So, I've been reading this book, The Great Emergence, and have been totally blown away by it! The basic gist of it is that every five hundred years or so, the church has what she calls a "rummage sale" and through that ends up spreading and becoming more relevant. Go back five hundred and you find the Protestant Reformation, five hundred before the Reformation you are at the Great Schism, before that Gregory the Great and the plunge into the dark ages, and five hundred before that the Great Transformation (Jesus and the apostles).Right now we are in the middle of another one of those "rummage sales." This one is being called the Great Emergence. It's happening as our culture enters the post-modern era, and as the Reformation's motto of sola scriptura, scriptura sola (only scripture, and scrpture only) has been found wanting as an answer to the question of authority. We are asking again: Where now should we place our authority?
That is a loaded question that neither I nor the emergent thinkers have resolved. It is the task of the next twenty to thirty years. There are those who are called to start something new, and those called to reform the old to be relevant in a new culture. I feel called in a strong way to the latter. I look forward to figuring Methodism in a postmodern context, and discovering how God can use our Wesleyan heritage to relate to a radically different world.
If you want to read more about the whole postmodern/emerging church thing here are some books I like:
A New Kind of Christian by: Brian McLaren
The Challenge of Jesus by: N.T. Wright
Postmodern Youth Ministry by: Tony Jones
The Emerging Church by: Dan Kimball
2 comments:
Your use of the phrase Weslyan Tradition caught my attention. I was just reading this week in a book entitled: "How to Reach Secular People," about John Wesley's "Order of Salvation." A brief summary follows. It states that the people were as "secular" as any populations we face today.
The first step in Wesleys strategy was to "awaken" people to their lostness, to their need of God, to a desire to "flee the wrath to come" and experience a new life. Second people were always invited to enroll in a Methodist "class meeting" whether they yet believed or had yet experienced anything. Third each week they were coached to expect that they would in God's time and way experience their justification. Fourth, once they had experienced their justification, they were coached to expect that, one day in this life, they would experience their sanctification--a second experience of God's grace in which they would completely surrender to God's will, be freed to live wholly by love, and become the people they were born to be. Overall, Wesley's strategy seems to have been to replicate in other people the structure of his own ezxperience, in which he tried for years to live as a Christian before becoming open to the grace of God that empowers people to live as Christians
neither the prophets, apostles, nor Jesus found God's Word to be lacking.
Just because people feel that authority is not found in God's Word does not mean that is true. "Thus sayeth the Lord" is the only foundation for authority and will be until the end of the age no matter what people feel or think. Our thoughts do not create authority. We either conform to authority or we reject it.
While society at large may reject the authority of God's Word, God's Word is the only thing that can bring change to the people who make up society.
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