The New Christians E-Book

Tony Jones

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 449

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

What the "Emergent Church Movement" is all about-and why itmatters to the future of Christianity Following on the questions raised by Brian McLaren in A New Kindof Christian, Tony Jones has written an engaging exploration ofwhat this new kind of Christianity looks like. Writing "dispatches"about the thinking and practices of adventurous Emergent Christiansacross the country, he offers an in-depth view of this new "thirdway" of faith-its origins, its theology, and its views of truth,scripture and interpretation, and the Emergent movement's hopefuland life-giving sense of community. With the depth of theologicalexpertise and broad perspective he has gained as a pastor, writer,and leader of the movement, Jones initiates readers into theEmergent conversation and offers a new way forward for Christiansin a post-Christian world. With journalistic narrative as well asauthoritative reflection, he draws upon on-site research to providefascinating examples and firsthand stories of who is doing what,where, and why it matters.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

A LIVING WAY

Foreword

Dedication

PREFACE

Introduction

Some Working Definitions of Terms Used in This Book

CHAPTER 1 - LEAVING THE OLD COUNTRY

"CHURCH IS DEAD"

SIGNS OF DEATH—AND LIFE

THE PROBLEM ON THE LEFT

A CASE STUDY: GO WHERE I SEND THEE

THE PROBLEM ON THE RIGHT

A CASE STUDY: DON′T ASK US ABOUT THE CHICKENS

THE REAL PROBLEM: LEFT VERSUS RIGHT

CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE

CHAPTER 2 - DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIER OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH

AN ALLEGORY

AN ALTERNATIVE ENDING

GEOLOGICAL MUSINGS

WHAT EXACTLY IS EMERGING?

THE BEGINNINGS

“THE BIBLE IS PROPAGANDA”

THE NEW KIND OF CHRISTIAN EFFECT

MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE POND

THEN TILL NOW

THE CHURCH’S CHOICE

CHAPTER 3 - WHO ARE THE EMERGENT CHRISTIANS?

HUNCHES AND INTUITIONS

INFLUENCING CULTURE OR INFLUENCED BY CULTURE?

AN “ENVELOPE OF FRIENDSHIP”

AN EMERGENT VOTERS’ GUIDE

CHAPTER 4 - THE THEOLOGY, STUPID

DARTMOUTH DAYS

WHAT, EXACTLY, IS THEOLOGY?

THEOLOGY ON THE RISE

GOING DEEP

SKIING THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

SO, A BIBLICIST AND A RELATIVIST WALK INTO A PASTORS’ CONFERENCE . . .

THE EXPURGATED LECTIONARY

CHAPTER 5 - AFTER OBJECTIVITY: BEAUTIFUL TRUTH

THE THRILL OF INTERPRETATION

READING THE WHOLE BIBLE

“SONNY, IT AIN’T NOTHING TILL I CALL IT”

TRUTH (A.K.A. GOD)

AFTER OBJECTIVITY: DIALOGUE

BEAUTIFUL, MESSY, INCARNATIONAL TRUTH

PARADOXES

CHAPTER 6 - INSIDE THE EMERGENT CHURCH

IT’S A GREAT DAY AT JACOB’S WELL!

WIKICHURCH

TIGHTLY KNIT: JOURNEY

BINITARIANS

THE PEOPLE’S LITURGY: CHURCH OF THE APOSTLES

TIME TO RETHINK SEMINARY

MYCHURCH: A PAEAN TO SOLOMON’S PORCH

EPILOGUE: FERAL CHRISTIANS

APPENDICES

NOTES

Acknowledgments

THE AUTHOR

INDEX

MORE PRAISE FOR THE NEW CHRISTIANS

“No one I know is better equipped than Tony Jones to write an insider’s history of emergent churches. Tony brings to his work deep, intuitive, first-hand observations. His bright intellect and inherent goodness and fair-mindedness make him an especially appropriate advocate and critic. The New Christians is a joy to read. It both challenged and inspired me. It made me miss old friends and caused me to re-cherish Emergent’s vision ’to follow God in the Way of Jesus.”’

—Todd Hunter, national director, Alpha USA, and former president, Vineyard Churches USA

“Tony Jones pulls no punches in calling for new ways of being church—and after reading this book I have a few bruises to show for it! But it was well worth the scuffle. This is a challenging and engaging call to think new thoughts about what it means to be faithful to the Gospel in our present context.”

—Richard J. Mouw, president and professor of Christian philosophy, Fuller Theological Seminary

“This is an insider’s journal of the journey called emergent Christianity, and it is the book I have been looking for. If you want to know what emergent Christianity is, buy this book, read it, talk about it and then give it to someone else. But don’t leave it around—someone will swipe it!”

—Scot McKnight, Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religion Studies, North Park University, and author, A Community Called Atonement

“There is indeed new life arising from the compost of Christendom. Tony’s book lets us see it, smell it, and touch it. The challenge with a book like this is neither to be overcome by the smell of the poop, nor stupefied by the beauty of a flower—more than anything we must see this book as an invitation to get our hands dirty, break a sweat, get messy outside the air-conditioned walls of comfort, and not just read more books on gardening.”

—Shane Clairborne, author, activist, and recovering sinner

“The emergent church, which Tony Jones describes for us in this book, must be taken seriously. Offering both hope and challenges for the rest of us, this postmodern version of Christianity will certainly change the face of the religious landscape.”

—Tony Campolo, Eastern University, and coauthor, The God of Intimacy and Action

“There is simply no way to think about the future of the church without knowing of the emergent journey. Tony will give you an all-access tour from the inside.”

