ATLANTA (ABP) — Atlanta church planter Jake Myers used the images of beer, candles and theologian Soren Kierkegaard to describe the “emergent conversation” taking place within Christianity, which he said could be a good fit for members of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Myers, who leads an emergent community in the Little Five Points area of Atlanta, led a breakout session during the CBF annual meeting June 23. He also serves on staff at Wieuca Road Baptist Church in Atlanta as a church planter and mission leader.
The “emergent church” movement is a decade-old movement of Christians — both mainline and evangelical — exploring new expressions of Christianity within a context of postmodern thought and culture. Led by proponents like Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt, the emergent community interacts through blogs and websites like emergentvillage.com.
Myers suggested “generative friendship” as a two-word definition for the emergent movement — a place “where we can come together and talk about what it means to be Christ-followers in a postmodern, post-Holocaust, post-colonial, post-Christendom world.”
Myers used beer as a rubric for the conversational and inclusive aspects of the emergent-church movement, suggesting that beer is commonly shared by friends and accompanied by conversation. That conversation crosses theological and generational lines to support “the church in all its forms,” he said, from new monastic communities to house churches and from coffee shop groups to larger gatherings.
Ethics, social justice, and hospitality are central to the movement, he said. Among evangelicals, he said, the emergent movement has sparked a greater concern for justice issues, he said.
Candles “transform space” and “create a more somber, sacred environment,” Myers said, thus serving as an appropriate metaphor for a discussion of “how we connect with God in our postmodern world.” Some emergent Christians have embraced ancient liturgical practices, he said, finding in them an openness to mystery not found in worship that is primarily rational.
Whatever the shape of it, liturgy needs to be organic, not imposed from outside but emerging from within the community of faith, Myers said.
The emergent conversation promotes a different model for doing church, Myers said. It is not an “attractional model” based on investing resources and doing marketing designed to attract as many people as possible, but a more incarnational or missional model in which there is more emphasis on being the church than on going to church.
Myers cited Danish existentialist Kierkegaard as a theologian who dealt with an apathetic, bourgeois church that didn't really impact its culture but became assimilated to it. The emergent church, like Kierkegaard, calls on believers to follow Christ more than culture.
“The emergent conversation allows everyone to be a theologian,” Myers said, adding that “theology gets a lot of us into trouble” with critics. Some emergent Christians are rethinking concepts like the penal substitution theory of atonement and challenging the idea that the primary reason for becoming a Christian is to avoid going to hell, he said.
Emergent Christians place a “huge emphasis on the kingdom of God,” Myers said, and on becoming “missional.” To be missional “is to be passionate on purpose,” he said, worrying less about whether people come to church and more about how “we participate in God's mission in the world.”
Myers' audience included older Fellowship members wanting to learn about the emergent-church movement and younger Fellowship participants interested in ministering in such a setting.
Myers stopped short of identifying CBF with the emergent movement, but he said they have some similarities. Both think of themselves as renewal movements, he said. CBF describes itself as a “fellowship”; the emergent church describes itself as a “generative friendship.” Both CBF and the emergent movement were birthed through crisis. Both emphasize autonomy. And both have made theological education a big part of the conversation, he said.
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