, an evangelical church, where my Christian formation involved sharing the gospel with all people.  I remember a youth rally I attended where a guest speaker told us that 166,000 people die everyday without knowing who Jesus is, and that it was up to us to go into the entire world in order to share the good news of Jesus.  I took that challenge to heart and I committed my life to sharing the gospel with the world.  Three years later there I was doing just that: sharing the gospel with people who had never heard it before. The mission was not going very well.  People were not receptive to our message and as far as I could tell, I could not foresee their minds changing anytime soon.

And that is when the conversation began for me.  My constructed Christian faith just encountered a roadblock.  For me Christianity was understood in this way: God created the world and humanity for relationship with God.  Humanity rebelled against God.  God sent Jesus to save humanity from their rebellion.  In order for humanity to be saved they must believe in Jesus and follow him.  In order for people to believe and follow Jesus, Christians must engage in evangelism so everyone has the opportunity to believe.  Eternal life in heaven is the reward for those that believe and follow; eternal damnation in hell is the punishment for those who do not. The roadblock was this: In my suburban-American-church-on-every-corner context it was plausible for this version of Christianity to make sense.  The gospel is readily available to everyone and therefore people can either choose to follow Jesus or not.  On the island of Zanzibar however, this version of Christian faith makes very little sense.  There, people do not have access to the gospel and there are no churches for them to attend.  Their lives and their worldviews have been entirely shaped by the African, Arab, Indian, and Muslim cultures that exist in East Africa.  Even though my words were translated into Swahili, my gospel message was still a foreign language that they could not comprehend.  So even if my version of Christianity was true, what good was it, if the message could not transcend the context in which it was formed?

Broadly speaking, I could respond to this roadblock in three ways.  One, I could ignore the roadblock and keep going.  This would be possible if I placed blame on either the people of Zanzibar, myself, or God. In other words, I could blame the people for refusing to believe the message I shared with them, blame myself that I was not good at sharing it, or point the finger at a God who had not chosen them for salvation.  The second response to this roadblock would be to disregard or privatize my Christian faith. Since my faith does not make sense in this new context, then it is nothing more than a human construct and has nothing to do with God.  The third response to this roadblock is what I will call the emergent conversation. That is, a conversation held in the hope that there is a way forward.

Before I expand upon how I have experienced the emergent conversation I first need to say that there are many roadblocks out there.  Scores of us have experienced roadblocks around such issues as the authority of scripture, gender, sexuality, worship styles, science and religion, etc.    And more often than not, one roadblock leads to another.  The roadblock I experienced – Christianity and mission in a pluralistic world – is a common one for younger evangelicals who participated in mission trips in high school and college.  For younger Episcopalians a roadblock may be the hierarchal structures of leadership, an inability to have influence at church, or worship styles that are unappealing.  Whatever it is, the important thing to grasp is that something has occurred that has caused one’s Christian faith to no longer be applicable in the new world in which they inhabit.  An emergent Christian is someone who is struggling to be faithful in light of the fact that they know not what it means to be faithful anymore.  They are struggling to believe, when they do not know what it is they believe in anymore.  They are reaching out in mission, even though they realize it is they themselves who are in most need of evangelism.

By the time I finished my second mission trip in Africa I was a changed person and by changed I mean utterly defeated.  I was a stranger in my own skin.  The God I knew so intimately was suddenly a stranger to me.  The vocation I was called to made little sense in my mind.  The years that followed were quite difficult for me personally.  But as I continued in my journey of faith, I found help in the form of conversation partners along the way.

I found my first conversation partner in the early church theologian Origen.  Origen was a brilliant thinker and also a person who was not afraid to take risks, or re-think things.  In his writings I found theological imagination, especially in regards to God’s plan of redemption.  I realized I wasn’t the first person to re-think how God might bring about salvation for the whole world.  I found a second conversation partner in Brian McLaren.  Like Origen, in Brian’s writings I saw someone struggling to re-imagine Christian faith in light of contemporary roadblocks that many faithful people were experiencing.  From Brian I ventured into a more academic discussion with Post-liberal theologians: Hans Frei, John Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, James McClendon and continental philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein.  In their writings I found people who have devoted their lives to articulating what truth, language, faithfulness, and Christianity might look like in a postmodern world.

At this same time I met one of my most treasured conversation partners, Robert Webber.  I had the good fortune of being one of the last students to take classes from Bob before he past away.  Bob started my journey down the Canterbury Trail by introducing me to the incredible treasure that is liturgical worship.  A year later, while attending seminary at Mars Hill Graduate School, I started attending an Anglo-Catholic parish in Seattle. There, the seed Bob had planted in me came to full fruition as I participated in the proclamation of God’s saving story through word and sacrament.  I had found a home in the Episcopal Church.  I had experienced God again through the bread and wine.  And I found a tradition that could hold (and encourage) theological imagination.

The emergent conversation has not ended for me now that I have found a church home, and that is why I now serve at Church of the Apostles here in Seattle (an Episcopal/Lutheran church that is emerging).  I believe that COTA is an emerging church because our community is engaging the conversation.  We are asking the difficult question of, “What does it mean to be the church in our day?”  And we are seeking answers that are enlightened by our traditions and at the same time relevant to the new world that we now live in.

And this is why all people can participate in this thing called “emergent”.  Being emergent is not about having a rock band, or opening up a coffee shop, or piercing you ears and quoting Derrida.  Being emergent is about being faithful to the gospel in the world that you live in now.  Not faithful for yesterday, not for the early church, or for the reformation, or 1950’s America, but for the world that you and your community of faith live in at this particular moment in time.