—John Ortberg, author and pastor, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church

“Tony Jones relentlessly and rightly challenges us to examine what Christianity means in our historical context. The more you might have questions or possible disagreements with Tony or emergent ideas, the more you need to read The New Christians.”

—Bruce Ellis Benson, professor of philosophy, Wheaton College

“Lots of people have questions about just what this emergent church thing is all about. Tony Jones has the answer for them here. A great starting point for understanding a significant movement.”

—Christian Smith, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, and author, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers

Copyright © 2008 by Tony Jones. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Tony, date

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-9471-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-4704-5539-5 (paperback)

1. Christianity—21st century. 2. Emerging church movement. 3. Postmodernism—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.

BR121.3.J665 2008

270.8′3—dc22

2007038030

HB Printing

PB Printing

A LIVING WAY

emergent visions

Soul Graffiti: Making a Life in the Way of Jesus by Mark Scandrette

The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier by Tony Jones

A Christianity Worth Believing: Hope-Filled, Open-Armed, Alive-and-Well Faith for the Left Out, Left Behind, and Let Down in Us All, by Doug Pagitt

“A LIVING WAY: EMERGENT VISIONS” SERIES FOREWORD

For a decade now, a group of friends has been gathering under the banner “Emergent Village: a growing, generative friendship of missional Christian leaders.” The friends within Emergent Village share life in profound ways, care for one another, and laugh a lot as they together forge a way to follow God in the way of Jesus Christ for the twenty-first century. Out of this cauldron of friendship and disillusion with religion-as-usual have come some ideas and some practices that have influenced the church in North America and around the world. New ways of being Christian, of being spiritual, of following God have bubbled up in this group.

“A Living Way: Emergent Visions” is a partnership between Emergent Village and Jossey-Bass/Wiley to capture some of what God is doing in the world and to provide encouragement for God-seekers to cooperate with what God is in that kingdom work. These books are meant to start conversations and provoke imaginations, to encourage action and inflame passion. They are meant to help us all lean into God’s future.

We welcome the conversation that we hope these books will call forth. And we look forward to meeting you down the road so that we can have this conversation together.

FOR SARAH AND DOUG JONES

WHO ALWAYS TOLD ME THAT I COULD DO ANYTHING

PREFACE

As I was working on this book, I was also on the road, speaking about this content to a variety of groups. In May 2007, I visited these five events in a whirlwind of travel:

• A Reformed Church in America seminary, where I spoke to youth pastors about ministry amidst postmodernity

• A Pentecostal church in Massachusetts, where I participated in a conference titled “God for People Who Hate Church” and shared the stage with witches and druids as they reflected on how they’ve been treated by Christians

• The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where I spoke about the challenge that emergent Christianity poses to the Episcopal Church at a conference called “Church in the Twenty-First Century”

• Yale University Divinity School, where I spoke about the interplay of faith and politics and the upcoming presidential election

• National Presbyterian Church, back in Washington, D.C., where I addressed the nature of orthodoxy at a conference of Christian visual artists

Two themes, I think, are noteworthy about my presence at these events. The first is their diversity. I don’t know of another item on the menu of American Christianity that is currently being tasted by such a wide array of Christians. Within a week, I’d gone from sitting with Pentecostals who interpret one another’s dreams and break out in “Holy Spirit laughter” to addressing collared Episcopal priests in the second-largest cathedral on the continent. That’s theological whiplash.

Across the spectrum, people are interested in the emergence of a new church and a new way of practicing Christianity. This “new” way, to be sure, is rooted in the old, which is part of the reason that so many are intrigued by it. Many in church leadership today—not to mention everyday believers—feel that the church made a wrong turn somewhere in the twentieth century. At the dawn of a new century, the emergents are one of the few groups offering a way out of this mess, and lots of people are listening.

The second theme of these five visits is that my message of emergence has not been universally acclaimed. At each stop, both personal interaction and the now powerful blogosphere indicate that significant discomfort results from my visit. To one, I’m playing fast and loose with sacred doctrine, and to another, I’m cursing the very institutions that pay their salaries. At the last event, I was mocked outright by my copresenter.

But following each visit, e-mails and blogs and Facebook tell another tale as well. People write to say, “Thanks for giving a voice to a new generation of Christians; thanks for standing up to the powers that be.” These commenters don’t necessarily buy everything I’m selling, but they do appreciate the conversation, the evolution of what it means to be a follower of Christ in the twenty-first century.

My hope is that this book is yet another voice in the ongoing conversation that is Christianity, always emerging.

Tony JonesEdina, MinnesotaFeast of Saint Francis of AssisiOctober 4, 2007

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS “EMERGENT”?

On June 21, 2001, a group of pastor-theologians convened a conference call. We were homeless. Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt, Tim Keel from Kansas City, Chris Seay from Houston, Tim Conder from Chapel Hill, and Brad Cecil from Dallas had all been pushed out of the nest of our hosting organization a year earlier, and we were looking for some identity, some banner under which we could rally. We needed a name. In previous iterations, we had been called the “Young Leaders Network,” the “Theological Working Group,” and the “Terranova Project.” Under that last rubric, we (and several others, including Sally Morgenthaler, Alan Roxburgh, Danielle Shroyer, Rudy Carrasco, Todd Hunter, and Jason Mitchell) had met less than a year earlier at my family’s cabin in the north woods of Minnesota and had spent a couple of days thinking and arguing and dreaming about the future of Christianity.

We’d already been tagged with phrases “emerging church” and “emerging leaders” in years past, and those phrases came up again on this conference call. In the midst of the conversation, we settled on a variant of that word: we’d call ourselves “emergent.”

