More thoughts on church and worship

Between blogs, books, and sermons at church, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about different ways of doing/being church. Some perhaps rambling thoughts on the subject:

There are three common faith-oriented responses to the perceived (and sometimes very real) shallowness of evangelical churches. There are also of course responses that are not what I would call “faith-oriented”: staying in the church and accepting shallowness as good enough, becoming cynical and giving up on any form of church, or complaining about it but doing little or nothing about it.

The first response is to try to make incremental changes from within the church. This is the approach taken by most Christians I have known personally. They pray for revival, work to establish small group Bible studies to get people to go deeper in the Word and in obedience, try to influence worship planning to include more meaningful songs or more Scripture or time for personal prayer and reflection. This is the approach I have taken myself, whether out of conviction it is the best approach or for lack of seeing a viable alternative.

Emerging thoughts on the emerging church

I’ve poked around quite a bit more at various websites, both those of people involved in the emerging church and those whose goal is to warn others of the dangers they see in this movement. Here is some of what I discovered:

Definitions
Not only is it hard to define the emerging church due to the diversity of beliefs and practices among those who use that label, “People in the emerging culture do not really want or need such a definition.” Their approach is to tell stories rather than to teach doctrines, and to focus on living as the church rather than talking about what it means to be the church.

There is also – among some of them – a distinction between “emerging” and “emergent.” Some of them use the words interchangeably; others use “emergent” only for the “emergent village,” a specific group that pursues radical changes in theology. Among those distinguish between the two, there are those who do consider themselves “emerging,” but by that they refer to new ways of “doing church” (e.g. worship style and church structure), and they wish to distance themselves from the theological revisionists.

What is the “emerging church”?

If I didn’t hang around at WorldontheWeb, I probably wouldn’t even have heard of it, at least not until now. The subject has come up a few times there, sometimes in the context of discussing “church” (such as worship style), but more often in the context of social issues.

I kept thinking, I ought to find out more about that. But I think that about a lot of topics, and find time only to explore a few. (A few months ago it was Islam. Right now I’m reading a book on Eastern Orthodoxy.) From what little I did find out about the emerging church, it because clear that even among those who consider themselves part of the movement (though I read that they prefer to call it a “conversation” rather than a movement), there was not a consensus on what it meant.