John Frame vs. Brian McLaren

Just for my own reference purposes, here's John Frame on Brian McLaren's Generous Orthodoxy. Here's a nice snippet:

And I have argued, like McLaren (105-114), for a missional concept of the church: the Great Commission of Matt. 28:18-20 is the fundamental task of the church, so that everything the church does, including worship, ought to have an outward-facing aspect.

It has always seemed to me that the church (including its theology) tends to be healthiest when mission is in the forefront, least healthy when it is preoccupied with its own history and trying hard to prove itself right in controversies with other Christians.

To which I add a hearty, Amen! I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. Regardless of what you think about the content of his critique, Frame's tone sets a fine example for others to emulate.

Mark Driscoll vs. Brian McLaren

Interesting. Mark Driscoll (who is considered 'emerging' by some) has just teed off on Brian McLaren over Brian's comments about homosexuality. This actually pertains to my earlier question about 'Where is the EM unashamedly bold?'. And I'm encouraged by Mark's response. Yes some people are in a dither about his tone. But at some point a guy has a right to say 'you guys are full of crap - stop waffling and call a spade a spade' and I think that's what Mark is doing here. And it's kind of a breath of fresh air actually...

Addendums:

• Andrew Jones (aka. Tall Skinny Kiwi) offers some nice insights into both Driscoll and McLaren. You should read what he says.
• There's another long discussion going on over here on Reformissionary.
• Here's a link to Mark Driscoll's blog, as well as a post that sheds light on how he sees himself fitting into the Emerging Movement.
• McLaren's response to Driscoll.
• Driscoll's very short-yet-pointed question back to McLaren.
• And then there's this summary by Tall Skinny Kiwi:
  

  Anyway, the subject is interesting. I have chatted to both guys on email this weekend and I can tell you that they are still good friends and will continue to respect each other. But they are VERY different from each other. They both mirror disparate characteristics of emerging culture, particularly as found in video gaming culture

  Mark Driscoll is the spontaneous, inituitive gamer who jumps guns blazing into a scene that he knows nothing about. But he is pressing all the buttons on his joystick at the same time and, like my son who masters video games in the same intuitive manner, very quickly finds his way around by the response he gets - either negative or positive. Hey - if you don't know how it works, just shoot everything in sight and see where the penalties come from! After a while you figure it out.

  Brian McLaren displays the other positive gamer characteristic which is the capacity to suspend completion of a game and endure mind-boggling lengths of time before arriving at the end. Some gamers have been working on Myst and Riven for nearly ten years and are still enjoying the discovery of the journey. They don't want to CHEAT and arrive early in case they miss essential things on the way. Brian could easily cancel the tension by coming out with his own statements of what he believes, but he doesn't want to rob people of the rich discovery process or the need for people to wrestle with deeper issues and arrive at a place themselves. Take his books - we still don't know where he is going to end up.

• To wrap this post up, there's a nice post-fight analysis by Jollyblogger that is worth reading.
• And last but not least, there's Driscoll's apology.
  

Emerging Question #7

Q7 - How many emergents have actually read Reformation classics like John Calvin's Institutes or Martin Luther's On Christian Liberty or The Westminster Confession of Faith?

(This question is just as applicable for pre-emerging evangelicals.)

My point is not that any of these are infallible, or even beyond improvement. They do however, represent high water marks of Christian traditions in the past, and if we are serious about taking our past seriously, we should at least be reading them before simply dismissing them as products of modernity.

As one who actually appreciates both Calvin and Luther, I get a sneaking suspicion at times that many of my evangelical friends who simply dismiss Reformed theology as a product of modernism, haven't even read what they are disparaging.

It's kind of like the my daughter with something new on the dinner menu - she is sure she doesn't like it even before she's tasted it...

Emerging Question #6

Q6 - Can the EM point to any churches that ARE missional (in the best sense of the word), yet are clearly NOT part of the EM?

What's driving this question is just a simple observation - as I've read a lot of EM blogs, I've noticed a huge emphasis on mission. That's good. At the same time, I sometimes find myself wondering whether or not emergents allow for the possibility that someone might be very missional, and yet still not be emergent.

To put it more simply - emergents sometimes sound as if they are the only ones interested in mission, and if you are too, well then you must be emergent as well ("Wow, look at how many emergent churches there are out there!") This seems just a tad myopic (and dare I say it: 'typically evangelical') to me, and reminds me of the comment someone made (Carson, perhaps?), that the emergent movement is "fixated on itself."

Now in fairness, I doubt the EM actually thinks this way. But they certainly sound like it at times. So this question is really aimed at getting them to clearly articulate how they see themselves, the movement, and others - particularly in relation to mission.