E·mer·gent

—adj. 1. coming into view or notice; issuing; 2. emerging; rising from a surrounding surface or liquid; 3. coming into existence, esp. with political independence; 4. arising casually or unexpectedly; 5. calling for immediate action; urgent; 6. Evolution: displaying emergence—n.7. Ecology: an aquatic plant having its stem, leaves, etc., extending above the surface of the water. (Source: Adapted from The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.)

A couple of months later, that name made perfect sense when someone approached us at a conference and said, “You know, when a forester enters a forest to determine that forest’s health, she does not look at the vitality of the tops of the old-growth trees. Instead, she gets on her hands and knees and examines what’s growing, what’s emerging on the forest floor. That’s how she can gauge the well-being of the forest.”

Later we reflected on this, and it made perfect sense: when it comes to the ecology of the American church, a lot of organizations exist to measure the health of the old-growth institutions, pruning their branches, fertilizing their roots. But there’s a lot happening and emerging down below on the forest floor. The new communities of faith, the innovative forms of monasticism, the adventurous theology—that’s the emergent church. The soil of that growth is deep and complex, a mélange that includes the advent of “new media” (blogs, e-mail, social networking sites, podcasts, Webcams, instant messaging, and so on), disaffection with politics as usual, the postmodern turn in philosophy, and cracks in the foundations of mainline and evangelical Christianity. Emergents—and I consider myself one—think that this movement is but one manifestation of the coming dramatic shift in what it means to be Christian.

There’s a lot at stake. The ecclesial elites on both the left and the right of modern Christianity have spent the past century endowing denominations; founding colleges, universities, and seminaries; launching publishing houses and magazines; building enormous churches; and getting face time on CNN and Fox News. In general, they look skeptically at the young, emergent usurpers. Some of them have even endeavored to spray herbicide on the emergent growth.

But they haven’t succeeded. Emergent Christianity has taken root, and it’s growing like a weed—a lot of different weeds, actually. Young evangelicals are forsaking their suburban birthright and moving into America’s toughest cities to found “new monastic communities.” Young theologians are rejecting the siren song of academic tenure for the pioneering life on the emergent frontier. And young pastors are snubbing the safety net of denominations for the adventure of church planting among the relational networks of the emergent church. The conversation among people who think of themselves as emergent is robust, and it’s taking place in books and blogs and conferences and spontaneous “meet-ups.” As we’ll explore throughout this book, the emergents are in some ways pioneers and in some ways expatriates. They do come from somewhere—most often a conventional Christian upbringing—but they are forsaking their homelands and choosing life on the frontier. They tend to be young, urban, and educated, but as emergent sensibilities spread around the world, those characteristics are becoming more tenuous as descriptors.

Like the electronica music of the 1980s and 1990s, the emergent church is a mash-up of old and new, of theory and practice, of men and women, and of mainline, evangelical, and, increasingly, Roman Catholic Christians. What started among leaders (a.k.a. clergy) is now spreading into the humus of everyday Christians (a.k.a. laypeople).

In some ways, there’s nothing new here. Since the Gospel writers penned their witness to the faith, theologians have argued about how we talk about God, who Jesus is, and how humans relate to God. And since the earliest Christians transformed their Roman peristyle homes into domus ecclesiae, followers of Jesus have found new and innovative ways to orient their lives, collectively and individually. But too often in our history, the innovative theoreticians have sat safely ensconced in their tenured chairs, rarely deigning to speak with the lowly churchfolk. Meanwhile, innovative church leaders think the theologian and the biblical scholar have lost all touch with reality and instead busy themselves with the latest technical innovations in “how to do church.” If the emergent church has anything rare, or even unique, it’s this nexus of theory and praxis, of innovative theology and innovative practice. These twin impulses of rethinking theology and rethinking church are driving the nascent growth of emergent Christianity.

And love it or hate it, it can’t be ignored.

Some Working Definitions of Terms Used in This Book

emergent Christianity

The new forms of Christian faith arising from the old; the Christianity believed and practiced by the emergents.

the emergent church

The specifically new forms of church life rising from the modern, American church of the twentieth century.

the emergents

The adherents of emergent Christianity.

Emergent

Specifically referring to the relational network which formed first in 1997; also known as Emergent Village.

Postmodernism . . . is not relativism or skepticism, as its uncomprehending critics almost daily charge, but minutely close attention to detail, a sense for the complexity and multiplicity of things, for close readings, for detailed histories, for sensitivity to differences. The postmodernists think the devil is in the details, but they also have reason to hope that none of this will antagonize God.

—JOHN D. CAPUTO

Either Christianity itself is flawed, failing, [or] untrue, or our modern, Western, commercialized, industrial-strength version of it is in need of a fresh look, a serious revision.

—BRIAN D. MCLAREN

I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!

—ANONYMOUS MAN (SPEAKING TO JESUS)

CHAPTER 1

LEAVING THE OLD COUNTRY

WHEN SHE SAT DOWN NEXT TO ME IN FIRST CLASS ON THE flight to New York, I knew that she was the kind of person who regularly traveled there, up front. I was bumped up from coach by the airline, but I suspected that she paid for her seat. To be honest, I was intimidated by this woman, who was probably around my age. She wore torn jeans—the kind that are really expensive and come pretorn—complemented by a shabby chic wool sweater. And she was pregnant.

I never spoke to her, just observed. As we were taking off, she was editing a very hip-looking graphic novel with the blue pencil of a savvy New York editor. I, meanwhile, was attempting to hide the fact that I was reading a Bible—how uncouth! And once we reached cruising altitude, she pulled a sleek MacBook Pro out of her bag. I hesitatingly opened my Dell dinosaur and began typing up a Bible study.

