Pulpit Magazine

(By Phil Johnson)

This is a continuation of Phil’s seminar-transcript from the 2006 Shepherds’ Conference.

My three main concerns

What else could possibly be wrong with the “emerging church movement”? (I’m not going to try for an exhaustive list. I wish you could see the stack of books I had to read over the past year as I prepared for this seminar. It’s literally a two-and-a-half-foot-high stack, and fully half of them are recent products of the Zondervan imprint called Emergent-YS, indicating the involvement of Emergent (Brian McLaren’s organization) and Youth Specialties, an organization that for years published the infamous evangelical satire magazine Wittenburg Door. Youth Specialties is also well known for publishing books of activities—outrageous games and grotesque or messy contests—for youth groups. Their literature has been a major influence in evangelical youth work for almost three decades now, and if you have ever been in youth ministry, you are probably familiar with them. These days, they are one of the main cheerleaders for the Emergent idea.)

I have friends who have suggested that the emerging church idea is the predictable fruit of churches that tailor their youth ministries to whatever style is currently fashionable, hold alternative church services for the youth in a separate building (“the youth building”) and never incorporate them into the actual life of the church itself. They’ve grown into adulthood while their styles and preferences were catered to in a special “church” service all their own. The actual church service was something they weren’t expected to like. Many of them were never really exposed to worship in the context of the actual church, with real adults. They were deliberately entertained instead, and thus they were conditioned to think that way. They grew old, but they never grew up, and now even as adults, they want to continue to play at church, but outside the mainstream of the historic church. (My friend characterized the emerging church worship style as “Church services for the ADHD generation.” Read the Christianity Today account of Emergent’s national convention and you will understand why he said that.)

And while that is not the background of everyone in the emerging subculture, I’m sure there area lot of people who fit that profile, including some of the key leaders in the movement. You’ll see what I mean if you read the Christianity Today article on the emerging church in the November 2004 issue.

Anyway, I could probably come up with a very long list of issues that concern me about the “emerging church movement,” but since we have so little time to pursue this, I have decided to boil it down and give you a short list of my top three current concerns about the “emerging church movement.” We can cover these very quickly, because I think you’ll understand my rationale for these concerns just based on what I have already said.

So here are the three things that disturb me most about the general drift of the movement:

1. It fosters contempt for authority. The New Testament idea of church government is not anarchy. It’s not even democracy or mobocracy. The church is certainly not supposed to be the sort of populist organization where everyone has an equal voice in everything that happens.

The contempt for structure in the “emerging church movement” is a thinly-veiled aversion to authority. You will see that if you simply examine the angry comments that were posted at the Emergent-US blog when it was announced that the new organization would have a “director.” Blogs and discussion forums associated with the movement were assaulted with complaints and angry criticisms. One member of the movement said, “A director?!! Nobody’s going to direct me! That’s why I left the traditional church.” Another guy wrote: “I think we are going in a horribly dangerous direction. We aren’t becoming a ‘conversation,’ we’re becoming an institution. A ‘National Director?’ for a conversation? Give me a break . . .. I have a feeling we’re going down the Anakin Skywalker path here, folks.”

The whole movement’s approach to Scripture is another major reflection of the widespread tendency within the movement, to show contempt for every kind of authority in the church. Brian McLaren insists that Scripture does not actually claim authority for itself. It claims to be profitable, he says, but not “authoritative.”

As a matter of fact, the whole movement seems devoted to dialectical approach to truth. This, I think, explains the movement’s aversion to the idea of preaching and its preference for the idea of “conversation.” There’s an underlying assumption that this is the best way to arrive at the truth: You have a thesis, and then an antithesis, and the truth is supposed to lie in a synthesis of those two contradictory ideas. That synthesis becomes the new thesis. It’s answered by a new antithesis, and the synthesis of those ideas becomes the new thought. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It’s a never-ending cycle.

That’s the perspective of truth and epistemology proposed by the German philosopher Hegel: the dialectical method. All truth is ultimately determined that way. So it’s fluid; never absolute. Truth changes all the time.

The dialectical method may indeed be a fairly accurate description of how public opinion develops. But we ought to know as Christians: That’s no way to discover truth. Right?

Scot Mcknight (who is an apologist for a number of the movements that are currently trying to expand the whole concept of evangelical Christianity) has written a sympathetic analysis of the “emerging church movement” that is worth reading if you want a decent description of the movement from a sympathetic perspective.