Crossing the Tiber

There's a very interesting discussion going on over on Scot McKnight's blog today, about the Wheaton prof who converted to Catholicism.

Evangelicals “cross the Tiber” for four reasons: to find certainty, to establish a connection with history, to discover unity in the Church, and to land upon a final authority. One can find in each of these themes (certainty, history, unity, and authority) an inherent weakness to the evangelical movement, which does not provide for some enough certainty, history, unity or authority.

As always, I think Scot does an excellent job of summarizing the lay of the land, and if you take the time to read the comments on his post, you'll see that these things seem to resonate for people who have left for Rome.

Several things interest me in this.

1. Why Rome? Why not the Reformation? Options seem to be: a) people might be unaware of what the Reformation was all about, b) churches which take pride in their Reformation heritage might be more modern/evangelical/fundamentalist (and less Reformational) than they realize. Or maybe it's a mixture of both.

2. It's interesting how non-emergent the conversations on Scot's blog got in response to this - it just seemed to drift quickly into a very "modern" sounding conversation. This is NOT a critique of Scot, btw.

3. Speaking of Emergents, I'd be very curious to know how the EM intersects with this whole "Crossing the Tiber" thing - is it appealing to them? Why or why not?

Just some thoughts as I sip my morning coffee...

Missional God

Tall Skinny Kiwi has a nice little blurb on thinking of God missionally:

I get to kick off the weekend with this topic - the Missio Dei or mission of God. The concept is that mission is not a program of the church but rather an attribute of God. Mission comes first from the heart of God and we are caught up in it rather than initiating it. Mission is primarily the work of God and we participate with God in what He is doing.

Missio Dei sees our mission as stemming from the Triune God:
The Father sends the Son,
the Father and the Son send the Spirit
The Father and and Son and the Spirit send the church. into the world.

As the Father sent me, so I send you. (Jesus)
Our Christology influences our missiology which influences our ecclesiology.

This sounds a lot like what I've said over here:

At the heart of our confession, then, lies a central truth: God is a missional God – his work culminates in Christ, Christ’s work culminates in the church, and the church’s work culminates in worship and mission. From this basic recognition, we can make several key observations:

• God, not man, builds his church – Church planting is not simply a matter of human effort or intention – this is something God is doing. It is his work (cf. Acts 13-14, where we repeatedly see God actively intervening to build his church: 13:2, 4, 9, 48, 52; 14:1, 3, 27).
  

• God has been building it from the beginning – everything God was doing in the OT finds its fulfillment in Jesus. Christ is the crux of the entire biblical story (cf. Gen 3:15, 12:2-3; 2 Sam 7:13; Acts 13:32-33). The heart of the gospel is that Jesus fulfills all of God’s promises. Only through Christ can we be reconciled to God, not because of what we do, but because of what the resurrected Christ has done and continues to do on our behalf.

• God has a passion for the lost – Jesus views his own work in terms of saving the lost and building his church. Thus Christ is a missional Messiah (cf. Luke 19:10; John 4:1-43; Mt 16:18; 1 Pe 2:6-7).
  

• The church is at the center of God’s redemptive plan – In Eph 3:6-11, Paul tells us that the church is the climax of God’s eternal purpose, created to manifest the mystery of the gospel to the Gentiles. In other words, the church is God’s means for mission. The church exists to model the gospel – in word, deed, worship, and mission – to unbelievers, and so invite them to participate in the kingdom as well.

In light of these principles, we offer two core convictions for church planting:

1. First, we want to plant churches that reach the unchurched – We desire this because God has a heart for the lost, he commands us to go, and this is where the harvest is ripe. Our aim is not simply to establish a “reformed church,” or to gather people who are already Christians - neither of these are bad; but they aren't at the heart of what the church is all about, either. We must never lose sight of the fact that our calling is to bring the gospel to people who have rejected God so that the gospel may redeem both us and our culture.
   
   
2. Second, we want to plant churches that plant more churches – We believe that mission must be part of the fabric of the church; the goal of our church plants is not to become self-sufficient and acquire a building – it is to call people (both unbelievers and believers) to continual faith in Christ, to lead them in true worship of God, to equip them for service in the church and for life in the culture, and to send them missionally back to the unchurched. While every member of the body has different gifts and abilities, we assert that all Christians are called to serve and witness and participate in mission, just as all are called to believe and worship.
   

So mission exists because worship doesn’t. Conversely, true worship must include mission.

To me, this is very much in line with the EM's passion for mission, although I may go a bit further than some of them might in terms of drawing theological conclusions. I think the EMers are definitely moving in the right direction here, although I would like to see them think a little more deeply about the ecclesiological implications of "mission."