The Anti-Ecclesial Rhetoric of Emerging Church Movements

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 11:07 pm by Ben Witherington

The Anti-Ecclesial Rhetoric of Emerging Church Movements 2015-03-13T23:07:29-04:00 Ben Witherington

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One of the things I have grown weary of in the last decade or so, is anti-ecclesial rhetoric. What I mean by this is the pitting of the ‘church’ over against Jesus, or ‘the established church’ over against more ‘organic’ models of Christianity (e.g. house churches, and the like). I suppose we all from time to time look for something or someone to blame our problems on, and the Christian church has become something of a punching bag, even for a goodly number of devout Christians. Sometimes this is because they have joined the ‘I’m spiritual, not religious’ movement, or the ‘I love Jesus, but the church…. not so much’ band wagon. Some of this frankly is caused by a profound misunderstanding of the word church/ ekklesia. Perhaps then, it would be wise to start this post with some basic definitions.

The church is the corporate people of God assembled for worship, fellowship, and service. It is not a building, it is not an institution, it is not an organization. Any church that is even moderately successful certainly needs a regular place to meet, needs some organization, needs some structure, but the ekklesia as defined in the NT is not these things. I would stress the church needs structure, needs buildings, needs organization, but it should not be identified with them. It is precisely when the buildings, structures, and organizations or institutions of the church become overly-sacralized that they become difficult if not impossible to change. That’s what I call Christians developing an ‘edifice’ complex.

The word ekklesia, often translated ‘church’ actual means ‘assembly’. One person is not the church. A group of unassembled Christian friends is not the church. No, there is an element of assembling for worship, fellowship, service that makes a group of people a church. You need to be having church to be a church.

It is certainly true that in my lifetime brand name denominational loyalty has declined in Protestantism (less so in Catholic or Orthodox circles). Some of this is caused by the weak ecclesiology of Protestant theology to begin with. By this I mean that Protestants tend to emphasize one’s individual walk with Christ, individual piety, individual commitment, and so on, at the expense of the group identity and unity. And when you throw in a hyper-active sensitivity about this or that view of truth or orthodoxy, it is no wonder that it seems that Protestants are better at fulfilling the Genesis commandment to be fruitful and multiple (by church splits) than at fulfilling the Great Commission. Put another way, when you stress your vision of Truth with a capital T, rather than the need for unity (with a little ‘u’), dividing and sub-dividing is inevitable it seems. There are literally hundreds of Protestant denominations…and frankly this is an all too modern phenomenon. Denominationalism did not exist in say the fourth century A.D. It is a decidedly Protestant development, or subplot.

Thus, when one gets to the emerging church folks, and you hear a lot of their anti-ecclesial rhetoric, it has a long precedent in Protestantism, whether it is Luther railing against the Pope, or Calvin complaining about the situation in Switzerland, or Wesley struggling with the Anglican Church, or the Free Methodists splitting off from the Methodist Episcopal Church or various Baptist groups splitting and multiplying prodigiously. And in all of this, few have stopped to ask—Is all this disputatiousness a good witness to the world? Put another way—Why should the world listen to any church group when we can’t even agree among ourselves, as we speak with forked tongues?

Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for renewal movements of God’s Spirit wherever they come from. We need them. What we don’t need is the church eating it’s own young or old. What we don’t need is any part of the church claiming to be ‘the one true church apostolic and universal’ at the expense of other parts of the body of Christ. What we don’t need is the oh so familiar attempt to blame the structures for the problems of the church, when, after all it is the people of God who set up, maintain, and run those structures. They are not, inherently, the real problem. As Pogo once said ‘I have seen the enemy, the enemy is me.’ We need to look in the mirror. What we also really don’t need is one part of the Christian church having the hubris to think it has a stranglehold on the truth. This in the end simply reflects arrogance and ignorance, and an unwillingness to learn from others who are not part of our particular portion of Christ’s body.

One more thing. With the anti-ecclesial rhetoric has also come some anti-intellectual, and even anti-educational and anti-seminary rhetoric. Correct me if I am wrong but in a Dark Age where the culture and the church in general is becoming more and more Biblically illiterate what we surely don’t need is less training in the Bible. What we don’t need is a dumbing down of Christian college and seminary core curriculum in Bible, Church History, Theology. What we don’t need is less emphasis on learning the actual languages that the Bible was written in, and learning the historical, literary, rhetorical context in which it was given.

Nor do we need the arrogance and foolishness that says ‘I can learn all that on my own, thank you very much. I don’t need formal training by experts.’ Really? Would you go to a dentist who said— ‘I’ve got no degrees and no formal training and I’ve never extracted a tooth, but lets start with you.’? I think you get my drift. Ministers (clergy and lay), need as much training by experts as possible in the core Christian curricula. They just do. Because if the leaders are not the resident experts for their people, then we are dealing with leaders who simply pool their ignorance with that of their people. And that only furthers the darkness of the Dark Age into which we have been descending.

It is my hope that when the Emerging Church stops Emerging from wherever it has been previously hidden and starts merging with other groups of Christians who are willing to partner with them, that it will be realized that it was after all unprofitable and unhelpful to sass your Mother, to repudiate the womb from which you emerged, by which I mean the ekklesia, the body of Christ, the people of God, which will always need structures and organizations. Think on these things.

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