Scot McKnight says this: “[People in the "emerging church movement"] want to open up questions. They’re asking questions about how we should understand our relationship to scripture: Is it inerrant? Is it true? And many of the emergent people are saying that [Scripture may not be absolute and authoritative and inerrant, but] it is the “senior partner” in the conversation.” McKnight calls that “a healthy category.” I don’t think it is. I think it’s just more evidence of how the “emerging church movement” fosters a contempt for authority.

Here’s a second major concern I have:

2. It breeds doubt about the perspicuity of Scripture. You understand the principle of perspicuity? It speaks of the clarity—the “understandability”—of the Bible. The Westminster Confession of Faith says it like this: “All things in scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, [so] that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” Perspicuity. The Bible is not too hard for us to understand.

The entire postmodern epistemology (their view of how we acquire knowledge of the truth) deliberately glorifies uncertainty. I already gave you some quotations about this from Brian McLaren, but you can read almost any writer in the movement and you will find this theme is relentlessly pressed.

The article in Christianity Today last year about the emerging church, for example, is a classic example of this. One of the central themes running through that article is the message that people in the “emerging church movement” have abandoned certainty, assurance, and strong convictions. They aren’t dogmatic about what they believe, because they aren’t really sure of what they believe.

The obvious implication here is that Scripture just isn’t clear enough for us to say what it means with any kind of confidence.

In fact, that’s more than an implication of the article. It’s pretty much what these folks are expressly saying. Listen to this paragraph about the husband-and-wife pastoral team of one of the leading emergent-style churches in the country. This is about Rob and Kristen Bell, who founded Mars Hill in Grand Rapids:

They found themselves increasingly uncomfortable with church. “Life in the church had become so small,” Kristen says. “It had worked for me for a long time. Then it stopped working.” The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself-”discovering the Bible as a human product,” as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. “The Bible is still in the center for us,” Rob says, “but it’s a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it.”

“I grew up thinking that we’ve figured out the Bible,” Kristen says, “that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again-like life used to be black and white, and now it’s in color.”

Ultimately, the emerging church message begins to sound like an echo of the voice of Satan in the garden: “Hath God said?”

This is a huge issue—in some ways the pivotal issue. The overwhelming message coming from the “emerging church movement” often sounds like a flat denial of the clarity and perspicuity of Scripture. That is a denial of one of the basic tenets of biblical Christianity, Protestant history, and evangelical conviction.

Yes, parts of Scripture are “hard to be understood.” The apostle Peter acknowledges that in 2 Peter 3:16. But the essential message is simple and clear. The wayfaring man, though he be a fool, doesn’t have to be confused by it, according to Isaiah 35:8. God has made Himself plain enough that there is much more than merely mystery to the Christian faith.

Quickly, here’s a third thing that disturbs me about the “emerging church movement”:

3. It sows confusion about the mission of the church. I’ll just sum up my final point with this one observation: The “missional” emphasis in the “emerging church movement” seems to be entirely focused on an effort to adapt the church to the culture, with very little stress on the church’s duty to proclaim a message of repentance and faith in Christ that calls men and women to forsake the world.

In other words, the “emerging church movement” seems to be all about the conversion of the church, rather than the conversion of the sinner.

In fact, I found little or no emphasis on conversion in any of more than a dozen books I read about the “emerging church movement”. (Sometimes, emerging church writers adopt the language of postmodern narcissism and talk about “recovery,” but that’s as close as they usually get to discussing conversion.) It is simply not a major theme of discussion in the emerging conversation.

This is a glaring flaw in a movement that calls itself “missional.”

The true mission of the church is embodied in the gospel message and the Great Commission. It is truth that demands to be proclaimed with clarity, and authority and conviction, and if you refuse to do that, even if you insist you are being “missional,” you are not fulfilling the mission of the church at all.

Those are some of my main concerns about the “emerging church movement.” Can I make one of those absolute statements that make postmodernists grind their teeth? There is absolutely no sense in which I would commend this movement to you, encourage you to join the so-called “conversation,” or wade through the mounds of trendy literature in search of valuable helps and insights that might help your church.

Spiritually speaking, that literature points down a dead-end street into a blind alley on the bad side of town. I am convinced that this movement is going to be a serious detriment to the testimony of the church as a whole, a source of great confusion for many Christians, and another in a long series of movements that will surely undermine the work of the gospel rather than advance it. And I have no doubt whatsoever that those predictions will be proven correct within the next 10-20 years, if not sooner.

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