How the Emerging Church Can Help the PCA
At the risk of overkill (and to bring closure - at least for now - to what ended up being this week's topic du jour), I thought it might be interesting to consider some key contributions the emerging church movement might offer the PCA to make it more missional.
From my perspective, the biggest contribution would be the questioning of some church and denominational traditions, and how they do or do not aid in fostering a missional emphasis within our churches. In other words, I don’t think we enter into the emerging conversation primarily for what it could add to God’s Kingdom mission through the PCA, but rather to help us identify what we ourselves have added over time (often with the best intentions) that actually works against the gospel’s global mission to make disciples.
As Darrin Patrick observed, I agree that the emerging church can help the PCA in three ways:
engaging in conversations about important issues that are not just ones of theology or technique
bringing attention back to missional contextualization, as well as to justice and mercy initiatives
redefining (perhaps “updating” is a better word) community and authentic relationships within the church
On the flip side, I agree with Patrick that his list of emerging church negatives – deconstruction without reconstruction, emphasizing the Incarnation to the neglect of the Exaltation, focusing on God’s World more than God’s Word, or marketing of the emerging church – would not serve the PCA. True to our name, we need to always be reforming, but I question whether the more extreme conversations within the emerging church are as much about that as about re-doing altogether.
The choice of church paradigm is certainly important, but the content of church paradigm is the most important decision of all. In other words, the journey matters, but so does the destination. I’m all for emerging as a church, as long as we’re emerging into the body and bride of Christ as he defines it, not as we do.
(As a very practical example of what I'm talking about, here's a piece from today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch about how emerging churches are bringing to light legalism within another denomination, "taking one for the team" in the process of trying to live out a biblical - not Baptist - worldview.)