thoughts from the ‘talking points’ @ grand rapids theological seminary…
brian mcClaren was the primary speaker for the day – he had 2 sessions then participated in a panel discussion with ed Dobson & the dean of g.r. sot.
McClaren began the morning with a statement i’ve heard before and have clung to. he said that anytime we enter into this discussion [postmodern/emerging] we need to ‘suspend judgement’. to simply hold off on our desire to define everything and land on solid ground on what we think of what’s happening. a good way to begin.
couple of points from his talk…
he began with a pic from hurricane mitch in 1998 that swept through Honduras. the pic was of a bridge [interesting, considering our initial metaphor]. the bridge was the only recognizable thing left of a road that used to connect 2 sides of a river. during the hurricane the road, on both sides of the bridge, were wiped out. so now, people from the villages on either side of the bridge come to the end of their road and wave to those that are on the other side of the bridge. the road has never been rebuilt, and those that have family, or their home, on the other side have not been able to visit or return. interesting metaphor for our time when you consider the difficulty that the modern & postmodern world seems to have, @ different points, communicating and connecting.
McClaren dropped a pretty interesting point in response to a question about moving from the modern mindset of church and Christianity into a postmodern thought process. on his slide he had this; the contemporary gospel message was about was contained in this… ‘information about going to heaven, with a small footnote about going to heaven, with a small footnote about an increased personal experience with Christ and happiness, with an smaller footnote about character development, with an small footnote about spiritual experience and a smaller footnote about global transformation.’ [i laughed out loud]
ed dobson asked the question ‘what will the emerging church speak for God on?’ fair question, here’s mcClaren’s response… poverty, racism, sexual immorality, violence, materialism. he expanded on each of these thoughts much better than i can repeat here. but looking at these freshly now these tie neatly to something else we’ve talked about here and, no doubt, elsewhere.
mcClaren was challenged by mike wittmer [sot dean] from the standpoint that mcClaren and others have said that there are plenty of good people that are involved in buddhism, islam, etc. that they even have beliefs that reflect Christianity. [the part of this conversation/accusation that gets left out is that the emerging church knows and asserts that relationship with Christ is foundational]
anyways, the emerging church desires very much to connect their beliefs to the actions; something that the modern church has not done a great job at. although i think the modern church did not intentionally live and breathe this way, the thing that has been communicated is that beliefs trump actions. ‘if i believe a certain criteria, then that is the most important thing.’ what this ends up creating [knowingly or not] is a gnostic gospel. a gospel that says that my head is the thing that matters most and my body can do what it wants, because my mind is saved. Jesus said that it is not what is on the outside that corrupts man/woman, but what is on the inside [mt.23:25 – 28].
what i see the emerging church responding to is this kind of thinking. for so long the church had been concentrating on how to get us all to heaven and we have, for a large part, forgotten what it means to live in this world. the next life is going to be great, but do we have responsibility here?
another great point mcClaren made was involvement in this change within the church. he said that not everyone HAS to be involved in this discussion. but there are some that need to. there are some that feel a desire and draw to this discussion. so on both sides of the fence, don’t begrudge those that are not engaging the conversation, but also don’t look down on those that feel the need to engage. – good words
well, this is pretty lengthy. there’s some other stuff from ed Dobson that i will post later on. he basically preached a sermon – and it was a good one!
my brain hurts – i’m done…
