» Answering Anthony: The sequel

Anthony: There is a fair amount of experimentation, most of it is destined to fail. Some valuable stuff will come through – but who and how can one pick it currently?

Steve: Most apples fall to the ground and rot without ever producing a new tree. Ditto for mangoes (my favorite fruit), passionfruit, paw paw (the devil’s counterfeit mangoes), grapes, tomatoes, oranges.

Most new businesses fail. Most new movements die. In the real world the fit and the lucky survive.

Of course you could give up the risky business of experimentation and stick with the way things are now. I call that the dinosaur strategy for survival. There are whole denominations that have chosen this strategy. Living off the momentum and assets of former generations. One day the temperature will change two degrees and they will drop.

How can we pick the winners? Wait around for a generation or two. History is unforgiving.

If you want to know now, get out your Bible. Read it from cover to cover. Pour out your heart to God and let Him speak to you about His heart, His mission, His people, His Son, His Spirit, His Kingdom and your calling. Let Him deal with you. Like he dealt with His Son in the wilderness and Paul on the Damascus Road. Surrender precedes revelation. That’s how you learn the difference between wood, hay and straw and the valuable stuff that lasts.

Anthony: Is the Emerging church really solving or moving forward beyond the problems of evangelicalism or are they creating a new set of problems?

Steve: The Emerging church is forcing us all think about how we do mission in a changing world. The unsettling is a good thing.

I wouldn’t buy shares in the “Revisionist” stream of the Emerging church. They’ve left Evangelicalism behind. Theologically they have reworked Liberal Protestantism and added a dash of anti-institutionalism. They don’t have a future. Except as a last refuge for disaffected Christians.

The mistake would be to make the Emerging church is the new ‘meta-narrative’ and the only hope of the church in the West. Get out more and discover what God is doing in the two-thirds world. There you’ll find conservative evangelicals like the IMB in the thick of fueling indigenous church planting movements. You’ll find Pentecostal and related movements everywhere.

Someone has described the Emerging church as a bunch of cool white guys with goatees who swear and drink cafe lattes. The emerging two-thirds world church is a bunch of poor, uneducated people who believe the Bible, love the church, experience the power of the Holy Spirit, win their friends and family, and have never heard of postmodernism and have no idea what ‘al’ is doing on the end of mission.

The two-thirds world is leading the way. In the West we are flat out trying the catch up to what God is doing in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Anthony: I am yet to see substantial similarities between the Emerging church movement and the truly great movements of the past and present like the Wesleyan revivals or the various church planting movements in China. What are the movements of the past that the Emerging church movement most resembles?

Steve: Another great question. The similarities just aren’t there yet. Every movement begins with people who are agitated about the way things are. Holy dissatisfaction. There’s a lot of that in the Emerging church. But you can’t camp there.

You can’t define yourself by what you are not. You must articulate a clear vision of the future and then take action to make it happen. The Emerging church is strong at the front end but weak at the business end. They should forget about throwing rocks at megachurches like Hillsong and get on with the work of making disciples and multiplying disciple-making groups. And if their vision doesn’t extend to the great mass of humanity beyond the West, they’ll end up being a fad rather than a movement.

As for the Emerging “Revisionists”, the movement they most resemble is the Student Christian Movement in the 20th century. I’ll be putting out a major study on SCM in the next few weeks.

Now Anthony, give me a break. No more great questions for at least a few weeks.