I was outmatched. A very vanilla suburbanite Christian pastor from Minnesota next to the hippest of New York editors. “I write books,” I wanted to say. But I dared not, for a New York editor is like a unicorn—if you talk to her, she’ll disappear. Or she’ll stab you in the heart with her horn.

But then, about halfway through the flight, she closed her Mac and tilted her seat back. What happened next has stuck with me ever since. She took a rosary out of her pocket, draped the prayer beads over her pregnant belly, and spent the next hour surreptitiously praying with her eyes closed.

Neurons in my brain began to misfire. “Does . . . not . . . compute”: a New York editor of graphic novels praying the most traditional of Roman Catholic rituals. I thought she was an enlightened, liberal member of the “East Coast elite.” But instead she was praying to the Blessed Virgin. I would have been less surprised had she tried to blow up her shoe.

Is there something in the air? Is there a spiritual itch that people are trying to scratch but it’s just in the middle of their back in that place that they can’t quite reach?

It seems incontrovertibly so.

We are not becoming less religious, as some people argue. We are becoming differently religious. And the shift is significant. Some call it a tectonic shift, others seismic or tsunamic. Whatever your geological metaphor, the changes are shaking the earth beneath our feet.

IAs the second half of the twentieth century began, most sociologists, social theorists, and social philosophers were proclaiming that the death of religion was nigh. They were bards of an impending secularism that was lapping onto the shores of all Western countries. We are losing our religion, they calmly—and often approvingly—lectured from behind their podia. We’re leaving the myths of this god and that god behind and establishing a new spirituality that is unhinged from the oppressive regimes of conventional religion. New Ageism is a nod in this direction: as we mature intellectually and scientifically, we’ll realize that traditional religions are holding us back. We’ll achieve our liberation by relying less on the strictures of religions and moving into the promising horizon of “spirituality.”

This was, of course, a natural consequence of God’s death, first declared by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882 and touted again by Time magazine in 1966. Nietzsche himself wasn’t out to kill God per se, nor was he saying that no one believed in God anymore. He was announcing that that the modern mind could no longer tolerate an authoritarian figure who towers over the cosmos with a lightning bolt in his hand, ready to strike down evil-doers. That deity, he said, had been murdered. With the death of that version of God, the Christian morals that upheld all of Western society had been undermined. We were, Nietzsche feared, on a fast track to nihilistic hell. So he went on a search for some sort of universal moral foundation that was not dependent on an unacceptable and medieval notion of God.

That same sensibility was seen by many observers as a move toward a universal (and secular) spirituality: we would realize how much we had in common; we would become more enlightened; we would teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the twenty-first century: we became more religious, not less. Fundamentalisms now thrive in all major religions, churches and religious schools keep popping up, and religious books outsell all other categories. Nowadays you can’t find a self-respecting social theorist proclaiming secularism. Instead, they’re studying religion and getting face time on CNN explaining to often oblivious journalists how religious Americans really are. Back in the pulpits, ironically, pastors continue to bewail that we’re living through the decline and fall of the Judeo-Christian American empire, that secularism is a fast-moving glacier, razing the mountains of faith that have been a part of America since its birth.

But the data just don’t back up this interpretation. Just ten percent of Americans are not affiliated with a church or synagogue, and another five percent hold a faith other than Judaism or Christianity. That leaves eighty-five percent of Americans who can write down the name and address of the congregation with which they are affiliated.1 Yes, that bears repeating: eighty-five percent. There are about 255 million church-affiliated Americans.

IWhat can be questioned is the level of commitment that Americans have to their churches. They may know the address, but do they know the doctrinal statement? Or the denominational affiliation? Do they care? The answer to the last question is most decidedly no. American Christians care less and less about the denominational divides that are so important to their seminary-trained pastors.

"CHURCH IS DEAD"

In the twenty-first century, it’s not God who’s dead. It’s the church. Or at least conventional forms of church. Dead? you say. Isn’t that overstating the case a bit? Indeed, churches still abound. So do pay phones. You can still find pay phones around, in airports and train stations and shopping malls—there are plenty of working pay phones. But look around your local airport and you’ll likely see the sad remnants where pay phones used to hang—the strange row of rectangles on the wall and the empty slot where a phone book used to sit.

There are under a million pay phones in the United States today. In 1997, there were over two million.2

Of course, the death of the pay phone doesn’t mean that we don’t make phone calls anymore. In fact, we make far more calls than ever before, but we make them differently. Now we make phone calls from home or on the mobile device clasped to our belt or through our computers. Phone calls aren’t obsolete, but the pay phone is—or at least it’s quickly becoming so.

Modern

As an adjective, modern can mean current or up-to-date. (For example, a highway rest area with “modern facilities” has indoor plumbing.) In our discussions, however, modern refers to an era in Western society following the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and reflective of the values of those social upheavals.

Similarly, the modern church is changing and evolving and emerging. To extend the analogy a bit, no one is saying that the pay phone was a bad idea. Most people would agree that it was a good idea at the time—it was an excellent way to communicate. But communication was the goal, and pay phones were merely a means to an end.

The modern church—at least as it is characterized by imposing physical buildings, professional clergy, denominational bureaucracies, residential seminary training, and other trappings—was an endeavor by faithful men and women in their time and place, attempting to live into the biblical gospel. But the church was never the end, only the means. The desire of the emergents is to live Christianly, to build something wonderful for the future on the legacy of the past.

