Emerging Church/Emerging Conversation
I won't pretend that I know all the distinctions/difference between the above terms, but I know there has been much going on in the blogosphere lately on the topic.
There are many leaders/speakers within this movement, but two of the folks in the conversation, Doug Pagitt and Brian McLaren, have made some suppositions/statements which I find somewhat disturbing.
To start, I have to say that the part of the movement which is probing what it means to be missional (however that is defined) is something that does interest me, insofar as it searches to find how the Gospel is to be practiced or lived out. It's when in trying to be missional that some folks redefine or reshape the Gospel that I have a HUGE problem.
You see, it's folks like Pagitt who state that John MacArthur preaches a perverted Gospel. Yes he said that--see this post.Pyromaniacs: Different Gospels
McLaren in a recent book, Everything Must Change casts the Gospel as a type of social gospel, where Christ came to establish His Kingdom here on earth, and the Gospel is meant to essentially cure social ills and the human condition. (see a great post by Tim Challies on McLaren's newest book here)
There's a sense in which they feel they have a new lease on the Gospel, that they are trying to invent a "new" way to be a Christian, but this social gospel has been preached before, and as Tim Challies mentions, it has been defeated.
McLaren and Pagitt want to leave behind "stuffy" Protestantism and orthodoxy, but if you do this in abandoning basic understandings of justification, atonement, etc, you have no Gospel at all. Jesus did not come to die so that we could have a better world--he died to save us from it and from the wrath of God!
Were the disciples preaching the Gospel to help create a better world? Did they die for that? Did Paul preach dying to oneself everyday because the people he was preaching to needed a better sense of community? NO! He preached to them because they were sinners, and they needed a savior! When Peter speaks in his letter about being prepared to give an answer for the hope that you have, he speaks of the hope in Christ that we have for our salvation, not some social interpretation of the gospel.
Helping and serving others should be a work that is an outflow of the grace that Christ has shown us--it should be a means, not an end of preaching the Gospel, and that's where I fear that the focus of this "conversation" is moving toward.
We have been told in the Gospel that there is one name by which we are saved, and that is through Christ--He said Himself that no one can come to the Father except through Him. If we begin to make the Gospel into a different focus other than the fact that each person needs to come to Christ for salvation, then the Gospel is not preached.
There are many leaders/speakers within this movement, but two of the folks in the conversation, Doug Pagitt and Brian McLaren, have made some suppositions/statements which I find somewhat disturbing.
To start, I have to say that the part of the movement which is probing what it means to be missional (however that is defined) is something that does interest me, insofar as it searches to find how the Gospel is to be practiced or lived out. It's when in trying to be missional that some folks redefine or reshape the Gospel that I have a HUGE problem.
You see, it's folks like Pagitt who state that John MacArthur preaches a perverted Gospel. Yes he said that--see this post.Pyromaniacs: Different Gospels
McLaren in a recent book, Everything Must Change casts the Gospel as a type of social gospel, where Christ came to establish His Kingdom here on earth, and the Gospel is meant to essentially cure social ills and the human condition. (see a great post by Tim Challies on McLaren's newest book here)
There's a sense in which they feel they have a new lease on the Gospel, that they are trying to invent a "new" way to be a Christian, but this social gospel has been preached before, and as Tim Challies mentions, it has been defeated.
McLaren and Pagitt want to leave behind "stuffy" Protestantism and orthodoxy, but if you do this in abandoning basic understandings of justification, atonement, etc, you have no Gospel at all. Jesus did not come to die so that we could have a better world--he died to save us from it and from the wrath of God!
Were the disciples preaching the Gospel to help create a better world? Did they die for that? Did Paul preach dying to oneself everyday because the people he was preaching to needed a better sense of community? NO! He preached to them because they were sinners, and they needed a savior! When Peter speaks in his letter about being prepared to give an answer for the hope that you have, he speaks of the hope in Christ that we have for our salvation, not some social interpretation of the gospel.
Helping and serving others should be a work that is an outflow of the grace that Christ has shown us--it should be a means, not an end of preaching the Gospel, and that's where I fear that the focus of this "conversation" is moving toward.
We have been told in the Gospel that there is one name by which we are saved, and that is through Christ--He said Himself that no one can come to the Father except through Him. If we begin to make the Gospel into a different focus other than the fact that each person needs to come to Christ for salvation, then the Gospel is not preached.
Labels: Christ, Christian, Church, community, God, good works, Gospel, grace, means of grace, salvation, santification, service
2 Comments:
At 8:56 AM , Chris said...
Dan
I agree with you. I find many disturbing things about the Emergent Church movement. I hear Brian McLaren is a very engaging writer. I have never read anything by him other than stuff I read on the internet, but some of his ideas and some of the ideas of the Emergent Church movement seem to be destructive to the message of the gospel.
At 5:56 PM , Dan B. said...
Chris,
He is indeed engaging, and it would seem that he really does believe what he states but it is certainly deceptive all the same and very destructive to the Gospel message. It has seemed like we have moved from the mega-church seeker mentality (which we may still be in) to this--watering the Gospel down is now thrown aside for completely re-working and re-defining it.
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