What is the Emerging Church?

Now, Contending for the Faith. In this regular feature, Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call. Here is this week’s question: 

“Dear Dave and TA, 

I keep hearing about a new influence in the church called the emerging church movement. What’s that all about?”

Tom: The emerging church movement (this comes from those who advocate this movement), it’s an attempt to reach the postmodern generation with the gospel of salvation. So…

Dave: Tom, before you explain further, I’d like to know - you’ve certainly put a lot of study into this, which I have not; I have never been to one of these and you have - emerging church? What does that signify? Where did this idea come from? Emerging from what to what?

Tom: Yeah. Dave, I’d have to turn it around a little bit. It’s actually submerging the church back to Catholic and Orthodox mysticism. That’s really what it’s all about. What they’ve found for all the success, so-called, of seeker-friendly and seeker-sensitive churches - even purpose driven - that the churches are trying to accommodate the lost, try to bring them into churches through changing things, making it more modern, giving them high tech, giving them production and dramas and video screens and all of that, and they’re not really reaching the 18-30 year olds.

Dave: What do you mean by reaching? 

Tom: Well…

Dave: Not getting them in?

Tom: Not getting them in, or if they’re in, even if they’re evangelicals - this is evangelical youth - they’re not staying in. They’re looking for something else. They’re turned off by the high tech stuff, and they’re looking for something - in the terms that they use in this movement - something authentic. They want authentic faith. They want something sacred, they want ritual, they want liturgy, they want what I call “bells and smells” of incense and that kind of stuff.

Dave: So “reaching” doesn’t mean reaching them with the gospel for Christ so much as making them happy and comfortable and getting them involved at least in church service…although, Tom, I’m not saying that that’s not what some of these people are aiming for, but I don’t think that’s what they’re producing.

Tom: Right. So how does this play out then? You will find many evangelical churches, including the larger ones, they have separate services. Now, we saw that - they went from a traditional service to a contemporary service. But those are not reaching, as I said, the youth, those who are part of the X-generation, the “extreme generation,” and so on. So what they’re doing is introducing liturgies, introducing the sacramentals. For example, many evangelical churches in their basements, you will find stations of the cross, all right? You will find prayer stations with incense and candles and icons and all of these things, because in the view of those who promote this, they say, “This is authentic Christianity. This goes back to the first times of the church.”

Dave: Tom, I was sitting next to a Catholic woman - well, she’s not really practicing - and I find that Catholicism turns an awful lot of people off. In fact, the flight attendant that I spoke with, also a Catholic - he doesn’t call himself an ex, but he’s turned off. He doesn’t even know whether he believes in God anymore; it just turned him off to the whole thing. So now they’re giving these people something that they don’t know about - as you say, “smells and bells” and all of this stuff. It has already turned an awful lot of people off, but now they’re trying to introduce Protestants into this, thinking that maybe it will get them involved. 

Anyway, this Catholic lady was saying, “Well, but the stations of the cross, isn’t that biblical?” 

I said, “I never read about the stations of the cross in the Bible.” So now we have evangelicals, supposedly Protestants, and they are introducing things that are not in the Bible.

Tom: A major thrust of this came out of The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s movie introducing evangelicals - because it was mainly evangelicals that supported the movie when it was in the theaters and it was primarily evangelicals that bought the DVD. Twelve million DVD’s sold, so this was an introduction that was emotional, that was sense-oriented - they got to see things that had a great emotional impact on them, but that’s not truth, Dave; that’s not the way people are truly converted, that’s catharsis.

Dave: Yeah, and of course we talked about it - we won’t go back into that - but what was given in that movie was not the truth either; it was not biblical. 

Anyway, the truth is devastating enough just as you embrace it in your heart, in your mind, in your soul. You don’t have to have any extra effects.

Tom: The term “effects,” that’s a good point here. It’s sense-oriented; it gives our kids - I’m talking about evangelical youth - it gives them a sense of feelings, of emotions, smells, and all of these kinds of things. It creates a sacred atmosphere in their mind, but it’s misleading; it’s not the truth. Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are my disciples indeed; and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” This stuff is not truth. The Bible also says the flesh profits nothing, but this is all flesh-oriented, I’m afraid.

Dave: So we live in a day, as Paul said, “when they will not endure sound doctrine.” They don’t want doctrine.

Tom: Right.

Dave: But what is the remedy that Paul gave for those who will not endure sound doctrine? Sound doctrine! He doesn’t say, “Give them effects, movies, and so forth; give them candles, and the stations of the cross, and the icons, etc.” Paul said to Timothy, “Preach the Word. Be instant in season, out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.” And he goes on and says, “For the time will come when they won’t endure sound doctrine.” 

So, Tom, we’re not getting the right remedy for this; we’re being taken farther away from the Word. Preach the Word, and even those who preach the Word often are trying to embellish it.

Tom: Dave, the cry is, “Well, wait a minute, this generation is a visual generation.” But in trying to appeal to the visual generation, we’re being weaned off the Word of God, as you’ve said, and we’re creating a Christianity that is so superficial that people no longer have the ability to discern, to be Bereans, to search the Scriptures, because they have not done it and they are not encouraged to do it.