SIGNS OF DEATH—AND LIFE

As a police chaplain, I’ve witnessed a few deaths, and the death rattle is a sound that sticks with you forever. In the throes of death, a person often loses the ability to swallow, and fluids accumulate in the throat. In the moments before expiration, the breath barely rattles past these secretions. It is an ominous sound.

We may now be hearing the American church’s death rattle (at least the death of church-as-we-know-it). Exhibit A: the fabric of the traditional denominations is tearing. The Episcopal Church in the United States of America appointed a gay bishop, and now African bishops walk out of the room and won’t take communion with the presiding bishop of the U.S. church. The Anglican Communion, a worldwide collection of denominations who gather under the rubric of the Church of England, claim that it’s the rites of the church and their shared history that hold them together—and that’s worked for four hundred years. But those commonalities probably cannot withstand the current pressure of liberalism versus conservatism. Ironically, conservative Episcopal churches in the States are placing themselves under the authority of like-minded bishops in Africa rather than recognizing that the real problem is an outmoded denominational structure and outdated categories of left and right.

That’s happening in the “high church” world of Anglicanism. Meanwhile, for over a decade now, conservative forces have been attempting to purge the “low church” Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) of all liberal and moderate influences. Exhibit B: recently, the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in the global South has inevitably encroached on Southern Baptist missionaries stationed around the world, including the biblical “gift of tongues,” which some interpret as a private prayer language between the believer and God. The SBC response to this incursion has been to purge its denomination of these influences, so the Southern Baptists are attempting to cast out all missionaries who speak in tongues. Concurrently, they’ve retrenched in their stance against the use of alcohol. As a result of these and other initiatives, moderate and liberal Baptists have been sent packing, and they’ve gone on to set up their own new denominations or join other ones. That won’t solve the problem, though, because it’s not necessarily the theology but denominationalism itself that’s the issue.

The irony of the struggles in the SBC is that the conservative shift is being spearheaded by leaders like Al Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s also a radio host, frequent guest on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, and all-around Baptist celebrity. But the Baptist revolution in church life started with the Pilgrims and others in Jolly Old England in the seventeenth century who expressly rejected the hierarchical structure of the Anglican Church. But at least genealogically, what is Al Mohler other than a de facto bishop of Southern Baptists?

So we’ve got Baptists who aren’t supposed to have bishops with Bishop Al Mohler and Bishop Paige Patterson excommunicating liberals and moderates, and we’ve got real-life Anglican bishops who won’t break bread with one another. Do we need more evidence that the church in America is in trouble? How about when, in 2007, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson called for the resignation of Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)? Then it turned out that Dobson and his cronies aren’t even members of the NAE! Or on the left, the silly television ads from the liberal United Church of Christ, virtually begging people to come to their dying denominational churches by caricaturing evangelicals as having bouncers and ejection seats in their churches.

I could go on.

This might be an overly bleak picture of church life in America. Maybe the church you go to is fine, and maybe you’re relatively happy with your church, even if there’s a little uneasiness that things are not quite right. That’s what the surveys say. But if the evangelical pollster George Barna is correct, upwards of twenty million “born again” Americans have left conventional churches for home groups and house churches—or no church at all.3 And that’s the real story here, that a generation of Christians—many of them under forty—are forsaking the conventional forms of church and gathering in new forms.

Some 225 million Americans voluntarily claim Christianity as their religion, and ninety percent of them can tell you what church they belong to. But out on the fringes, on the frontier of American Christianity, is another ten percent who are leaving their parents’ churches, vowing never to return. It’s not the faith they’re forsaking but the particularly polarized form of church life—the attitudes, forms, and institutions—they’ve been offered at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This phenomenon is not simply a fad (although there are faddish elements) or youthful hubris (though there’s some of that, too) but rather a harbinger of the future of church life in America. A new church is emerging from the compost of Christendom. Many in conventional Christianity, both on the left and the right, are concerned about the emergent church; others find it a hopeful trend. In any case, it is significant.

But what led to the emergent church movement? Disaffection with the theologies, attitudes, and institutions of American church life surely played a part, particularly with the poles of left and right that have become so prominent in the last quarter-century. Often segregated into the “mainline left” and the “evangelical right,” they’ve both got irresolvable problems, from an emergent perspective.

A new church is emerging from compost of Christendom.

THE PROBLEM ON THE LEFT

Potential mainline preachers have to pick a flavor of Christianity early on in their careers—Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic, Quaker, Baptist—the list could go on and on. Like ice cream, these are the main flavors, but there are also all kinds of exotic variations—Baptist Chip, Baptist Swirl, Low-Fat Baptist Lite, and Double Baptist Chunk.4 The pastor then becomes a one-flavor guy. He goes to that seminary, learns that theology, buys into that pension plan, and goes to that annual trade show. This is not to disparage the erstwhile pastors—they really have no choice; they don’t get to pick a new flavor on a whim. That’s how the system of getting to be a pastor is set up; those are the rules by which the players are bound to play.

Mainline Protestantism

The older, established Protestant denominations, including Episcopalian, United Methodist, United Church of Christ, and Presbyterian. Also known as “name-brand Christianity.” Mainliners tend to lean to the left, both theologically and politically.

But as young pastors are learning every nuance of their flavor of the faith, nearly everyone else in America is becoming less interested in a steady diet of one flavor. Americans are moving to Church of the Van-Choc-Straw (a.k.a. Neapolitan). American Christians care little about the denomination label on the sign in the parking lot or the church’s stand on predestination. I found this out a few years ago as a young pastor myself. I stood before a “new members” class at Colonial Church, an old-line denominational church, and asked how many of the seventy-two persons there wanted to join Colonial because it’s a Congregational church. Just two hands went up. The other seventy said they were drawn to Colonial by the choir, the preaching, the children’s ministry, or by a friend. The proud Congregational heritage of Colonial Church—represented by a glass-encased chunk of the Mayflower in the entryway—meant nothing to them.

