Evangelical Resources

Should Churches Look Postmodern?

8:59 pm | Emergent Church

I’m back in Kansas City with my parents after several hot but valuable days at the Cornerstone Festival. Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading down to Little Rock to visit my brother, and then traveling back to Dallas the next day. I do however need to be back in Dallas soon so that I don’t miss another week of the Philosophy course I’m taking through Westminster Seminary in Dallas this summer.

One of the readers of this blog asked if I thought churches should try to look postmodern. Probably the most important thing I can think of is not to simply take post-modern and cultural elements, put them on or in the church, and expect that that will make the church attractive. When people are leery of the institutional church, they’ll see these kinds of things simply as marketing gimmicks. While the emerging church talks a lot about the need for charity within the church, people outside the church have no love lost toward the church, so that the church and Christians are looked at with suspicion. To people who look at Christianity with suspicion, everything Christians do is seen as merely an attempt to trick them into coming to church and get “saved”, not an expression of legitimate concern or a legitimate culture of love within the body of Christ. So, I would put a lot of emphasis on being the church first - developing genuine community and spiritual fellowship within the body of Christ, not just in emerging churches or house churches but within all churches, whether they be cell groups/churches, megachurches, or traditionalized churches - so that forming relationships with people outside the church is an outgrowth of the community within the church, rather than as an evangelistic strategy. The churches in North Dallas tend to be influenced by emerging church ideas and want to borrow those, apply them disjointly, and call themselves ‘emerging’ when really they’re just applying superficial and inauthentic changes. Emerging is seen largely as style rather than substance - and not without reason, as the places where emerging does emphasize substance they tend to say the same things that many Evangelicals have been saying for forty years, so there is little new added by the movement other than unorthodox twists on Christian doctrine and a de-emphasis on Truth as having real spiritual meaning for the believer or the world, which is an idea that I find highly suspect and that others have been extremely critical of.

Folks who have been involved in the postmodern, house church, and emerging movement before it was trendy, however, have a very negative view of anything they arbitrarily call ‘traditional’ (why I say arbitrarily is more clear when you realize that megachurches, cell-churches, seeker-sensitive churches, purpose driven, fundamentalist churches, house churches that grew and built buildings, and mainstream protestant churches are all lumped together in an unqualified manner as ‘traditional’) and on the whole have been hyper-reactionary. An example of this arbitrariness is when Ryan Bolger calls the diversity of Evangelical Christianity “Christendom”, he does a tremendous disservice to the vitality and diversity of the body of Christ. I for one am happy to use the word “Evangelical” to describe my beliefs because I appreciate the broad diversity and history of Evangelicalism - particularly Evangelicalism in the United States - despite its many faults and warts.

Calls for renewal from the emerging church are certainly calls that need to be heard and heeded, but I don’t think being a separatist movement that breaks away from old churches over matters of taste is the right way to be the body of Christ. Better I think is to begin being the church where you are at and transform or revitalize the body of Christ from within. But that takes a lot of work and sometimes a lot of nasty politics - and emerging folks find political and philosophical disputes distasteful and repugnant (emerging folks tend to think that conflict is always bad - another reactionary stance against Evangelicalism’s in-fighting). They generally reject authority structures as a result of these kinds of conflicts and go off in their own directions because they don’t want other people telling them what to do. Ironically they become separatists, which is one of the more distinguishing aspects of late Fundamentalism that they so despise. Fundamentalists and emerging church folks have both tended to separate themselves from the dominant expressions of Christianity, albeit for very different reasons. I believe that in the process, despite all their high ideals to the contrary, the result is more division confusion and disunity in the body of Christ, rather than unity love and charity.