Church in the Present Tense (emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Clark Jason , Kevin Corcoran , Peter Rollins , Scot Mcknight

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102 pages

English

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Much has been written by practitioners advocating the emerging church phenomenon, but confusion about the nature and beliefs of those who identify with the emerging church still exists. Now that the movement has aged a bit, the time has come for a more rigorous, scholarly analysis. Here four influential authors, each an expert in his field, discuss important cultural, theological, philosophical, and biblical underpinnings and implications of the emerging church movement. Their sympathetic yet critical assessment helps readers better understand the roots of the movement and the impact that it has had and is having on wider traditions.

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Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 février 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441214492
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0720€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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© 2011 by Kevin Corcoran
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
E-book edition created 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1449-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
is a partnership between Baker Publishing Group and Emergent Village, a growing, generative friendship among missional Christians seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The ē mersion line is intended for professional and lay leaders like you who are meeting the challenges of a changing culture with vision and hope for the future. These books will encourage you and your community to live into God’s kingdom here and now.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the following individuals and institution for support and encouragement during various stages of this project: Jonny Baker; Kester Brewin; Allistair Duncan; Brian McLaren; Archbishop Rowan Williams; each of the other authors: Scot, Peter, and Jason; Bob Hosack and Jeremy Cunningham of Brazos Press; Kurt and Lori Wilson for friendship and for their many tangible contributions to this book and the courses out of which it grew; and John Witvliet and the Institute for Christian Worship at Calvin College. The Institute made it possible not only to include the very talented team of Kurt and Lori Wilson on this project but also to collaborate with students in ways meaningful not only to them but to me as well. Thanks to all of you.
Introduction
The Emerging Church
Kevin Corcoran
The Christian church has a history. The birth of the church traces its lineage back to Jesus from Nazareth, and more specifically to a community’s belief in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ. Of course, the Christ event itself is embedded in a history, a peculiarly Jewish history. Absent that (Jewish) history, the Christ event is evacuated of theological significance. That a human being should rise from the dead would certainly be a historical curiosity, just another startling oddity in a world that throws up such natural oddities as carnivorous plants and marsupial wolves. But absent a narrative of sin and redemption, a narrative of kingship and exodus, a resurrection from the dead would remain nothing more than an odd curiosity.
What we know as the emerging church is no different. It too has a history. Its history begins in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. It was there, in London, that people like Jonny Baker (who appears on the DVD insert that accompanies this volume), Ian Mobsby, and others began what can best be described as experiments in worship . These communities were self-consciously contextual, both culturally and geographically. The aesthetics of their worship reflected the gifts, skills, and talents of the human resources indigenous to its members, which included artists of various sorts, writers, social visionaries, and the like. These communities also exploited the emerging cultural resources known and daily used by its members, including technological resources such as new media and social networking resources that were just coming into existence via the world wide web.
Many of these experiments were not originally undertaken outside or in opposition to the institutional church, which in the United Kingdom is the Anglican Church. Often these experimental groups began within and with the aid and blessing of the Anglican Church. Today the archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, Rowan Williams, is a staunch defender of the movement. (An interview with the archbishop is included on the DVD accompanying this volume.) “Fresh expressions” is the phrase currently being employed to describe these new ways of doing church within Anglicanism. The term emerging , which is also used in the United Kingdom, is actually a fairly recent American export.
What we know as the emerging church in the United States began later, in the late 1990s. And unlike the alternative worship movement in the United Kingdom, it seems fair to say that the US emerging church movement began as a reaction against institutional church within evangelical Protestantism. Emergent Village, for example, originally began as a small band of disillusioned friends who gathered for the purpose of forging a way to follow Jesus at the end of the twentieth century and at the dawn of the twenty-first.
In 2000 Tony Jones met with friends in the Minnesota woods to dream about, argue about, and contemplate the future of Christianity. A year later Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Tim Keel, and others adopted the “emerging” moniker. Since then, and thanks in no small measure to the explosion of Internet blogs and new means of social networking, the emerging church has been spreading like a virus.
It seems fair to say that while the alternative worship movement in the United Kingdom was, at the beginning, primarily concerned with rethinking and reimagining worship practices, the emerging church in the United States was from its inception concerned with rethinking and reimagining Christian theology as well as Christian practice.
Despite these differences the emerging church in the United States and its British counterpart share the same animating principles and ethos. Below I describe the emerging church as it exists today on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Church and Postmodernism
Each January I teach a three-week course in London and Belfast on the emerging church. To give you a feel for an emerging church, let me describe an experience I had several years ago in London. I was participating in an Anglo-Catholic Mass in a very old church that blended ancient ritual, liturgy, and creeds with the use of the latest image and sound reproduction, including an elegant MacBook Pro, which was perched on the altar table just to the left of the consecrated elements. I found this juxtaposition utterly shocking. There was the priest, dressed in high-church vestments and performing the liturgy, ancient and regal. And also there—a MacBook Pro. On the altar!
What to me seemed initially incongruous was to my students ho hum. Bread and wine are ordinary things; so too a laptop computer. If the former can become for us the body and blood of Christ, why can’t the other, ordinary though it may be, function as a window through which God’s love and mercy are communicated via image and sound?
Postmodernism , as I point out in “Who’s Afraid of Philosophical Realism?” is both a cultural phenomenon and a philosophical movement. Cultural postmodernism involves various and sundry sorts of cultural shifts, sensibilities, and notions, while philosophical postmodernism involves, among other things, calling into question “metanarratives,” or grand stories of the world and our place in it. The Christian story is one such narrative. Atheistic naturalism is another. Consciously or not, each of us fits our own particular story into a larger story (or stories). What gets called into question by philosophical postmodernism is our ability to float free of the grand narratives we find ourselves in and to view things from a “God’s eye view.” Those sensitive to the postmodern situation, like those in the emerging and altworship movements, claim that our grasp of reality is always partial, incomplete, fragmentary. This, I suggest, leads those in the movement to emphatically promote tolerance and enthusiastically participate in dialogue—religious, political, and otherwise.
Second, emerging Christians tend to be theologically pluralistic and suspicious of tidy theological boxes. They believe that God is bigger than any theology and that God is first and foremost a storyteller, not a dispenser of theological doctrine and factoids. Theology for them, therefore, is conceived as an ongoing and provisional conversation. Indeed, many prefer the descriptor “emerging conversation” to “emerging church.”
Emerging Christians are also allergic to thinking that fixates on who is going to heaven and who is going to hell, or on who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside. They stress the importance of right living (ortho praxy ) over right believing (ortho doxy ). What’s important, some often say, is whether you engage in God-love and neighbor-love. They believe the gospel is a radically this-worldly bit of good news.
Third, emerging Christians believe the church must change if it is to speak meaningfully to a postmodern culture. So, like the prophet Amos, the rhetoric of emerging Christians can be shocking, alarming, and hyperbolic. They are frequently given to dramatic overstatement. But it should be kept in mind that, at its best and most sincere, the aim of the rhetoric is to rouse us (the church) from dogmatic slumber, to get us to see old things with new eyes, or sometimes to see completely new things