Dispatch 1: Emergents find little importance in the discrete differences between the various flavors of Christianity. Instead, they practice a generous orthodoxy that appreciates the contributions of all Christian movements.

It’s similar to the way that being a European has changed. Before 1995, a French citizen had to stop at every border in Europe, show her passport, and get it stamped; the borders between countries were definite, and they were guarded by soldiers with guns. She also had to visit a bank and change her francs into lire or pounds or kroner. But with the formation of the European Union, every European in the twenty-seven EU countries now gets an EU passport, and the borders are unguarded—Europeans now travel freely between EU countries, and most use the same currency.

Similarly, Americans pass from church to church with little regard for denominational heritage—their passports say “Christian,” not “Lutheran” or “Nazarene” or “Episcopal.” Some in the American clergy have gotten hip to this new reality, but far more are beholden to denominational structures for their self-identity (and their retirement funds).

What’s interesting is that when asked, most mainline clergy express great chagrin at this situation. They agree that denominations are an outmoded form of organized Christianity, but they can’t seem to find a way out.

Although denominations existed in nineteenth-century America, the first three-quarters of the twentieth century can really be seen as the Golden Age of Mainline Protestantism. In fact, the flagship magazine of mainline Christians, founded in 1900, is titled The Christian Century.

The postindustrial era was one of big organizations: universities, corporations, and nation-states were all growing in size and adding layers of administrative bureaucracy to cope with the other big organizations in the world. Christian leaders at the beginning of the twentieth century wanted to play in this arena too, so they followed suit and founded denominational headquarters in New York and Chicago; they added layers of bureaucracy (called “judicatories”) and middle managers (often called “bishops” or “district superintendents”); and they started their own publishing houses, colleges, and seminaries.

The well-meaning members of denominations built these institutions to advance the gospel in a world of large, monolithic organizations. But we’ve now come to realize three problems: first, the gospel isn’t monolithic; second, it’s inevitably destabilizing of institutions; and third, for all their benefits (like organizing society and preserving communal wisdom), bureaucracies also do two other things well: grow more bureaucratic tentacles and attract bureaucrats.5 So a crust of bureaucracy grew over the gospel impulses of the denominational founders, thickening over a century to the point that according to conservatives, the gospel has been suffocated right out of the mainline denominations.

Lillian Daniel is a pastor in the United Church of Christ, a notoriously left-leaning denomination founded in 1957. She’s also active in the labor movement and an outspoken proponent of progressive causes—a passionate person. Reflecting on the biannual General Synod national meeting, she moaned, “We used to be a group of revolutionaries. Now we’re a group of resolutionaries.” Operating by the distinctly nonbiblical Robert’s Rules of Order, she said, the convention has devolved into a gathering of persons who read resolutions that are then voted on and promptly ignored or forgotten. The resolutions range from those for gay marriage to those against gay marriage, from a call to study the imprisonment of native Hawaiians to “saving Social Security from privatization.” The resolutions pile up; then they’re read, seconded, discussed, voted on, and filed.

Lillian thought she was joining a movement, but she was joining a bureaucracy. And that bureaucracy tends to quash the passion of the many Christ-centered and enthusiastic persons therein.

A CASE STUDY: GO WHERE I SEND THEE

A seminary professor told this story with tears in her eyes. She had an outstanding student, a young man who’d hung around seminary for an extra year so that he could earn an extra master’s in youth ministry on top of his master of divinity degree. Throughout his childhood, adolescence, college, and seminary years, he’d been a loyal Methodist, following in the path of his father, a United Methodist pastor. And during seminary, while going through the labyrinthine process of United Methodist ordination, he also fell in love with the idea of being a college campus chaplain. He just sensed that was the right spot for him—in his language, he felt “called.” So he applied at a couple of colleges and was selected as a finalist at one of them. But at 10:00 P.M., the night before his final interview at the college, he received a call from his bishop. She told him (on his answering machine) of his first church assignment, a small Methodist church in rural upstate New York. He’d be a solo pastor. Upon hearing the message, the young man swallowed hard and called her back. “Could I have a week to get back to you?” he asked, “because I’m in the running for a college chaplaincy.”

“No,” the bishop replied. “You need to tell me in the morning. And let me just inform you, if you reject this placement, the next one I give you will be even worse.”

The next morning, through tears, the young ordinand accepted the placement of his bishop and withdrew from the college chaplaincy position.

Although the bishop’s actions seem indefensible, her power play was merely an attempt to stanch the bleeding. We can’t lose another young pastor, she must have thought. I’ve got too many pulpits to fill to let this guy go to a college. She might have even considered that he would have a significant pastoral impact on a college campus, but she had little choice. While United Methodist Church vacancy rates hover around ten percent, the vacancies in churches with fewer than one hundred members—the majority of UMC churches—is far higher.6 It’s been well documented that young seminary graduates rarely want to serve in small, rural congregations. Couple that with the fact that only five percent of UMC clergy are in their twenties,7 and you can see why the well-meaning bishop didn’t want to lose her young charge to the allure of college chaplaincy.

She needed him in the system, like the Matrix needs human batteries. If she let him get away, he might never plug back into the United Methodist Church, and that’s not just one less pastor in an already overstretched system; that’s one less payer into the pension fund, one less recruiter of future pastors, one less name in the annual yearbook.

