We Have Seen Emergence Christianity & It Was Once Us

I began last week's reflection with a quote from our 2012 Adult Retreat leader Phyllis Tickle: “If ever I saw an Emergence bunch of folks, it's you all!”

That makes me feel good. It's exciting to think someone from the outside looks at us and thinks we are about the things that make for a cutting edge church. Everybody likes to be seen as being relevant to the times. Thank you. Phyllis.

And then she hit us with a blindside. She called us the Jerusalem Church.

The Jerusalem Church?

In the book of Acts, the Jerusalem Church was the church led by James the brother of Jesus and a number of other conservative Jewish followers of Jesus. They were the ones who took issue when newer churches like the one at Antioch started allowing Gentiles to come into their fellowship without having to observe Jewish customs like circumcision and dietary law. The Jerusalem Church was the conservative "home church," while Antioch was the cutting edge, Emergence church.

How can this be? How can we be both an Emergence church and also the Jerusalem Church?

The answer is time. If you remember, when the Jerusalem Church was first founded at Pentecost, it was the cutting edge, church of the Emergence. But a quarter of a century passed between that day and the time the Antioch Church was founded. The same is true for us at Second B. When we were founded in 1958, we did indeed have all the charismatic characteristics of Emergence Christianity (you can read these in last week's article). We still do. But now we also have the institutional characteristics of a Jerusalem Church — an aging congregation, high operational costs, established forms of organizational structure, decision-making, and worship —which are said to define "who we are", etc.

None of this is bad in and of itself. It's simply what happens to the Jerusalem Church in the pages between the Day of Pentecost and the founding of the Church at Antioch. The task of a Jerusalem Church like ours is to remain open to new movements of the Holy Spirit which will certainly move us from "who we are" in the present toward what God calls us to be in the advent future.

We call such movements "renewal" — a making again. Renewal is the re-making of the Jerusalem Church, not into the Church of Antioch, but rather again into the Church of Pentecost — a church ready to be born again by the wind and flame of God's power.

You can read more about what this renewal might mean for Second B next week.