In other words, her tactics are understandable in a system that needs more young pastors if it is to survive. But how many potential pastors will continue to play by these rules?

THE PROBLEM ON THE RIGHT

While the mainline Protestants know that they are hemorrhaging members and money at alarming rates, the grass seems greener on the evangelical side of the fence. Fourth-ring suburbs of major metropolitan cities sport glossy new megachurches, their lots full of minivans on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. This is a bloc of the folks who elected George W. Bush, and since then, there’s been no dearth of journalistic interest in American evangelicals.

Evangelical Protestantism

The loosely aligned “born again” Christians who hold a view of the Bible that tends toward literal interpretation, emphasize personal conversion to Christ, and generally lean to the right, both politically and theologically.

But if the problem with liberal Christianity is more dire and more obvious, the evangelical movement has its own problems. A century and a half ago, the United States was coming out of the Civil War, and the country was rent in two. Conservative churches in the South were reeling because they had supported the sinful and corrupt practice of slavery.8 The liberal churches in the North, by contrast, were enjoying success in the wake of military and moral victory. At the same time, a new kind of biblical scholarship was in its ascendancy in Europe: German professors were using critical literary and historical methods to investigate the veracity of the biblical texts, culminating with Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1906. Schweitzer concluded, famously, that Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t God after all but instead a wild-eyed apocalyptic rabbi who threw himself on the wheel of history only to be crushed by it.9

The majority of leaders in the American church embraced these academic trends. These were the mainliners, and they were in the majority. The only other choice in American Christianity was fundamentalism, and this was the backwoods, snake-handling, poison-drinking, Bible-thumping version of fundamentalism.10

Fundamentalism

A particularly rigid adherence to what is considered foundational to a religion. In American Christianity, fundamentalism began in the early twentieth century as a reaction to modernism and codified the “Five Fundamentals” of Christian belief: the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Jesus, physical resurrection at the end of time, individual atonement of the believer by Jesus’ death, and the Second Coming of Jesus in the future.

A group of men started meeting in the 1940s, tired of this liberal-fundamentalist polarization. They wanted to remain faithful to a more conservative interpretation of the Bible but not retreat from society into the woods—they were looking for a “third way” to be Christian in America. They claimed the title “evangelical,” which had in fact been around for at least a century already. These men, including Carl Henry, Charles Fuller, Harold Ockenga, and Billy Graham, committed themselves to rescuing the Bible from the fundamentalists and liberals alike, and they did so by forming a network of like-minded organizations. They didn’t have a headquarters or a central committee, but they spun a web of connection that now spreads across the United States in the form of Christian youth camps, college ministries, radio stations, publishing houses, magazines, and colleges. Over half a century, these evangelicals—focusing on conservative biblical interpretation, evangelism, and cultural suasion—increased their influence to the point of electing presidents and appointing Supreme Court justices. Though there are evangelical denominations, their histories are relatively short, and their identities are not nearly as reified as those of their mainline peers.

But it may be that evangelicals gained cultural prominence at the cost of real spiritual, societal, or intellectual transformation. And when measured by the present moral fiber of the United States, the evangelical revolution is a qualified failure—America, it seems, is no more “Christian” in its ethos than it ever was; some people argue that we’re less Christ-like than we’ve ever been. Indeed, one can make the argument that evangelicals have been duped, selling their votes for a mess of pottage. For example, having played an important role in the Republican revolution and the eventual capture of all three branches of government, evangelicals have come to realize that Republican politicos have no serious intention of overturning Roe v. Wade—in fact, in the six years that Republicans had the White House and both houses of Congress (and, arguably, the Supreme Court), they passed virtually no significant antiabortion legislation,11 even though many of them had been elected on just that promise. Add to that the relentless assault on Christian values in the form of video games, Coors Light ads, and gun violence, and you simply don’t have a “Christian nation.”

The evidence is in: millions of individuals “inviting Jesus Christ into their hearts as their personal Lord and Savior” at megachurches and Billy Graham crusades has done little to stem the moral dissolution of America. And ironically, it’s the very individualism engendered by evangelicalism that has resulted in this predicament. The primary emphasis of evangelicalism is the conversion of the individual, but that emphasis has also handicapped evangelicals in their attempts to tackle systemic issues like racism and poverty and thus has left them open to manipulation by political forces.

A CASE STUDY: DON′T ASK US ABOUT THE CHICKENS

Known for chicken, Tyson Foods acquired Iowa Beef and Pork Company in 2001, making it the largest producer of meat in the world. Actually, the preferred corporate-speak for meat when you’re at the Tyson headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, is “protein solutions.” They refer to themselves as a producer of “affordable protein solutions.”

I visited Tyson Foods in 2006 with a group from Yale University Divinity School’s Center for Faith and Culture as part of an initiative called Faith as a Way of Life. Our trip to Tyson was meant to provoke our thinking about faith and business.

We began the day at a “kill plant.” That’s the industry name for a factory where animals are slaughtered and prepared; they’re turned into things like chicken nuggets elsewhere. The plant we visited produces Cornish game hens, which I was surprised to discover are not a particular type of bird but are simply twenty-eight-day-old chickens. In other words, they’re young, small birds. Outside of the plant, half a dozen trucks full of live, twenty-eight-day-old chickens are in the driveway. One at a time, they back into a loading dock and dump their squawking load into a trough. Six men, immigrants from the Marshall Islands (a U.S. territory in the Pacific), stand in the “dark room”—lit only by black lights, in order to keep the chickens calm—and hang the chickens upside down in stirrups. The men are amazingly agile, picking up a live animal and hanging it in one fluid movement. One hundred and thirty-five birds per minute leave the dark room, and that same number per minute wend their way on a conveyer system to the kill room. The head of each chicken is dragged through an electrified pool of water, stunning it briefly. That way, the animal is basically unconscious as its throat is slit a split second later by a whirring razor blade.

I really can’t describe what it’s like to watch 135 birds slaughtered in a minute or, even more overwhelming, to know that there are another 135 coming the next minute and the next minute, hour after hour, twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. Compound this by two dozen, which is how many kill plants Tyson operates. It’s a staggering number of chickens that are killed for our consumption each day. Millions.

(Let me be clear: I’m no vegan. I eat protein solutions almost every day. I even hunt for protein solutions in fields and over ponds.12 So I have no ideological objection to the raising and slaughter of chickens. Still, it was an overwhelming experience to witness the inner workings of a kill plant.)

Because I have no ideological ax to grind, I thought I’d ask a question to each of the groups we met with about the chickens. Scripture is clear: in Genesis 1:24-31, human beings are given the task of caretakers of the earth and the animals and plants that inhabit it. Christians (as well as Jews and Muslims, and indeed all spiritual people) are pretty well agreed on this idea. No one really debates whether we’re supposed to care for God’s creation. It’s a given. So with this supposed theological consensus in mind, I figured I’d ask, “What about the chickens?”

Before lunch, we gathered in a little, wood-paneled board room at the front of the kill plant. A few workers, on their break, were ushered into the room. They stood against the wall while we Yalies sat around the table. It was a bit awkward. Here we were, the epitome of the “East Coast elite,” questioning workers who make about $7.00 an hour slaughtering and prepping chickens. But these line workers immediately put us at ease—they were friendly and gracious. One woman had worked in the plant for thirty-five years; another was a Marshallese immigrant who’d been there for just four months. They talked about how much they appreciated the Tyson Corporation, the health care plan, and the plant’s manager. The thirty-five-year veteran told of her daughter’s bout with cancer and how the entire plant rallied around her and raised money to support her. They spoke openly about their faith and about the little Baptist and Pentecostal churches that they attend—some of them go to church three times per week. When I asked about the chickens, they answered candidly about the stewardship of the animals. I thought to myself, A generation or two ago, these people would have been farmers and would have been slaughtering chickens by hand in their barns. All that’s really changed for them is the technology and efficiency by which the chickens are dispatched.

At four in the afternoon, we sat down with John Tyson at the company’s headquarters. Tyson’s grandfather founded the company, and his father turned it into a massive, multinational corporation. John is a prodigal son. A child of privilege, he became a drug-addled young man with no interest in his dad’s company. But after a divorce and chemical dependency treatment, he became a follower of Jesus. Tyson is no towering figure; he stands about five foot nine. He’s balding, a bit portly, and dresses in jeans, a golf shirt, and a worn Tyson Foods windbreaker. One could characterize him as a quiet, humble evangelical Christian. He wears his previous failures on his sleeve, and employees and friends speak of him as a truly good person.

And he makes about $5 million per year (plus stock options).

Tyson spoke openly about his life; his children, whom he’s raising as a single parent; and the doubts he still has about whether his acquisition of Iowa Beef and Pork was a good idea. Then I asked, “What about the chickens?”

I elaborated: “I’m not asking you to feel guilty about slaughtering chickens; I think you’re providing meat to millions of people every day, and I appreciate what your company is doing. But you’re also a Christian, one whose job it is to act as a steward of God’s creation. You have literally millions and millions of animals under your care. Do you ever think about them?”

He paused for a moment before answering. “Yes,” he said, “I do.” He paused again, and then continued, “As you might guess, I am hated by some people. I get lots of angry e-mail from PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] activists, for example. But we’ve worked hard to develop the most humane ways to kill chickens. We’ve had significant studies done on what is the least painful and most hygienic way to slaughter chickens, and we invented the electrified pool of water because that’s the best way to kill the chickens humanely. Yes, I think about the chickens, and I take my responsibility to them very seriously.”

But in the middle of the day, we had gotten quite a different response. After lunch, we met with a couple of different groups of middle managers at Tyson. All men, they were dressed in khaki pants and golf shirts emblazoned with the Tyson logo. These men occupy the vast American strata between $7.00-an-hour kill plant line workers and $5 million-a-year John Tyson. They live in four-bedroom homes in suburban subdivisions, coach soccer, and belong to country clubs. And they all go to church—in fact, many of them told us they attend First Baptist Church of Springdale, pastored by the Southern Baptist celebrity Ronnie Floyd. They have four-year college degrees and maybe an M.B.A. They mow their lawns on Saturday and cheer for the Razorbacks. They’re white, educated, and relatively wealthy. To be honest, they’re my people. If I worked at Tyson, I’d be a middle manager. I say that because if my forthcoming judgment of them seems unduly harsh, I am also implicating myself.

We had a nice, civil chat, although they were significantly more standoffish toward us due to our Yale connections than were our interlocutors earlier in the day. We were the people that Pastor Ronnie had warned them about. They talked about their churches, their faith, and Pastor Ronnie. But when I asked, “What about the chickens?” the looks on their faces responded loud and clear: Don’t ask us about the chickens. One man even said as much, implying that I was a leftist tree-hugger with an anticorporate agenda.

That night, as our group debriefed the day, a heated and not very civil conversation broke out. The group—made up of an artist, a novelist, a teacher, a business consultant, a businesswoman, a couple of theologians, and a few pastors—could not agree on the sincerity of the middle managers. Some of us were disturbed at their responses, while others argued that this is the very Sunday-Monday divide that afflicts many American Christians.